Meagan Taylor was arrested last July in Iowa while staying at Drury Inn with a friend after staff called police to report ‘two men’ engaged in prostitution

A transgender woman who was jailed for eight days after hotel staff called the police to report “two men” engaging in prostitution, has settled her lawsuit against the hotel.

Last July, Meagan Taylor, 22, and her friend, both black transgender women, spent the night at the Drury Inn in West Des Moines, Iowa. The pair had been on their way to Kansas City to attend a funeral. But Taylor wound up getting arrested and spending eight days in a county jail after being found in possession of her hormone drugs without a copy of her prescription, a charge that was later dropped.

While the details of Taylor’s case could not be disclosed due to a confidentiality agreement tied to the settlement, her case is a reflection of the continued struggles transgender people face across the US, civil liberties groups said.

“Meagan’s case garnered national attention and has been an important reminder to those in the criminal justice system and who run businesses and other public accommodations in Iowa that transgender people are explicitly protected by our civil rights laws from discriminatory treatment,” said Rita Bettis, ACLU of Iowa legal director, after the announcement.

“Given the attack on transgender people happening across the country,” Bettis continued, referring to states like North Carolina which have passed discriminatory so-called “bathroom bills”, “we in Iowa are proud and thankful to work in a place where transgender people are afforded dignity and protection under our state law.”

The ACLU was able to settle the case, because Iowa is one of only 16 states that protects transgender people from discrimination under state law.

Bathroom bills – which make it illegal for transgender people to use restrooms not associated with the gender on their birth certificates and blocks local governments from creating protections for LGBT people – continue to dominate the transgender community’s struggles. But civil rights groups are eager to use wins like Taylor’s as evidence that the struggle for gender inclusive facilities should extend beyond bathrooms to include hotels and other public spaces.

“We can no longer allow violence against and criminalization of transgender people to be excused away as a reasonable response to perceived deception,” Beverly Tillery, executive director of the New York City Anti-Violence Project, which tracks every case of LGBT homicides and violence, told the Guardian.

“Many people feel like they have license to taunt, demean, harass, physically assault and even call the police on [transgender people] just because of their perceptions of who they are,” Tillery said.