Earlier this year, Puerto Rico became the first U.S. territory to pass an anti-trans bathroom ban into law.

Gov. Jenniffer González-Colón (R) signed H.B. 165 in late February, after it was passed by the Puerto Rican Legislative Assembly with votes of 37–11 in the House and 21–5 in the Senate, as reported by independent journalist Aleksandra Vaca.

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The “Public Government Restroom Facilities Regulation Act” requires all government buildings, including the University of Puerto Rico, to maintain sex-segregated multi-occupancy restrooms, and bans transgender and nonbinary people from accessing bathrooms that do not align with the sex they were assigned at birth. It also “prohibits the installation of mixed or gender-neutral multi-occupancy restrooms in government facilities,” according to a February 25 press release.

The press release notes that the law “is consistent with Executive Order 14168issued by President Donald J. Trump.”

The text of H.B 165 argues that the law is necessary to protect cisgender women – a claim routinely put forth by anti-trans activists with little evidence to support it.

“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,” the legislation reportedly states. “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.”

The text of the law goes on to cite “women on the University of Pennsylvania’s swim team” who claimed that transgender swimmer Lia Thomas (who the law deadnames) exposed herself to them and walked around naked in the women’s swim team bathrooms while she was a member of the team during the 2021–2022 season.

Thomas has never been accused of any form of assault. After former University of Kentucky swimmer turned anti-trans activist Riley Gaines accused Thomas of “dropping [her] pants and watching us undress” in the women’s locker room while competing at the March 2022 NCAA championship in a 2023 interview with Fox News, trans writer Kristina Konwerski shared quotes from an April 2022 interview with Gaines in which she reportedly admitted that she “never felt uncomfortable around Lia or because of Lia.”

The law also claims that “there have been instances of sexual violence in schools where adolescents who identify as something other than their biological sex have entered girls’ restrooms.” But according to Vaca, the law’s text primarily cites anecdotal reporting in right-wing outlets to back up those claims.

Contrary to this anti-trans narrative, a February 2025 study from the Williams Institute found that transgender people are disproportionately likely to face harassment when using restrooms that align with their sex assigned at birth. And in January, advocacy group TransLucent released the results of six separate investigations conducted between 2022 and 2024, which showed that actual complaints about transgender women using women’s restrooms in the U.K. are vanishingly rare.

A 2021 study from the Williams Institute also found that trans people are four times more likely than cis people to be victims of violent crime.

Violations of the law carry fines up to $15,000, which will be directed to the Puerto Rican government’s Center for Assistance to Victims of Rape (CAVV).

H.B. 165 is not the first anti-trans law passed in Puerto Rico. Last year, González-Colón signed a bill banning gender-affirming care for trans youth under 21.

According to Vaca, it is the first bathroom ban to become law in a U.S. territory, and is one of the broadest such laws in the nation. Nevertheless, the passage of H.B. 165 received little media coverage. Vaca suggests that this may have been because the law was signed the same day Kansas began notifying trans people that their driver’s licenses were invalid.