Idaho Put the Locker Room Line Back in the Criminal Code

What does the law owe a woman in a shower room?

For most of American history the answer was assumed rather than written. Restrooms, locker rooms, and changing rooms were separated by sex, everyone understood why, and no statute needed to say so. The last decade dissolved the assumption in one public institution after another, and states have been deciding, one by one, whether to write the old line back down or let it disappear.

Idaho wrote it down. House Bill 752 (Session Law Chapter 263), signed April 1, 2026, and effective July 1, adds section 18-4117 to the Idaho Code. Any person who "knowingly and willfully enters a restroom or changing room in a government-owned building or a place of public accommodation" that is "designated for use by the opposite biological sex" commits a misdemeanor, punishable by up to a year in county jail. A second violation within five years, counting equivalent offenses in other states, becomes a felony carrying up to five years. The statute defines "changing room" to include locker rooms and shower rooms, the places where a person "may be in a state of undress in the presence of others."

Read subsection (2) before accepting anyone's summary of this bill, including mine. The statute lists ten circumstances where the prohibition simply does not apply: custodial and maintenance work, medical assistance, law enforcement duties, emergencies and disasters, using a single-user facility when it is the only one reasonably available, genuine urgent need when no other facility is available, facilities temporarily redesignated by sex, coaching during athletic events, accompanying a person who needs assistance, and a parent or guardian helping a minor child.

That list is the statute's own statement of intent. The janitor, the EMT, the father taking his young daughter into the men's room, the woman coaching a boys' team: all outside the law's reach by name. Add the mens rea requirement, "knowingly and willfully," and the wrong-door mistake at a gas station is not a prosecutable event. What remains covered is the deliberate act the bill was written for: a person entering the space where members of the opposite sex undress, knowing exactly what the sign says.

Opponents raise two arguments that deserve straight answers. The first is enforcement: how does anyone prove biological sex at a restroom door without invasive policing? The practical answer is that this statute works the way most misdemeanor law works, by complaint after the fact rather than by checkpoint. It gives a woman who finds a man in the changing room something she did not have before: a specific offense to report, rather than a shrug from a facility manager whose corporate policy has already surrendered the question.

The second argument is constitutional, and honesty requires saying plainly that the legal ground here is unsettled. Federal courts have divided on how sex, gender identity, and facility access interact under the Equal Protection Clause and federal statutes, different circuits have gone different directions in related disputes, and the Supreme Court has not resolved the question for laws like this one. Litigation against H752 is a reasonable expectation, and anyone telling you its court fate is certain, in either direction, is selling confidence they do not have. What the Legislature has done is state Idaho's answer clearly and let the courts do what courts do.

The Legislature placed this statute in the indecency and obscenity chapter of the criminal code, and that placement is the argument. Idaho's judgment is that bodily privacy in a state of undress turns on bodies, that women and girls did not consent to redefine that boundary, and that a line everyone once honored voluntarily now requires a penalty to mean anything.

Privacy in the places we undress is the oldest boundary in public life, and women have been left to hold it alone, one uncomfortable objection at a time, against institutions that had already surrendered it. As of July 1, an Idaho woman's complaint has the criminal code behind it.

This is our read of the bill. We encourage every reader to read the legislation for themselves and reach their own conclusions.