Idaho Gov. Brad Little (via Facebook)
The ACLU has filed a lawsuit on behalf of four plaintiffs against the state of Idaho and for enacting anti-transgender legislation earlier this month. The suit, known as Hecox v. Little, named for the first listed plaintiff and the governor, was filed this week in U.S. District Court for the state of Idaho.
Gov. Brad Little signed two bills into law earlier this month. One bill prohibits transgender people from changing their gender marker on an Idaho birth certificate. The other prevents transgender girls from playing on girl’s and women’s sports teams. Female athletic teams will “not be open to students of the male sex,” the new law states.
The lawsuit attacks discrimination against trans teens in the second law. The suit argues the law “does so by requiring proof of ‘biological sex’ based on criteria that intentionally disqualify all women and girls who are transgender and many who are intersex, and which threaten to intrude upon the privacy and bodily autonomy of all women and girls engaged in student athletics.”
The suit argues, “Idaho is the first and only state in the United States to categorically bar the participation of a subset of women in women’s student athletics because they are transgender and/or intersex.” No national organization, such as the NCAA, or international organization, such as the Olympics, has such a ban.
Discrimination of trans women wasn’t a result of the new law, the suit argues, but the intent of the law.
Plaintiff Lindsay Hecox is a freshman at Boise State University who plans to try out for the school’s cross country team. The other plaintiffs are an unnamed 17-year-old athlete and her parents.
The defendants include Little, in his capacity as governor, the state’s board of education, Boise State University and Marlene Tromp, the school’s president.
— David Taffet
