Puerto Rico Passed a Strict Trans Bathroom Ban in February and Almost No One Noticed

House Bill 165, signed into law over 2 months ago, implies that allowing trans women to use women’s bathrooms is violence against cis women and declares that “bathrooms don’t have sex, but people do.”

The Capitol of Puerto Rico in San Juan | Image: Wikimedia Commons

On February 25th, the Republican-aligned governor of Puerto Rico, Jenniffer González-Colón, signed anti-trans House Bill 165 into law. The law, known as the “Public Government Restroom Facilities Regulation Act,” implements a bathroom ban on all government properties in the territory. Additionally, the law prohibits government entities from designating bathrooms as ‘inclusive, mixed, or neutral,’ sending a clear message to trans Puerto Ricans that their government does not wish to accommodate them at all.

In a press release, the governor’s office stated that HB 165 “aims to strengthen public safety standards while ensuring that no individual is subjected to unlawful discrimination” and that it “is consistent with Executive Order 14168 issued by President Donald J. Trump.” As part of this, it explicitly borrows the Trump administration’s position that allowing trans women to access women’s spaces is discriminatory against ‘biological’ women, a line that the Department of Justice has used against colleges as well.

However, despite being among the broadest bathroom laws in the nation and the first bathroom ban to pass in a US territory, HB 165 received minimal media attention: aside from the governor’s press release, the only other article written about it had fewer than a hundred views at the time of writing. Unlike with the territory’s extreme ban on gender-affirming care for anyone under 21—Senate Bill 350, which passed last year—opposition to HB 165 never really materialized, and it overwhelmingly passed the Puerto Rican Legislative Assembly by votes of 37–11 in the House and 21–5 in the Senate. That said, the timing of the law’s passage may provide an explanation for this, as it was signed on the same day that Kansas began sending driver’s license revocation letters to trans residents.

But even when compared to the harshest bathroom bans, the rhetoric behind HB 165 is nothing short of extreme. It opens with four pages of legislative findings (by contrast, Idaho’s first bathroom ban, SB 1100 (2023), used half a page), and in the first of its fourteen paragraphs, it begins with this statement:

“We firmly believe that human dignity is unalienable and that every person has a right to use a public restroom in a clean, safe, and accessible manner. In the past few years, the controversy surrounding inclusive, mixed, or neutral restrooms has surged. Specifically, the people who identify as something other than their biological sex have argued that sex distinctions in public bathrooms amount to discrimination against them and violate their human dignity. For this reason, we are not opposed to the idea that persons who identify as something other than their biological sex should receive a reasonable accommodation to attend to their physiological needs without affecting the rights of others.”

Despite expressing this sentiment, after dedicating an entire page to the history of women’s bathrooms, the law immediately goes on the offensive against the trans community:

“Those who advocate for the existence of multi-occupancy gender-neutral bathrooms argue that they need to protect the safety and well-being of those who identify as something other than their biological sex. This constitutes a depreciation and even an erasure, conscious or not, of a problem that is worthy of consideration, which is that there have been many instances, regrettably, where men who self-identify as women have entered women’s bathrooms to assault and rape them. For example, a group of women on the University of Pennsylvania’s swim team spoke up about the case of [Lia’s deadname] Thomas, or how [she’s] made [herself] known, ‘Lia Thomas’, who identifies differently from her biological sex, and how [she] showed them [her] [genitals] and walked around naked in women’s swim team bathrooms. A group of women approached the university’s administration but did not receive a favorable response. Additionally, they brought a coalition of over 35 women who felt uncomfortable, especially after [Lia] expressed that [she] was sexually attracted to women.

“Similarly, there have been instances of sexual violence in schools where adolescents who identify as something other than their biological sex have entered girls’ restrooms. This has also occurred in department stores, supermarkets, to girls in kindergarten, and in other scenarios. Many survivors of sexual assault have opposed these new policies of multi-occupancy gender-neutral bathrooms.”

To substantiate these claims, the law primarily relies on largely anecdotal reports and cites articles by conservative outlets like the Daily Signal and the New York Post. Additionally, it also makes a point to repeatedly deadname and misgender Lia Thomas, who is mentioned despite having never really been relevant to the issue of trans bathroom use.

Then, after claiming that a court ruling upholding a Florida school district’s bathroom ban “represents a great victory for the rights of women,” HB 165 contains a rather humorous double entendre: “los baños no tienen sexo, pero las personas sí.” This sentence can be translated in two ways: one reading is the idea “bathrooms don’t have a sex/gender, but people do,” while the other is that “bathrooms don’t have sex, but people do.”

Finally, the legislature asserts that “it is a clear manifestation of discrimination against women around the world that their still-unsatisfied sanitary needs are given less publicity and importance than problems arising from new ideological identities and that these problems lead to encroachment upon women’s spaces rather than on the privileges of men who self-identify as women.”

This rhetoric doesn’t stop there, either. Although it stipulates that government entities found to be in noncompliance will be fined—similarly to most other bathroom laws—it uses these fines as an opportunity to send a message, stating that any fines will be sent to the Puerto Rican government’s Center for Assistance to Victims of Rape (CAVV). This may be a nice sentiment on its face, but based on the language used earlier in the law, it can be inferred that this is a reference to the idea that allowing trans women into women’s restrooms is comparable to sexual assault.

Unfortunately, House Bill 165 isn’t alone. This year, there are 4 other anti-trans bills making their way through the Legislative Assembly, including a ban on trans sports participation—which has already passed the House—and another mandating that trans women be housed in men’s prisons. But given that this law and last year’s youth gender-affirming care ban were both passed by supermajorities, it doesn’t seem that there’s much political opposition to either of these measures. Hopefully that’ll change as these bills receive more attention.

Author’s note: the author is a fluent Spanish speaker and has manually translated the quoted contents of House Bill 165 to English from its original Spanish text. References to Lia Thomas’ deadname and instances of the law misgendering her have been removed out of respect for her identity.