North Carolina License Plates Can Now Read GAY, QUEER, And LESBIE

People in North Carolina can now get GAY, QUEER, and LESBIE license plates.

For ages, the North Carolina DMV, like several similar state agencies, has kept a “Do Not Issue” list of thousands of words, phrases, and permutations that may be inappropriate or offensive to use. But now the department removing 239 terms from the list, many of them related to LGBTQ+ communities.

According to Them, the now-permitted terms include everyday terms like GAY, LESBIAN, and QUEER, as well as various phrases including the word PRIDE. Other phrases you can now get on a plate include L8RBEAR – apparently flagged because of the connotation of gay bears – and LESBOWAG.

Image Credit: Pixabay

It’s unlikely that the terms were banned because of homophobia. DMV Commissioner Wayne Goodwin said in an interview it’s possible some workers believed they were removing terms that may have been intended to be derogatory, like one application for a plate reading KINDAGAY. But there’s no record of who flagged the terms or why.

Goodwin ordered the review after one woman’s quest to save her FART vanity plate made national news, telling the Observer he “believed that we needed to address and update, to the extent appropriate, what appeared on that list,” only then realizing it contained nearly 10,000 entries. But even with more than 200 deletions, some inoffensive LGBTQ+ terms are still prohibited, including BISEXUAL and its variations as well as GAYLIB.

“We are happy to see that the DMV listened to the public and reevaluated restrictions on LGBTQ+ phrases, but we hope to see all phrases that discriminate against the LGBTQ+ community removed from the list and for inclusion to extend fully to this area,” said Equality North Carolina director Kendra Johnson in a statement.

License plate restrictions are commonplace across the US as officials attempt to reign in some people’s worst impulses; the state DMV also recalled eight plates recently with anti-Semitic and white supremacist language that had been wrongfully approved. But in many cases, these restrictions may violate the First Amendment, as a federal court found in 2020 when authorizing an injunction against the state of Rhode Island that allowed a driver to continue using his “FKGAS” vanity plate, which the driver said was supposed to mean “fake gas,” though it read as a curse word.

That same year, a California driver successfully sued to keep his own “QUEER” plates, with a US district court ruling that while hate speech can be regulated, “viewpoint discrimination” by the state was not permitted.

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