For a Boise family of medical providers, Idaho criminal trans bathroom ban was the last straw

But this year’s criminal transgender bathroom ban — described by advocates as the most extreme in the nation for extending to private businesses — was the couple’s last straw.

So early this month, Michael Devitt notified patients that his practice, Focus Physical Therapy, would shut down at the end of August as his family prepared to move out of Idaho.

“Obviously, this law is a disaster for families like ours,” he wrote in a letter. “We can no longer take a road trip across our beloved state, or even enjoy a family night out at a restaurant, or a movie, without running the risk of Eve being charged and sent to a prison merely for using the facilities.”

Michael said he and his wife — who is the president of a large group of doctors, called the Idaho Academy of Family Physicians — draw the line at human dignity. He’s heard next year’s legislative session will be even worse.

“We say ‘We’re in an abusive relationship with the state of Idaho’ — all people with transgender relatives, or all transgender people. And you always think, ‘Oh, they’ll stop hitting me.’ But they’re not gonna,” Michael said.

In addition to the bathroom ban, the Republican supermajority-controlled Idaho Legislature and Gov. Brad Little approved a bill to require teachers and doctors to out transgender children to their parents, and to re-ban local and state government agencies from flying the LGBTQ+ pride flag.

The city of Boise already found a workaround to the latest ban: Making the flagpoles themselves rainbow colored.

Idaho’s anti-LGBTQ+ bills this year follow a trend

Three became law: The trans bathroom ban, the bill requiring forced outing of youth, and the expanded flag ban.

The bills follow years of anti-LGBTQ+ legislation in Idaho.

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.

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, a trans man who serves as chair of the Idaho Democratic Queer Caucus, said at a news conference in February. He was among nine protestors arrested for trespassing after a sit-in protest over anti-trans bills at the governor’s office early this month.

Nampa Republican Rep. Bruce Skaug pushed for several of the bills — including this year’s bill to require teachers and doctors to out trans kids to their parents. He says he’s trying to protect traditional families.

“I know that some people have sent me emails … saying ‘Why are you so genital focused?’ Well, I’m trying to protect families and children from those who are genuinely genital focused. And that would be the transgenders and those who would go after our children,” Skaug told the Sun.

Some see these bills as a distraction.

“I think what we see nationally and here in Idaho is lots of money being used to manufacture outrage and a crisis around trans people, rather than focus on the issues that really matter to Idahoans,” ACLU of Idaho’s LGBTQ+ Rights Strategist Jenna Damron told the Sun.

Boise Democratic Sen. Melissa Wintrow sees it similarly, arguing that the Republican party has chosen the LTBTQ+ community as a scapegoat while things aren’t going well.

“While we’re worried about toilet seats and bathrooms, we’re going to pilfer the coffers over here and take the money that is the public wealth, and we’re going to give it all the way back. We’re going to give it back to rich corporations and wealthy folks,” she said.

Why some call Idaho’s trans bathroom ban the nation’s most extreme

House Bill 752 criminalizes transgender people using bathrooms that align with their gender identity, including in private businesses. The law takes effect July 1.

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.

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.

House Bill 752 criminalizes transgender people using bathrooms that align with their gender identity, including in private businesses. The law takes effect July 1.

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.

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.

Skaug said he supported the bill to protect women in women’s spaces. He said it has nothing to do with transgender people’s rights, citing conversations with the bill’s sponsor, Rep. Cornel Rasor, R-Sagle.

ACLU of Idaho Legal Director Paul Carlos Southwick told the Sun that the ban is the most extreme in the nation mainly because it applies to places of public accommodations, which includes many private businesses, like grocery stores, restaurants and movie theaters.

“Most places that people would go about in their ordinary life are going to be impacted by this bill,” he said.

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.

Little signed the bill into law on Trans Day of Visibility.

Bill to force teachers, doctors to out trans kids to parents takes effect July 1

House Bill 822 forces teachers and doctors to out transgender minors to their parents, or face lawsuits. The law takes effect July 1.

Supporters argued the bill protects parental rights. But critics say it risks exposing some trans youth to abuse from parents.

Major medical groups say gender-affirming care is medically necessary and safe. The American Medical Association last month reiterated that gender-affirming care is “medically necessary.” Some European nations are tightening standards for gender affirming-care.

The bill was brought by Skaug. The lawmaker led efforts to criminalize gender-affirming care for all minors in Idaho and expand the ban to taxpayer funds, which prevented Medicaid from covering gender-affirming care and prompted an eastern Idaho clinic to halt offering gender-affirming care.

Skaug told the Sun he got started on the bill years earlier, when he pushed for the bill to outlaw gender-affirming care for minors. He said he encountered parents whose children were secretly transitioned.

Skaug dismissed concerns that his bill could risk trans kids’ safety.

“I don’t know what that situation could possibly be. If Billy wants to be Sally, that’s a pretty serious mental health issue that any parent should know about, first and foremost,” he said. “So I don’t know of a situation where that has actually occurred, where there’s an abusive parent that is going to harm their child because they want to change their sex.”

Boise quickly found another workaround to another ban on the LGBTQ+ pride flag

After the governor signed a bill to fine cities for flying flags that aren’t on the Legislature’s pre-approved list, the city of Boise took down an LGBTQ+ pride flag that flew in front of its City Hall.

Just blocks away from the state Capitol, Boise had flown a pride flag for more than a decade. The city council declared it an official flag of the city to workaround a flag ban law passed last year.

But House Bill 561 this year made it clear that the pride flag can’t be flown. It banned city flags made official after 2023. Eagle Republican Rep. Ted Hill has said his bill is meant to target the city of Boise.

But less than two weeks after the bill became law, Boise found more workarounds, KTVB reported: Adorning the flag pole with rainbow wrap, hanging a pride banner on the front of city hall, and decking the building with lights colored after the trans pride flag.

Michael Devitt bets there’ll be a bill next year to regulate what color government flagpoles can be.

What’s next for the Devitts

The Devitts aren’t sure how soon they’ll move.

Their daughter, Eve is now 20 years old, attending college in New York City. But what about when she comes to Boise to visit? Her dad worries she could be subjected to a physical exam.

“How do you navigate a community like that when we literally are penalizing people for their presence more than we would penalize somebody for assault, more than we would penalize somebody for, oh say, manslaughter,” Michael Devitt said. “I mean, there are all kinds of things you can do in Idaho that will get you prison time that are less than the second offense for using the bathroom that aligns with your gender identity.”

In a book about raising their trans daughter in Idaho, Michael and Dr. Angie Devitt chronicle Eve’s growth, and the couple’s frustration with the Legislature’s hyperfocus on “persecuting transgender people.”

“I recently had someone tell me they were sick and tired of hearing about transgender people all of the time,” they wrote toward the end of their book, “Finding Eve,” which is written from Michael’s perspective. “I told them, speaking for every parent of a trans kid in Idaho, that I am sick of it too, and so is Angie. Every time we turn around our legislature or governor are talking about transgender people and how the state of Idaho is working to make their lives more difficult.”

Dr. Angie Devitt said she’ll keep seeing patients, and may even continue to work in Idaho while she lives in another state.

But part of what hurts so much as a physician testifying in the Legislature, she said, is seeing local experts, like doctors who took time out of their day to testify, be passed over as committees rush through bills. That happened at the House hearing on the bill to force teachers and doctors to out trans kids, where no doctors testified, but several people not from Idaho were allowed to speak.

As she waits to be called to testify, Dr. Angie Devitt said she’s often juggling treating patients.

“I tell my patient, ‘I’m doing two things right now, and if I get called, because I’m signed up, and you never know — if I get called, I’m going to take two it’s only two minutes, unless they ask questions, and I’m going to step out,’” she said.

One bill that didn’t pass is coming back. It would repeal local LGBTQ+ anti-discrimination protections.

Some anti-LGBTQ+ bills didn’t pass this year, like an attempt to ask the U.S. Supreme Court to overturn its ruling that legalized gay marriage across the U.S.

But that doesn’t mean they won’t return. The gay marriage repeal resolution is at least the second version introduced in the Legislature in recent years.

A bill to repeal local policies that protect LGBTQ+ people from discrimination is coming back, one lawmaker confirmed.

House Bill 557 passed the House, but never got a committee hearing in the Senate. Skaug, who sponsored the bill, says he’s planning to carry the bill again next year. The bill was written by the Idaho Family Policy Center, a conservative Christian lobbying group.

The bill would prevent local governments in Idaho from having or enforcing antidiscrimination policies that go beyond state law. The bill comes after more than a decade of failed efforts in the Legislature to add LGBTQ+ discrimination protections to state law.

More than a third of Idahoans — over 720,000 people — live in Idaho communities with local nondiscrimination ordinances, the ACLU of Idaho estimates. Since 2011, 12 Idaho cities and towns passed nondiscrimination ordinances including Boise, Idaho Falls, Moscow, Lewiston, Meridian, Ketchum, Hailey, Bellevue, Driggs, Victor, Pocatello and Coeur d’Alene. In 2020, Ada County, home to Boise, passed its own.

A separate trans bathroom ban — which would have let people sue to enforce it, instead of allowing prison sentences — never got a hearing in the Senate after passing the House. The bill, House Bill 607, was also written by the Idaho Family Policy Center.

But Michael Devitt doesn’t think the bathroom ban that passed is going to work as intended.

“They say, ‘Oh, we don’t want men in women’s bathrooms.’ Well, guess what? That’s what you’re going to get, because you’re going to get people who look very much like the gender they identify with,” he said.

Idaho Capital Sun is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Idaho Capital Sun maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Christina Lords for questions: info@idahocapitalsun.com.