Bathroom bill next step in Idaho Legislature’s campaign of persecution | Opinion
Sadly for Idahoans, the vast majority in our Idaho Legislature is not focused on affordable housing or the economic strain we are feeling. Instead, they seem intent on terrorizing transgender people and the thousands of businesses and government buildings that accommodate us.
House Bill 607 passed the Idaho House Jan. 16 and is headed for the Senate. It makes government entities and private businesses liable if a patron who’s using a restroom or changing room has to share that space with a transgender person or someone whose gender does not match their sex as determined at birth.
No crime, incident or impropriety needs to occur. Instead, our Legislature is passing two entire new sections of law supposing that people in Idaho will be traumatized by the idea of a trans woman using the neighboring stall or a trans man peeing nearby in the same restroom.
This might be hard to believe if it were not the fourth year our Legislature had passed bills terrorizing trans adults and kids along with the doctors, teachers, parents, governments and businesses that accommodate us, helping us live in peace. It all might be funny, too if Idaho families were not losing their trans children to suicide at a devastating rate these past two months since sponsors have circulated this year’s bill drafts.
Have we forgotten that conservative families have trans kids too? Have we forgotten that calling people predators and treating them as criminals — not for behavior, but for their identity — is repugnant and flies in the face of the kind of freedom and respect our state has struggled for so long to embody?
It’s time this Legislature reverses its crusade. This is hate, built not on real problems but on prejudice. It is harassment written to embolden vigilantes to stalk restrooms from Victor to Sandpoint. It will place financial burdens on businesses and subject to scrutiny any woman entering a restroom or changing room at a moment when she does not look quite “feminine enough.”
Where are the state’s hundreds of bearded transgender men supposed to pee? According to the law, in the women’s restroom — where our presence will create more conflict and confusion than what already exists. To the trans women with fully developed breasts, this law says, use the men’s bathrooms and changing rooms — regardless of the obvious risks to our safety.
Idaho, where has our compassion gone? What has become of that place where for eight years I served next to wise, thoughtful Republicans? In 2010, I had former Senate Majority leader Bill Roden and four sitting House and Senate Republican co-sponsors on a bill to do what polling showed Idahoans agreed should be done: not codify and embolden bigotry but include us in Idaho’s civil and human rights laws to ban discrimination against gay and transgender people in employment, housing, education and public accommodation.
Cole Nicole LeFavour is a former Idaho State Senator and former reporter for the Boise Weekly who now writes about conscience and nature from deep in Idaho. Their forthcoming book, “In the Arms of Mountains: A Memoir of Land, Love and Queer Resistance in Red America” is due from Beacon on May 26th.