A 2023 Idaho law criminalizing gender-affirming medical care for transgender youth is being challenged in federal court by two transgender adolescents and their families. HB 71, signed into law by Idaho Governor Brad Little in May 2023, prohibits gender-affirming medical care that is widely accepted to treat gender dysphoria, helping alleviate the distress of gender dysphoria and significantly improving patients’ mental health and well-being. Such treatment is supported by leading medical experts and all major U.S. medical organizations, including the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association, and the American Academy of Pediatrics.

Lindsay is a college student at Boise State University. She wants to run on the track team so she can form friendships with other girls. A new law in Idaho would ban her from doing so because she is transgender.

On August 8, 2023, the ACLU, the ACLU of Idaho, Professor Seth Kreimer, and law firm Strindberg Scholnick Birch Hallam Harstad Thorne, filed a lawsuit on behalf of two teachers’ unions and six professors in the U.S. District Court of Idaho to challenge Idaho’s No Public Funds for Abortion Act. The statute criminalizes the use of any public funds to “promote abortion” or “counsel in favor of abortion.” On behalf of our Plaintiffs, we argue that the law violates the First Amendment by restricting the academic speech of faculty at Idaho’s public universities, and is unconstitutionally vague under the Fourteenth Amendment.

On April 5, a group of health care providers and advocates sued to stop Idaho Attorney General Labrador from applying a legal opinion in which he claims that health care providers cannot refer patients out of state for abortion care under Idaho law. Under the opinion, any assistance from a health care provider — including offering information about other states’ abortion providers and abortion funds — could be a violation of Idaho’s abortion ban, threatening health care licenses or even criminal prosecution. This interpretation goes far beyond Idaho’s law and is an extreme attempt to prevent health care providers from giving information to patients and to prevent Idahoans from accessing legal health care in another state.

Six plaintiffs file this action on their own behalf and on behalf of a class of all other persons incarcerated, now or in the future, in the Canyon County Jail in Caldwell, Idaho.