Idaho Criminalizes Transgender Use of Some Bathrooms in Private Businesses - The New York Times

The Take

Jordan Calloway · Government Secrets & FOIA

Idaho just criminalized biology while pretending to protect privacy—and nobody's asking the obvious question: who enforces this? That's the real scandal buried in the statute. Governor Brad Little signed legislation making it illegal for transgender people to use bathrooms matching their gender identity in private businesses. The bill creates a legal liability minefield for business owners while establishing zero enforcement mechanism. That's either incompetent lawmaking or intentional—I'm betting intentional. Here's what matters: this law exists to generate lawsuits, not compliance. Private businesses are now liable if they *don't* discriminate, yet have no police power to verify anyone's anatomy. It's a backdoor way to criminalize through civil litigation rather than prosecution. Brilliant, actually. Deniable. No government agents dragging people from bathrooms—just liability insurance exploding and business owners caught between contradictory state and federal law. The Times buried the enforcement gap. That gap is the entire point. This isn't about bathrooms. It's about using private business as a enforcement proxy for state discrimination policy while maintaining plausible deniability about who's actually doing the discriminating.