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Florida police recently arrested a transgender woman for using the women’s restroom in the state Capitol in Tallahassee, in what is believed to be the first such arrest in a state with an anti-trans bathroom ban.
Marcy Rheintgen, a 20-year-old college student and Illinois resident, was arrested March 19 on a trespassing charge after she used a women’s restroom in a protest against Florida’s law barring people from using bathrooms that don’t align with their assigned sex at birth in government-owned or -leased buildings.
According to The Associated Press, Rheintgen had sent letters to every Florida state lawmaker to inform them that she planned to use a restroom at the statehouse that corresponded with her gender identity. She included a photo of herself for identification, the Tampa Bay Times reported.
“I know that you know in your heart that this law is wrong and unjust. I know that you know in your heart that transgender people are human too, and that you can’t arrest us away,” she wrote. “I know that you know that I have dignity. That’s why I know that you won’t arrest me.”
Jon Davidson, a senior staff attorney for the American Civil Liberties Union, told the AP that Rheintgen’s arrest is the first of its kind that ACLU’s attorneys are aware of in any state with a bathroom ban.
Rheintgen, who the AP reported had been visiting her grandparents, was freed on pretrial release the day after her arrest, according to the Miami Herald. If convicted on the misdemeanor trespassing charge, she could face up to 60 days in jail.
Rheintgen told the AP that she wanted to show “the absurdity of this law in practice.”
“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,” she said, adding that she was “horrified and scared” over what might happen next.
Nadine Smith, the executive director of Equality Florida, an LGBTQ civil rights organization, said in a statement that Rheintgen’s arrest was not about safety, but “about cruelty, humiliation, and the deliberate erosion of human dignity.”
“Transgender people have been using restrooms aligned with their gender for generations without incident,” Smith wrote. “What’s changed is not their presence — it’s a wave of laws designed to intimidate them out of public life.”
Florida is one of more than a dozen states with a bathroom ban, though Utah is the only other state to criminalize the act. In recent years, GOP lawmakers across the country have passed legislation to crack down on trans rights and strip protections — a pattern that the Trump administration has mirrored on the federal level as well.