Iowa House Republicans renew effort to strip transgender protections from Iowa civil rights law

House Republicans want to remove Iowa’s discrimination protections for transgender Iowans. The bill is a long list touching on bathrooms, birth certificates and introduces a new phrase “gender theory” into Iowa law.

Just like all other Iowans, transgender residents of the state are protected under the Iowa Civil Rights Act, meaning they cannot be discriminated against when it comes to employment, housing, education, and public accommodation. But a new effort by Iowa Republicans would strip those protections from state law, opening the door for widespread discrimination of trans Iowans. 

A new bill proposed by House Republicans would remove gender identity from the list of protected statuses in the Iowa Civil Rights Act. The bill defines “sex” as “the state of being either male or female as observed or clinically verified at birth” and specifies that “gender” should be considered a synonym for biological sex, not gender identity. 

“This is the worst bill I’ve ever seen,” said Keenan Crow, director of policy and advocacy at One Iowa, an statewide LGBTQ equality organization. “Every time I read it, I find something new that’s bad.”

For Republicans, this marks the second year in a row they’ve tried to remove these protections. Last year’s effort failed after even Republican lawmakers on the panel expressed concerns that the bill would create a “festival of litigation.”

Legal experts, including the ACLU of Iowa, have warned that removing protections from a specific group that was voluntarily granted protected status could violate the Equal Protection Clause of the US Constitution, citing the Supreme Court’s 1996 Romer v. Evans decision.

HSB 242 goes beyond removing civil rights protections to also regulate identification of sex on birth certificates. It also would erase the phrase “gender identity” in educational contexts and replace it with the phrase “gender theory,” prohibiting instruction about so-called “gender theory” in schools from kindergarten through sixth grade.

Storm O’Brink is on the board of the Iowa Trans Mutual Aid Fund.

“The goal of this bill is to erase trans and intersex people from public life entirely, and to provide avenues to make sure we are unable to find employment, housing, or even a bathroom we can use without scrutiny,” O’Brink said. “As an intersex person, this erases my biological reality of having sex traits that don’t neatly fit into the male or female sex category. And most offensively, they chose to prioritize this bill while trans homeless teenagers are sleeping in tents and abandoned, unheated houses right here in Iowa.”

The bill will be considered by the House Judiciary Committee which is chaired by Rep. Steve Holt. Before that, it must be advanced by a subcommittee. The time and day of that meeting has not been announced.