By Steve Gorman
April 30 (Reuters) – Six transgender residents of Idaho have filed suit challenging a new state law making it a crime for them to use sex-designated public restrooms and changing areas that do not match their birth-assigned gender, civil liberties advocates said on Thursday.
The class-action case, filed on Wednesday in U.S. District Court in Boise, the state capital, argues the statute violates the plaintiffs’ rights to due process, equal protection and privacy under the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.
The measure passed the Republican-controlled state legislature in March and was signed into law by Republican Governor Brad Little, making Idaho one of just four states to adopt the threat of incarceration as an enforcement mechanism for such restrictions.
The legal challenge to it was brought on behalf of six named plaintiffs by the American Civil Liberties Union Foundation, the ACLU of Idaho Foundation, the Lambda Legal Defense & Education Fund and two law firms.
It names state Attorney General Raul Labrador and all 43 of Idaho’s prosecuting attorneys as defendants.
Lambda attorney Kell Olson said the lawsuit is believed to be the first challenging the newly enacted measure.
While proponents of the new law asserted it is aimed at making public bathrooms safer, the lawsuit counters that the measure will instead expose transgender individuals “to likely violence, harassment and psychological harm.”
Its enactment was motivated by hostility toward transgender people and seeks to push them to the margins of public life, critics argue.
PUBLIC SAFETY RATIONALE DISPUTED
“The Idaho legislature relied on inaccurate beliefs and stereotypes about transgender people,” the suit says, “primarily conflating transgender people with sexual predators.”
In response to the court challenge, a spokesperson for Labrador said, “We look forward to defending the law.”
Idaho is one of about 20 U.S. states to have some form of bathroom access restrictions for transgender people on the books, according to a tally by the Movement Advancement Project, a think tank that advocates for LGBTQ rights.
But Idaho and just three other states – Utah, Kansas and Florida – have adopted criminal penalties under such laws, and Idaho carries some of the harshest, Olson said.
The measure makes it a crime to enter a restroom or changing room designated for the opposite biological sex in government buildings, restaurants, stores and other private businesses when those bathroom facilities are open to the public.
The first offense under the new restrictions, set to take effect in July, would be a misdemeanor, punishable by up to one year in jail, while a second offense within five years would be a felony, carrying a maximum five-year prison sentence.
Transgender residents of the U.S. have faced increasing limitations at the national and state level in recent years, with those efforts reinforced since President Donald Trump returned to office in 2025.
Idaho passed two previous laws restricting access to bathrooms in public schools and on college campuses to students whose birth sex corresponds to the gender designation of the facility in question, and seeks to enforce those by allowing students to sue if they encounter a transgender person in violation.
Both those statutes are under legal challenge and remain in effect as they wend their way through the courts, Olson said.
(Reporting by Steve Gorman in Los Angeles; Editing by Chris Reese)
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