idaho lets students sue for $5,000 every time they see a trans classmate in a bathroom. the first bill just came due.
via Idaho Education News, Boise State Public Radio and Metro Weekly.
Five thousand dollars. That is the going rate in Idaho for seeing a trans kid in a bathroom, and it is not a metaphor, it is in the statute.
what the law pays out
Senate Bill 1100, passed in 2023, requires public school students to use the multi-occupancy restroom matching their sex assigned at birth, and gives any student who encounters someone who does not the right to sue their own school district for $5,000 per encounter, plus uncapped damages for psychological, emotional and physical harm. It was co-authored by the Idaho Family Policy Center.
The Boise School District has now paid. Through its insurer, it settled for $34,000: $10,000 in damages to a student called Jane Doe in the court papers, who ran into a transgender classmate in a girls' restroom in January and again in February 2025, and $24,000 in attorney fees. The trans student had been using that restroom as part of a gender support plan the district had agreed to. Ada County District Judge Lynn Norton refused to throw the case out in late July, and the district settled rather than go to a trial that had been set for June 2027. Idaho Education News reports it is the first lawsuit brought under the law to close.
who brought the case
Two details are doing a lot of work here. The first is that the organization that wrote the law is the organization that brought the case, through its own legal arm, and then issued a press release about winning. Its legal center director, Caleb Pirc: "Other Idaho public schools should take note that compliance with the law isn't optional." The second is the ratio. Of $34,000 paid out over a child's distress, $24,000 went to lawyers.
The district's line, from public affairs administrator Dan Hollar, is that "neither the District nor any of its employees admits, acknowledges, or concedes any fault." It is also not doing it again. The restroom ban is fully in force, so trans and nonbinary students in Idaho now use the restroom matching their birth certificate or find one of the single-user ones, which are never where you are.
The thing about a bounty is that it does not need to be collected often to work. It needs to be collectible once. Boise has just demonstrated it is, which is the actual product being sold here, and every other district in the state read the invoice. We watched a Virginia school board fold on a gay student club the moment a federal judge got close; this is the same lesson taught from the other direction. Districts do what is cheapest.
Nobody has said a word about the student who was using the bathroom her school had told her she could use. She is not named anywhere, the plaintiff's father called her "a male student in the female bathroom," and she cost her district $34,000 by washing her hands.
