In a small corridor near the governor’s office at the Idaho State Capitol last week, state and local police officers stood in formation, blocking the public from approaching a public restroom. Inside, two state police officers had taken up a position beside two white pedestal sinks, their uniforms a strange contrast to the white marble tiled walls. One announced that those people remaining in the toilet stalls were “trespassing.” Not long after, officers walked each person out of the bathroom and into the corridor, cuffed their wrists behind their backs, and took them away, some still chanting, “Trans rights are human rights.”
Two days earlier, Governor Brad Little had signed into law the most punitive anti-trans bathroom bill in the United States, banning “knowingly and willfully” entering a bathroom or changing room “that is designated for use by the opposite biological sex of such person”—with penalties including up to one year in jail for a first offense, “essentially making it a misdemeanor for trans people to use the bathroom that aligns with their identity,” said Scar Rulien, a board member at Trans Affirm, a statewide trans rights group. Subsequent offenses could result in felony charges and up to five years in prison. “The bill doesn’t ban illegal activity in a bathroom,” Rulien told me. “It makes a new crime out of something.” The ban is not yet in effect. The arrests last week were the culmination of a protest against the law—resulting in six charges of misdemeanor trespass and two charges of resisting arrest—but they were a preview of what trans Idahoans may soon face.
Laws endangering transgender and nonbinary communities are now so common. Dozens are introduced every legislative session in many states: banning bathroom use, prohibiting gender-affirming care for young people, forcing schools to out trans students, denying changes to government-issued identity documents. The onslaught from anti-trans lawmakers is now so constant that it may be hard to remember that just ten years ago, it was not like this. Human Rights Campaign identified 55 anti-trans laws introduced across the United States, with three passing, in 2015. The next year, when North Carolina passed an anti-trans bathroom ban, there was national resistance from civil rights groups to professional sports organizations and corporations. A narrative began to take hold: Republicans had gone too far, and such bans were costly, extreme, and politically reckless. As North Carolina news outlet The Assembly marked the anniversary of the bathroom ban, it reminded readers that the state’s attorney general called the bill “a national embarrassment” and that Trump, during his 2016 campaign, said North Carolina was “paying a big price” for the law.
Now, in 2026, when Idaho’s legislature has passed the country’s most comprehensive and most punitive bathroom ban, the national response feels comparatively muted. There were no calls for boycotts from major organizations, as the NAACP had in North Carolina. Bruce Springsteen did not cancel shows. PayPal—a company co-founded by the gay neoreactionary Peter Thiel—did not threaten to take its business out of state, as the company had done when it withdrew a planned expansion to Charlotte. Bathroom bans have since proliferated, but very few threaten trans people with arrest as Idaho has. While Florida, Kansas, and Utah have bathroom bans with some criminal penalties in some public bathrooms, Idaho has the only ban extending such penalties to any “place of public accommodation.” The bill was opposed by a range of groups and interests, from Planned Parenthood Alliance Advocates–Idaho to the Idaho Fraternal Order of Police. It was not even the state’s first bathroom ban; the first was in 2023, targeting students, then was expanded to colleges and universities in 2025, and now has been expanded to all bathrooms, and for the first time criminalizes trans people themselves. Legal challenges to both those bans have already been brought by trans students in Idaho, represented by Lambda Legal. “We are tremendously concerned about the new law that criminalizes transgender people for ordinary restroom use,” said Kell Olson, counsel and strategist at Lambda Legal in a statement this week. “We are talking to people across the state whose daily lives are being affected.”
Given all this, it is unnerving to witness something like public acquiescence despite Idahoans’ loud and persistent resistance to the bathroom ban, just one among a host of other anti-trans laws passed this year in the state. As if to make the point for the public, Governor Little signed the bathroom ban into law on Transgender Day of Visibility, as trans Idahoans rallied outside the Capitol. “We were in our own world,” said Rulien of Trans Affirm, who had co-organized the rally. “We were in the moment.”
“The law doesn’t go into effect until July 1, but the trans community is already feeling the anxiety,” said Preston Pace, an activist and co-founder of the group Trans Joy Boise. The message had been sent: The state’s government was officially excluding trans people from civic life. “We’re already starting to see the public try to enforce these things, and getting aggressive with people in public restrooms,” Pace told me by phone this week. In hearings on the ban, state Senator Brandon Shippy claimed the bill doesn’t target trans people because trans people are not mentioned in the bill. “There is no oppressed community that we’re dealing with here,” said Shippy. “Because there is only male and female.” He called the trans community a “myth.” When the opposition claims they have none, why would they entertain testimony at all? Shippy said in 2025 that he had voted against that year’s bathroom ban because to do so would affirm that trans people existed.
The hearings, such as they were, were rushed affairs, with limited public comment. In one Senate committee, testimony was cut off after only five people spoke (two in support, three against). “We see this tactic happening a lot,” said Rulien. “Push them to the end of the session so that they can justify not giving them an adequate hearing.” Rulien testified against the bill, and as they told me (and told the panel considering the bathroom ban bill), “This is the second time I’ve testified against this exact same thing.” Both Pace and Rulien were clear about what little they can expect from the legislature. “When we go to the hearings, we go into them knowing they are going to pass anyway,” said Pace. When they prepare what they’ll say about a bill, Rulien told me, what advocates are asking themselves is, “how are we going to frame our testimony so that when this goes to court, it can potentially be overturned? Because that’s the only real reality for us to win in these deep red states.”
This is not at all uncommon. In 2021, I met a Texas middle schooler who had already testified against three sessions worth of anti-trans bills that targeted her education and her medical care. Any anti-trans strategy that Republicans introduce in one state predictably spreads to another, and another. Idaho has been dealing with this for a long time, too: In 2020, they were the first state to adopt a blanket ban on trans women and girls from participating in women’s sports.
With the Republicans’ supermajority in the legislature nearly guaranteeing passage of anti-trans laws, the fight isn’t even really about those lawmakers. It isn’t really about the law at all. “We go to show that there are people that are fighting against this,” Pace explained, “and to also show other people in the trans community that we are fighting for you.”
In addition to local organizations such as Trans Affirm and Trans Joy Boise, new media outlets in Idaho are now regularly reporting on anti-trans legislative developments and community resistance at the Capitol. Idaho activist and independent journalist Jaewon Lee livestreamed the bathroom protest on their Boise Blackbirds Instagram. When we spoke this week, Lee told me that he only really got into activism after Trump’s re-election. “I’m noticing kind of a pecking order here,” he told me, “where you have immigrants being targeted, trans people being targeted.” Lee is a naturalized citizen, and at least for now, they told me, being involved in activism feels safer than it might be for immigrants without that status. “I felt an obligation to get out there, and say, I’m somebody who is on that pecking order.” Lee realized they weren’t alone in that, that they were seeing people who said, as he put it, “we’re gonna show up wherever we can and do what whatever we can, not only for the queer community but for immigrant community.” By now, they’ve been seeing “a lot of familiar faces coming together.” Lee is one of the very few people who is keeping that record in real-time.
The same week as the bathroom arrests at the Capitol, a group of activists held a sit-in in Governor Little’s office, requesting a meeting and demanding he veto the bathroom ban, along with a bill that would force teachers to out trans students to their parents. Lee noticed that the people there were really active in the community, and were coming from different causes, “we understand there’s a lot of overlap, and the things we are standing up for in Idaho against white Christian nationalism right now.” At the governor’s office sit-in, he saw many of the people involved were faith leaders, who wanted to confront Christian nationalism, as well. Preston Pace was there, too, but wasn’t one of those arrested. “Being in that setting, surrounded mostly by allies, which consisted of a lot of older, cis white church women,” they told me. “Having these people so willing to not only stand up for our rights and protect us, and put themselves between us and danger was incredibly moving.”
One of those arrested, Nikson Mathews, spoke at a Trans Day of Visibility rally at the Capitol, telling supporters how important it was to show up, “in front of this building when year after year they continue to bring bills that try to remove us from public space and remove us from our public lives.” When Mathews offered testimony opposing the bathroom ban in the House, like Rulien, it was far from the first time he testified against a bathroom ban in the state. “In the past five years this body has passed 17 laws targeting trans rights,” he said, noting that five were introduced this session. “When is it enough? When do we reach the point when it’s been enough?”
Republican lawmakers were not content merely to file and pass as many of these bills as they have. They also tried to keep opposition off the record, voting to suppress a report by Democrats on the likely harms of a the forced outing bill—“a dangerous bill,” the ACLU of Idaho said in a statement, “that would require trusted adults, such as teachers and counselors, to monitor children for signs that they are not conforming to gender stereotypes.” The Democrats’ report attempted to get on the record objections that will be important when the law is enforced or challenged, such as it lacking any “safety exception for children at knowable risk of abuse, homelessness, or parental violence” and creating “compelled speech obligations that conflict with professional ethical and legal duties,” among other concerns. House Republicans “do not want Idahoans to see the serious legal, constitutional, and practical problems this bill creates,” said House Democratic leader Ilana Rubel.
In his testimony, Nikson Mathews pressed the lawmakers to think through what the bathroom ban meant for trans people, “what this law forces me to do,” he said. “It forces me to use the women’s bathroom,” where people would see a bearded young man enter, in apparent violation of the law. What if someone took enforcement into their own hands, attacking a “man” in a “woman’s bathroom”?
“It’s worth noting that based on existing Idaho code”—Mathews offered a sheaf of printed pages—”if I were assaulted, that person would face a lighter punishment than I would for using the men’s bathroom.” The law becomes an instrument for creating public spaces where violence against trans people is more likely, and where such violence was deemed less worthy of punishment than a trans person’s mere presence. Mathews would thus be left to choose, as he put it: “Do I feel like going to jail today? Or do I feel like being attacked?” Given the experiences of trans people in jails and prisons, the likelihood that someone arrested under this law would also be attacked while in custody is also high, notwithstanding the violence of the arrest itself.
Hours before Little signed the bathroom ban on March 31, he signed a petty and mean-spirited law banning Pride flags on government buildings. That day, Trans Affirm and Trans Joy Boise were also recognized with a proclamation by Boise’s Democratic mayor, Lauren McLean. The contrast is too obvious to dwell on for long, but that night Boise City Hall was lit magenta, blue, and violet to mark Trans Day of Visibility, even as its Pride flag had been removed by state decree. Since then, “the mayor has kind of maliciously complied,” Scar Rulien told me, “and they have put a giant rainbow up,” inside and visible in the window. The City Hall flagpoles are also now wrapped in Pride colors.
Idaho Republicans are not stopping any time soon, but the session is done for the year, offering some time to regroup and ready for the next one. “I know the reality of how red it is in Idaho, and at times, it is a losing battle,” Pace told me. Pace is headed out of state soon—but not for good, as many trans Idahoans have had to do. Pace is going to attend law school, so they can return “and help continue the fight.”
