In 2020, Idaho Governor Brad Little signed into law HB 500 – the so-called “Fairness in Women’s Sports Act” – making Idaho the first state to pass a law banning transgender athletes from participating in sports. The law would bar women and girls who are transgender, and many who are intersex, from taking part in school sports consistent with their gender identity. It would also institute a “dispute” process, which would require female athletes to verify their biological sex through an...
Our Voices
NCLR, along with co-counsel Rifkin Law Office, Hadsell Stormer & Renick LLP, and Ferguson Durham, PLLC, represents Adree Edmo, a Native American transgender woman in the custody of the Idaho Department of Correction (IDOC). Adree Edmo After a three-day evidentiary hearing on Ms. Edmo’s motion for a preliminary injunction, Judge B. Lynn Winmill issued an order on December 13, 2018 requiring IDOC and IDOC’s medical provider Corizon to provide Ms. Edmo with medically urgent...
On July 7, 2014, NCLR and Boise attorneys Deborah A. Ferguson and Craig Durham filed a lawsuit on behalf of Madelynn Lee Taylor, a 74-year-old military veteran who challenged Idaho state laws prohibiting her from being buried in the Idaho State Veterans Cemetery with her late wife, Jean Mixner. Taylor served in the Navy from 1958 to 1964. In 2013, she tried to make advance arrangements to have her ashes interred along with those of her wife in a granite columbarium at the Idaho State Veterans...
On November 8, 2013, four same-sex couples filed a federal lawsuit in Boise challenging Idaho’s laws prohibiting same-sex couples from marrying and refusing to respect the legal marriages of same-sex couples who married in other states. The lawsuit argued that Idaho’s laws barring same-sex couples from marrying and prohibiting the state from respecting the marriages of same-sex couples who married in other states violated the United States Constitution’s guarantees of equal...
Jenniffer Spencer served a 10-year prison sentence for possession of a stolen car and a failed escape attempt that occurred when she was a teenager. While she was incarcerated in Idaho, Spencer, a transgender woman, made 75 requests for treatment for her gender identity disorder (GID), but the Idaho Department of Corrections (IDOC) failed to provide her with any appropriate care. Spencer attempted suicide when she learned that prison doctors would not provide any treatment and eventually...
