Idaho: Where Boys Will Be Boys And Girls Will Be Girls… or We’ll Fine You $100,000

I just spoke with a social worker back in my home state of Idaho. She works with at-risk youth, many LGBTQ kids, and she was telling me about the new law going into effect July 1st that forces her to report trans kids to their parents—outing them against their will, in situations where those parents may be physically hostile to such a revelation. Not for even actually transitioning, going public, actually using new pronouns and names at school, but for even bringing such subjects up to their teachers, social workers, or therapists. Should she fail to snitch on her vulnerable questioning kid within 72 hours, she and the organization for which she works are subject to lawsuits from the parents, including damages and court costs, plus lawsuits from the Attorney General for civil penalties up to $100,000.

Damn, and I thought Idaho hated weed! But the maximum fine you can get for pot felonies is $50,000 in the Handmaid State.

This latest bit of batshit Idaho cruelty is known as The Pediatric Secretive Transitions Parental Rights Act.

The law also penalizes any entities that would aid and abet a minor undergoing “sex transition procedure”—what they call gender-affirming care—which is already illegal in Idaho under the so-called Vulnerable Child Protection Act of 2025. Puberty blockers, estrogen or testosterone, or any procedure “for the purpose of attempting to alter the appearance of or affirm” a child’s gender is illegal in Idaho. I mean, contra to what a doctor thought of their infant genitalia. Girls can get boob jobs and boys can have breast reductions, but boys can’t get boob jobs and girls can’t get breast reductions. Well, maybe they can, if they promise to keep acting like girls with their new smaller boobies. We must protect the vulnerable children, after all.

That 2025 law just wasn’t enough, however. Those trans kids, even without the medical care necessary to reconcile their body and mind, kept persisting in socially transitioning. They kept having the gall to ask society to accept them as they feel themselves to be and to provide the common courtesy of addressing them a certain way, I mean, the ones who didn’t suicide in Idaho when they lost their medical care did. So Idaho did what Idaho does and got white straight to work on drafting a new law to address this epidemic of boys not acting properly masculine and girls not acting properly feminine.

I was, of course, horrified to listen to the social worker describe how she and her co-workers and all their kids will be affected by this. How so many will shut down, afraid to be the kind of questioning adolescent we all were. How they’ve been counseled by legal departments that the slightest inquiry needs to be taken seriously. How three of her co-workers have already left for other states. How she’s counseling others to stay, because if they don’t, what will be left for these kids to cling to in Idaho?

The law states that “the legislature finds that … social sex transitions can inflict severe and irreversible harm to a child’s well-being.” And how many pediatricians are in the Idaho Legislature? Let’s see, attorney, farmer, business owner, public speaker, homemaker, rancher, engineer, money metals specialist, oh, a clinical nurse specialist! but, no, I don’t find any pediatricians.

Meanwhile, actual pediatricians out there will tell you that denying social transitions is what can cause the severe and irreversible harm to the transgender child.

The law concludes (emphasis mine) that “it is undoubtedly a parental purview and prerogative to have knowledge of, and the authority to deny, a child’s efforts at … social transitions.”

They couldn’t more plainly state that the child is the parent’s property and its identity shall be molded by the parent. It has no say in its self-expression. I guess this is consistent with a state that still has not outlawed the practice of faith healing your child to death or marrying off your 16-year-old child.

This fear that your child might be secretly transitioning reminds me of the gun owners who fear things like red flag laws—you’re the reason why we need these laws.

After hearing a number of anecdotes the social worker told me of kids she’d worked with and how next month she’d have to out those questions, requests, behaviors, and dress to their parents, I realized that if I was still a high school student in Idaho, this would be Operation: I Am Spartacus time.

Every teacher, counselor, therapist are all now mandatory reporters for any variance of binary gender norms? Then my friends and I are going to give them a hell of a lot to report. Show up to class in a skirt. Ask to be called Loretta. High five the guys saying, “yasss, queeen!” Ask (just ask) to use the ladies room. Every day, every class, every teacher, force them to have to call my parents to tell them, “Mr. Belville, your son Russell just asked the drama teacher if he should get breast implants. Would you please make him stop? We’re all getting tired of calling you.” I can hear my dad laughing now.

I mean, I’ve been fighting mandatory high school gender norms since high school.

Come on, Idaho kids. Everybody go trans. Make the reporting of every gender variance such an overwhelming hassle that it becomes the chaff, hiding the actual trans kid from the incoming fire, so when that trans kid’s unaccepting dad yells, “What’s this call I got from your teacher saying you go by she/her pronouns,” she can reply, “It’s just a goof, like that six-seven thing,” and when he talks to the other guys at work, they confirm, “Yeah, my kid’s teacher called, said my boy wanted to get titties… like implants, not second base. They’re all doing it to harass the teachers. That trans law makes ’em call,”

Jesus, I can already imagine the Idaho Legislature writing The False Reporting of Social Transitioning Act of 2027.