BOISE, Idaho -- Bonnie Violet Quintana worked for months to organize Idaho’s first official march for transgender rights and visibility during Boise Pride Festival. Having attended trans marches in other states, she hoped for one in Idaho with massive attendance, to show trans people in Idaho they have widespread support.

“As trans people ... what we need to do is really intentionally carve out places and make spaces and moments in which we can really just be in the joy of things,” she told the Idaho Statesman before the event.

Her vision came to fruition as several hundred demonstrators flooded the streets for the march.

The crowd held transgender and pride flags as they rallied through downtown Boise on Friday night. They wore shirts and waved signs supporting trans and nonbinary people. “Protect trans kids,” read one shirt. “Pride is still protest,” read others, as the crowd marched down Eighth Street to the cheers of servers and restaurant diners along the strip.

The march aimed to promote trans joy, stand up against discrimination and create inclusive spaces, organizers said.

“After such a taxing few years on the trans community, we need some joy,” Liliana Rauer, 17, a student at Boise High, told the crowd at the beginning of the gathering as people cheered. “In classrooms, in libraries and legislatures across the nation, our identities are the pinnacle of controversy. And I think we can all agree that this gets exhausting.”

Rauer, who is transgender, described trans people as strong, brave and caring — people who refuse to back down when their identities are under attack, stand proud in the streets of Boise and look out for others.

“We matter,” Rauer said. “Our stories matter. Our voices make a difference. We are trans joy.”

Cole LeFavour, a former Idaho lawmaker, talked about their time in the Idaho Capitol, which is filled with a “long tradition of very, very rigid binary gender roles,” they said.

Gender is a journey, LeFavour said as they spoke to the crowd, and there’s not one way to be a man, a woman or nonbinary. And then they described what it felt like when they got gender-affirming surgery in 2011.

“Gender-affirming surgery ended my long struggle with my breasts,” they said. “And I felt free.”

After the speeches, attendees marched to the Anne Frank Memorial, where they heard from performers that included trans and nonbinary drag artists. Volunteers for the march handed out carnations and small sheets of paper to write messages of love and hope to trans and nonbinary people in Idaho.

The march ended at the Boise Pride Festival in Cecil D. Andrus Park, where demonstrators placed the flowers with messages on a welded metal sculpture that sat atop a base with the colors of the trans flag.

Idaho continues to pass anti-LGBTQ+ laws

Idaho in recent years has passed several laws targeting trans and nonbinary people. Since 2020, lawmakers have barred trans women and girls from participating in female sports, banned gender-affirming care for people under 18 and required teachers to get parental permission to use a student’s name or pronouns that differ from their sex at birth.

Some of these laws are going through litigation, but trans and nonbinary people have said the laws, and the culture those laws created in Idaho, forced their community to live in fear and prompt some to consider leaving the state.

Standing before the crowd, dressed in a white sequined dress and white heeled boots, Quintana thanked the dozens of people who made the event happen. She acknowledged that trans people have marched in Idaho before “to get us to this day,” but this is the first time the march was taking place during Boise Pride.

“This is a scary world for us,” she said. But on Friday night, people showed up — and the march will continue every year, she said, “until we don’t have to do it anymore.”

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