Idaho Is Ground Zero of Republicans’ Escalating War on Trans People

Ten years ago, bathroom bans inspired boycotts and celebrity opposition. Where’s the national outrage now?

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........

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