Idaho House Passes Bill Forcing Schools To Out Trans Kids So Parents Can Disown Them
No 'aiding or abetting' of boys with long hair or girls wearing dungarees, either.
As we mention whenever we get the chance, our home state may not have the size or influence of a Florida or a Texas, but when it comes to pushing far-Right culture war bills, the Idaho Legislature punches above its weight in crazy. Hence our beloved state motto, “Though she be but little, she is batshit.”
(Okay, we’re also a small enough media market that rightwing dark money goes a lot farther than in bigger states, making it easier to elect weirdos and lobby them once they’re elected.)
Here’s the latest horrible idea from the state that was first in the nation to ban trans girls and women from sports: Having already banned gender-affirming medical care in 2023, the Idaho House this week passed HB 822, a bill outlawing what it calls “pediatric secretive transitions.” School staff, health professionals, and childcare providers must inform parents if their kid attempts any kind of “social transition” in their gender identity, because we all know about how schools are trying to forcibly turn kids trans and hide it from their parents.
Like most such legislation, it’s deliberately vague about what exactly must be reported to parents, and it includes a massive penalty that probably violates the state constitution: Not only can aggrieved parents sue for damages, but the state attorney general could seek civil penalties of up to $100,000. The bill also doesn’t include any exceptions, so a school or a counselor in private practice would be required to out trans-maybe kids even if they have reason to believe the parent might abuse or abandon the kid. Because “parental rights.”
The bill passed Wednesday on a nearly party-line vote, 59 to 9, although one Republican, state Rep. Jack Nelsen of Jerome, voted against it. We haven’t checked to see whether his house has been burned to the ground yet.
The bill is the scrawny brainchild of state Rep. Bruce Skaug, who previously led the Lege’s drive to criminalize gender affirming care to minors, and then to prohibit taxpayer funds from covering transgender healthcare through Medicaid, even for adults. That 2024 law pushed a clinic at Idaho State U in Pocatello to stop providing gender-affirming care other than counseling, because the statute also prohibited gender-affirming care on state property.
HB 822 would require “covered entities” — schools, medical providers, and childcare providers — to notify parents within 72 hours if a minor asks them to “participate in or facilitate the social transition of the minor student,” including asking the adult to refer to them by different pronouns, a different name or nickname that isn’t a “derivative” of their given name, asking to use the wrong terlet, locker room, changing room, or litter box, or wanting to play on the wrong sex’s sports team. (Presumably, a good portion of Shakespeare’s plays would be off limits too.)
Weirdly cramming the language of criminal law into a civil law bill, HB 822 states, “A covered entity shall not aid or abet a child's efforts to socially transition without first obtaining written consent from the child's parent.” Helping kids be who they are is “aiding and abetting” now, even when parents support it.
The bill’s definition of “social transition” is dangerously broad, opening the door to all sorts of litigious mischief:
“Social transition” means the process by which an individual goes from identifying with and living as a gender that corresponds to the individual's sex to identifying with and living as a gender different from the individual's sex and may involve social, legal, or physical changes, including adopting a name, pronouns, appearance, or dress that does not correspond to the individual's sex.
Skaug claimed in committee debate that the bill is sufficiently specific that it would never ever be used against teachers who fail to report minor departures from gender stereotypes.
“So that’s not when a girl wants to have a short haircut. That’s not when a girl wants to dress in boy’s clothes or vice versa,” Skaug said. “But if there’s that desire to have social transitioning from one gender to the other, then that needs to be reported to the parents.”
But there’s nothing in the bill to stop parents from suing a teacher or counselor for not reporting a girl who wears her hair short, wears a man’s dungarees, and even operates power tools while cursing. As House Democrats noted in a seven-page Minority Report on the bill, the question of whether a kid has “adopted an appearance or dress” inconsistent with their sex is “entirely in the eye of the beholder,” and in the face of a potential $100,000 shithammer of punishment, the bill would encourage over-reporting.
The Democratic minority report also highlights the lack of any exceptions for the minor’s safety, an omission that’s sure to be the basis of a lawsuit if HB 822 makes it into law. Nope, have to tell the parents if a trans kid confides in a trusted adult, even if the kid fears their parents might react with violence or throw them out of the house. The result, say the Democrats, “is not greater safety — it is more fear, more isolation, and less access to care for Idaho's most vulnerable young people.”
Well OK, but how are the parents supposed to force the kids into “conversion therapy” and make them no longer trans if they aren’t alerted?
As it turns out, Republicans in House leadership took the unusual step of voting to block the minority report from being included in the House Journal, the official record of the body’s activities. The reason they offered was that report was rude to the GOP committee chair because it (accurately) complained that he’d only allowed 14 minutes for public comment, and the comment period was dominated by opponents of the bill, including two witnesses who weren’t from Idaho. Seems like a good opportunity to Streisand Effect the heck out of the minority report.
As we’ve noted, once in a while the Idaho Senate does the state a favor and refuses to consider some of the flaming paper bags of dogshit the House sends it, but it hasn’t shown any willingness to do so with recent anti-trans bills. Gov. Little seems likely to tout the “parental rights” rhetoric and sign the thing, and then we’ll have to see how the lawsuits go.
From here, we suppose the Idaho Lege will move to consolidate rightwing moral panics by forbidding furries from using litter boxes designated for furries of the opposite gender.
We should also note that at least one part of the bill is opposed by the far-Right Idaho Freedom Foundation, the dark-money group which has huge influence in aiding and abetting culture war legislation in this state. The IFF generally supports the law, but complains that the “written consent” requirement is too lax, because “There should be no allowance — even with the written consent of a parent — for a child’s mental health issues to be affirmed in the facilitation of a sex change, even if only socially.”
Freedom is much too dangerous to be left up to families, after all.
[Idaho State Journal / Idaho Capital Sun / Idaho HB 822 / Minority Report on HB 822 / Idaho Statesman (archive link) / ACLU of Idaho / CBS2]
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I want to open a cafe for all ages in Boise called "Gender Affirming Care". Nothing medical, not associated with any school district. Just a place where people can gather without any religious creep crawling up in their underpants.
What is Idaho doing about those filthy potatoes?!
"Potato plants can flower. These flowers are *hermaphroditic*, containing both male (stamens) and female (pistils) parts in each flower. Many modern potato varieties are male-sterile, meaning they are often used as female parents in breeding"
This is just smut!