Idaho Gov. Brad Little signed into law a bill that criminalizes transgender people using bathrooms that align with their gender identity, including in private businesses.
House Bill 752 will create criminal charges for people who “knowingly and willfully” enter a bathroom or changing room designated for the opposite sex, with some exceptions. The bill would apply in government-owned buildings and places of public accommodations, like private businesses.
A first offense carries a misdemeanor, punishable by up to one year in prison. A second offense within five years is a felony, punishable by up to five years in prison.
Only three states — Utah, Florida and Kansas — have criminal bans on trans people using bathrooms that align with their gender identity, according to the Movement Advancement Project, an LGBTQ+ advocacy group.
Planned Parenthood Alliance Advocates — Idaho called the bill “the most extreme anti-transgender bathroom ban in the nation.”
Little signed the bill into law Tuesday afternoon — just as people rallied on the Capitol steps in Boise for Transgender Day of Visibility. The law takes effect July 1.
In the Republican supermajority-controlled Legislature, the bill had support from only Republicans — and was opposed by all 15 Democrats and eight Republicans.
After the governor signed a bill Tuesday morning to fine cities for flying the LGBTQ+ pride flag, the city of Boise removed an LGBTQ+ pride flag that flew in front of City Hall. Boise Mayor Lauren McLean said the city had been flying the pride flag for a decade.
‘Do I feel like going to jail today, or do I feel like being attacked?’ trans man testifies
The transgender bathroom ban bill builds on a wave of anti-LGTBQ+ bills that the Legislature and the governor have approved in recent years.
In 2020, Idaho became the first state to ban transgender girls and women from competing on sports teams that align with their gender identity. In 2023, state lawmakers made it a felony for doctors to provide gender-affirming health care to transgender youth. In 2024, lawmakers expanded the ban to apply to taxpayer funds and government property, which forbids Medicaid from covering gender-affirming care.
The Legislature also just passed a bill this year that would require teachers and doctors to out transgender minors to their parents, or face lawsuits.
And for more than a decade, efforts to add anti-discrimination protections for LGBTQ+ people to state law have failed.
“Over the last several years, legislators have gone from refusing to protect us to actively targeting us,” Nikson Mathews, who serves as chair of the Idaho Democratic Queer Caucus, said at a news conference in February.
Mathews, a trans man with a beard, told a House committee earlier this year that the bathroom bill would force him to use the women’s restroom.
“Every single day when I’m out in public, I have to decide: Do I feel like going to jail today, or do I feel like being attacked,” Mathews told lawmakers.
A 2025 study by the UCLA School of Law’s Williams Institute found “no evidence of increased harms to people who are not transgender when transgender people are allowed to use restrooms and other gendered facilities according to their identity.” But when trans people are refused access to facilities that align with their gender, the study found that trans people report verbal harassment and physical assault.
In debate, Republicans cast the bill as protecting women’s spaces. A Democrat called it discriminatory.
Last week, Coeur d’Alene Republican, Sen. Ben Toews, who sponsored the bill, told senators that the bill protects “common sense realities.”
“The Legislature has a fundamental duty to protect the bodily privacy and safety of Idaho citizens,” Toews said. “House Bill 752 provides a clear, proactive tool to secure sex-separated private spaces in our state, while accommodating common-sense realities.”
Sen. Ron Taylor, a Democrat from Hailey, said the bill is about discrimination. He said constituents told him that they’d move out of Idaho if it passed — because it would throw their transgender children in jail.
“Now maybe that’s what some of us want, is to chase a population that’s marginalized out of Idaho,” Taylor said. “But that’s not Idaho. Idaho was founded by a population that was marginalized.”
The bill was opposed by some law enforcement groups and several transgender Idahoans.
The bill outlines several exceptions, including to give medical assistance, law enforcement assistance, and if someone “is in dire need of urinating or defecating and such facility is the only facility reasonably available at the time of the person’s use.”
The Idaho Fraternal Order of Police flagged that exception as concerning.
“Officers responding to a complaint would be placed in the difficult position of determining an individual’s biological sex in order to enforce the statute,” Idaho Fraternal Order of Police President Bryan Lovell wrote. “In many circumstances, there is no clear or reasonable way for officers to make that determination without engaging in questioning or investigative actions that could be viewed as invasive and inappropriate.”
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