Statement On Arrest of Transgender Woman for Using Bathroom at Florida Capitol

Statement On Arrest of Transgender Woman for Using Bathroom at Florida Capitol

Tallahassee, FL — According to reports, Marcy Rheintgen, a transgender woman from Illinois, was arrested for using the women’s restroom in the Florida Capitol on March 19, 2025. She was charged with trespassing, a second-degree misdemeanor punishable by up to 60 days in jail. Marcy was held for 24-hours in the men's ward before being released on pretrial release.

Equality Florida's Executive Director, Nadine Smith, released the following statement in response:

“The arrest of Marcy Rheintgen is not about safety. It’s about cruelty, humiliation, and the deliberate erosion of human dignity. Transgender people have been using restrooms aligned with their gender for generations without incident. What’s changed is not their presence — it’s a wave of laws designed to intimidate them out of public life.

These laws are largely unenforceable. And for good reason: policing people’s bodies and identities in bathrooms is both absurd and dangerous. Many transgender people continue to use public restrooms that match their gender without issue because most people understand what this law refuses to admit: transgender people are simply human beings living their lives, not threats.

The true goal is intimidation. If you can’t safely or legally use a restroom, your time in any public space is limited. That’s the point. These laws don’t protect anyone; they push transgender people out of everyday life, shrinking their freedom and making them vulnerable to harassment and arrest.

We were not aware of Marcy’s planned action and cannot speak for her personally, but what has been reported aligns with the long tradition of civil disobedience: the intentional breaking of an unjust law, done publicly and deliberately without causing harm, to expose its cruelty. She wrote lawmakers, identified herself, and made it clear that this was a protest, not a threat.

We’ve seen laws like this before. Whether it was denying access to lunch counters, water fountains, or restrooms, the goal was always the same: to diminish a group’s humanity and license public cruelty. That strategy failed then, and it will fail again because people are standing up, telling the truth, and refusing to be erased.”

Additional Reports: Erin In The Morning