A 2023 Idaho school bathroom law is now permanently in effect, after attorneys for a student group and the state agreed to close a pair of federal lawsuits.
The agreement was finalized Wednesday — the same day a student who was central to the case graduated from high school, and months after a classmate, a transgender student, died by suicide.
The court battle began in July 2023, shortly after Senate Bill 1100 was supposed to go into effect. The law requires students to use bathrooms and locker rooms consistent with their gender assigned at birth. The law went into effect in 2025, at least temporarily, while the legal manuevering continued.
The Sexuality and Gender Alliance, a Boise High School student group, agreed Wednesday to drop its cases before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit and the U.S. District Court of Idaho. Attorneys for the state agreed to the dismissal. Both parties agreed to cover their own legal fees.
“From the district court to the Ninth Circuit, we defended Idaho’s right to protect students’ privacy in bathrooms and locker rooms,” Attorney General Raúl Labrador said in a news release Thursday. “Idaho families can be confident that this law is fully in effect and will remain so.”
The lawsuits named state superintendent Debbie Critchfield, State Board of Education members and Boise school administrators as defendants.
Attorneys for the Sexuality and Gender Alliance argued that the law violated 14th Amendment equal protection rights, by prohibiting students from using facilities aligned with their gender identity. Attorneys also argued that the law violated Title IX, the federal education law that prohibits discrimination based on sex.
The law requires schools to make “reasonable accommodations” to students who do not want to use facilities aligned with their gender assigned at birth. According to court documents, two Boise students in November requested access to single-user bathrooms at the school. But both students expressed reservations about the arrangement.
“It is scary having to look around before to see if anyone will see me going into the single-user restroom, as I worry about people gossiping and speculating about me being transgender,” said one of the students, identified in court documents only as Jane Doe. “I don’t want people to know I am transgender without my consent — even students who might be friendly. For me, it is not a part of myself I talk about or that I feel is the most important part of my identity.”
According to this week’s court filings, one of the two students graduated from Boise High Wednesday. Jane Doe died by suicide in January.
“The court expresses its sincere sympathies to Jane Doe’s family,” U.S. District Court Judge David Nye wrote in a Tuesday filing on the case.
