Iowa became the first U.S. state to remove gender identity protections from its civil rights code on Friday when Governor Kim Reynolds signed into law a bill that opponents say will expose transgender people and other Iowans to discrimination in all aspects of daily life.
The new law, which goes into effect July 1, follows several years of action from Reynolds and Iowa Republicans to restrict transgender students’ use of such spaces as bathrooms and locker rooms, and their participation on sports teams, in an effort to protect people assigned female at birth. Republicans say those policies cannot co-exist with a civil rights code that includes gender identity protections.
The law passed quickly after being introduced last week. It also creates explicit legal definitions of female and male based on their reproductive organs at birth, rejecting the idea that a person can transition to another gender. Reynolds proposed a similar bill last year, but it didn’t make it to a vote of the full House or Senate.
Reynolds posted a video on social media explaining her signature on the bill and acknowledging that it was a “sensitive issue for some.”
“It’s common sense to acknowledge the obvious biological differences between men and women. In fact, it’s necessary to secure genuine equal protection for women and girls,” she said, adding that the previous civil rights code “blurred the biological line between the sexes.”
President Donald Trump signed an executive order on his first day in office to formalize a definition of the two sexes at the federal level, leading several Republican-led legislatures to push for laws defining male and female. Trump posted in support of the Iowa bill on his Truth Social platform Thursday after it got final approval from the Iowa House and Senate.
Five House Republicans joined all Democrats in the House and Senate in voting against the bill. Iowa state Representative Aime Wichtendahl was the final Democrat to speak before the vote, wiping away tears as she offered her personal story as a transgender woman, saying: “I transitioned to save my life.”
“The purpose of this bill and the purpose of every anti-trans bill is to further erase us from public life and to stigmatize our existence,” Wichtendahl said. “The sum total of every anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ bill is to make our existence illegal.”
Hundreds of LGBTQ+ advocates streamed into the Capitol rotunda on Thursday waving signs reading “Trans rights are human rights” and chanting slogans including “No hate in our state!” There was a heavy police presence, with state troopers stationed around the rotunda. The few protesters who lingered for final passage of the bill were emotional.
Not all states include gender identity in their civil rights codes, but Iowa is now the first in the U.S. to remove nondiscrimination protections based on gender identity, said Logan Casey, director of policy research at the Movement Advancement Project, an LGBTQ+ rights think tank.
Sexual orientation and gender identity were not originally included in the state’s Civil Rights Act of 1965. They were added by the Democratic-controlled Legislature in 2007, with the support of about a dozen Republicans across the two chambers.
The House Republican moving the bill Thursday, Representative Steven Holt, said that if the Legislature can add protections, it can remove them.
As of July 1, Iowa’s civil rights law will protect against discrimination based on race, color, creed, sex, sexual orientation, religion, national origin or disability status.
Iowa’s Supreme Court has expressly rejected the argument that discrimination based on sex includes discrimination based on gender identity.
Advocacy groups promise to defend transgender rights, which may lead them to court.
Keenan Crow, director of policy and advocacy for LGBTQ+ advocacy group One Iowa, said the organization is still analyzing the text of the bill and that its vagueness makes it “hard to determine where the enforcement is going to come from.”
“We will pursue any legal options available to us,” Crow said.
