The first case of a person being arrested for attempting to challenge Florida's antitrans bathroom law has been tossed out of court after state prosecutors missed filing deadlines.
Marcy Rheintgen, a 20-year-old transgender college student, was arrested in March for washing her hands in the women's restroom of the Florida Statehouse in Tallahassee. She was protesting the state's law banning transgender people from using bathrooms that align with their gender identity. However, Leon County court records show that a judge granted her defense attorney's motion to dismiss the misdemeanor trespassing charge against her on June 20 after state prosecutors failed to file charging documents and other information in her case within a 90-day timeline.
Florida passed the Safety in Private Spaces Act in 2023. The law makes it a crime for an individual to refuse to leave a restroom or changing area assigned to the opposite sex when asked to by a government employee. It applies in government buildings.
While more than a dozen states have passed laws restricting transgender access to restrooms, only Florida and Utah have enacted criminal statutes. Rheintgen was not only the first person to be arrested for attempting to challenge Florida's law, but, as far as civil liberties groups can tell, the first person in the country to face criminal prosecution because of one of these new laws.
"I wanted people to see the absurdity of this law in practice," Rheintgen told the Associated Press following her arrest. "If I'm a criminal, it's going to be so hard for me to live a normal life, all because I washed my hands. Like, that's so insane."
Rheintgen was ultimately prosecuted under a misdemeanor trespassing charge, rather than for the law she was protesting.
As Reason's Autumn Billings writes, the poorly written statute is a threat to far more than just transgender people: "Because of its breadth and vagueness, the law's impact goes beyond transgendered individuals and puts everyone on notice that their mundane use of facilities could invite action from law enforcement."
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