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Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier alongside sports shoes, backpack, and water bottle on a bench in gym locker room
But Florida's bathroom law does not apply to privately owned facilities.
Florida officials just intimidated a private gym for allowing transgender members to use facilities corresponding with their gender identity. But a state law restricting bathroom and changing facility access does not apply to private businesses.
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Nevertheless, Florida Attorney General James Uthmeier, who was appointed by Gov. Ron DeSantis this year, sent a letter to Life Time Fitness threatening to investigate the business for allowing “men posing as women to enter and use the women's locker room.”
“This policy clearly harms and endangers women who use private facilities at Life Time Palm Beach Gardens,” the Republican wrote.
A letter sent to the gym on May 12 does not cite any state statutes. The gym at one point cited a Palm Beach County human rights ordinance that includes gender identity as a protected characteristic, and Uthmeier argues that does not apply because it excludes language about bathroom restrictions.
DeSantis in 2023 signed a bathroom bill, part of a “slate of hate” that targeted LGBTQ+ Floridians and especially transgender people. But the bathroom law applied only to restrooms and changing facilities on public property, such as those at schools, prisons, and, as recently enforced for the first time, the Florida Capitol.
The American Civil Liberties Union of Florida, in its own explainer on the law, stresses that “private businesses, organizations, and religious institutions are not covered unless they operate inside a state-owned building.”
Despite this, Uthmeier threatened to investigate the private business. In a video posted on social media May 12, Uthmeier references a different law. “Instead of following Florida’s Civil Rights Act, they've decided to let men into women's locker rooms,” he said. “That is wrong, and we are not going to stand for it. Let me be clear: Florida law protects spaces designated for women.”
But that is not true either. The Florida Civil Rights Act of 1992 bans discrimination “because of race, color, religion, sex, pregnancy, national origin, age, handicap, or marital status” and calls for the state to “protect their interest in personal dignity.” It makes no mention, however, of bathroom use, changing facilities, or even gender identity.
But the state has protections against discrimination based on gender identity when it comes to housing, employment or public accommodations as the result of a 2021 interpretation by the state agency that enforces the civil rights law.
Uthmeier doesn’t cite any Florida statute but offers up several news reports from around the coverage as anecdotal evidence that allowing transgender people in women’s restrooms results in harm to young girls. Those included reports of an Oklahoma transgender girl beating another girl in a school restroom, though no mention of Nex Benedict, a trans student beaten in a girls' bathroom in the same state. Benedict subsequently died, and a coroner's report ruled the youth's death a suicide, but there has been skepticism about that conclusion.
He also references a Virginia transgender sex offender arrested after exposing sex organs to women in multiple recreation center locker rooms as well as a California transgender woman convicted of assaulting a 10-year-old girl in a Denny’s restroom when the assailant was 17.
Ultimately, Life Time Fitness appears to have caved to Uthmeier’s pressure anyway. Owners told radio station WJNO that after receiving Uthmeier’s letter, the Palm Beach Gardens facility will comply with his interpretation of the law while “remaining committed to welcoming all members.”
