If you thought that denying North Carolina residents the pleasure of singing along to “Thunder Road” while buzzed on $11 stadium beers was harsh, get a load of this. Or don’t, because porn site xHamster has joined the ranks of the many entertainment industry types (and PayPal) who have raised their voices in protest of North Carolina’s House Bill 2, a.k.a. the “bathroom law” that requires North Carolina citizens to use the bathroom of the gender they were assigned at birth. Who‘s going to be sitting outside the men’s room checking birth certificates at the Fuquay Varina Hardee’s remains unclear, but we’re sure advocates of the law have thought all this through and weren’t just acting out of kneejerk moral panic.
Anyway, xHamster’s protest doesn’t block North Carolinians from using the site entirely. But accessing the site from an IP address in the Tar Heel State will now result in a pop-up window appearing on the user’s desktop, pointing out the “incredible hypocrisy” of actively discriminating against gay and trans people while clandestinely watching videos featuring those same people engaged in the supposedly unholy and super gross sex acts that are invoked to justify said discrimination. (You can see a screenshot of the pop-up above.) It’s not much—and it’s generally considered insensitive to refer to trans women as “shemales” outside of a porn context, in case you haven’t heard—but it will cost lust-addled porn searchers precious seconds of masturbation time. And if you can’t stop people from being jerks, you might as well stop them from…well, you know.