Iowa’s Legislators Want Final Say In Civil Rights
After lawmakers removed transgender Iowans from the Iowa Civil Rights Act last year, some cities in Iowa enacted their own civil rights ordinances. Those same lawmakers want to change that.
by Aly Gibbs
Lawmakers in Iowa, after seeing their bigotry rejected by hundreds of thousands of Iowans, have cooked up a bill that will ensure their citizens have no say in their own governance.
Thanks to reporting from Robin Opsahl at Iowa Capital Dispatch, we know all the unpleasant details about Iowa’s House Study Bill 664, which would prevent local municipalities from passing laws or ordinances lending legal protections to certain groups of people, if those protections conflict with state law. Specifically, this is a response to the fact that 13 cities in Iowa (and some unincorporated areas of Johnson County) have passed their own local laws protecting transgender Iowans from discrimination in housing and employment, after Iowa last year became the first state to repeal anti-discrimination protections previously written into state law by removing trans Iowans from the Iowa Civil Rights Act.
Iowa state legislators, having seen an outpouring of support for trans Iowans, decided that they had to act quickly and nip that common decency in the bud. One of the thirteen cities to pass local laws protecting trans citizens is Ames, who passed a vote regarding the new ordinance 5-1 just a few weeks ago. Presently, no part of Iowa Code or the Iowa Civil Rights Act prevents sub-state governments, like city councils, from expanding the Act’s coverage to citizens it has excluded. Unfortunately, that may soon change.
When Governor Kim Reynolds signed into law the bill that removed trans Iowans from the Iowa Civil Rights Act, she claimed it would “[safeguard] the rights of women and girls.”
“[It is] common sense to acknowledge the obvious biological differences between men and women,” she said, at the time. “It is why we have men and women’s bathrooms, but not men and women’s conference rooms; girls’ and boys’ sports, but not girls’ math and boys’ math; separate men and women’s prisons, but not different laws for men and women. It is about the biological differences, and that is all. It is also why Iowa has enacted laws protecting girls’ sports for girls and women’s private spaces like bathrooms and locker rooms.”
Never mind that the “biological differences” between differently sexed people are blurry at the best of times, or that intersex people exist and commonly defy these stereotyped differences. Forget that, when it comes to schools, trans youth are at a higher risk of assault than their cisgender peers. Ignore that these exclusion laws have killed trans kids. Now, state governments want to interfere in your city. They aren’t satisfied with control over their own domain; they intend to force anybody who disagrees with them to submit to their will, or else. Feels a bit dystopian, doesn’t it?
House Study Bill 664 has been recommended for passage by the Iowa House Judiciary Committee, and still has three steps to go before it can be signed by Governor Reynolds.
Representative Steven Holt, who chairs the House Judiciary Committee, said that removing trans Iowans from the Iowa Civil Rights Act actually promoted equality. Somehow. He said, “transgender Iowans have exactly the same rights as everyone else in the state of Iowa,” which is a deeply asinine statement. Trans Iowans do not have the same civil protections provided to other queer Iowans by the state, but face demonstrable and measurable discrimination in their private and public lives. Ergo, trans Iowans do not have “exactly the same rights as everyone else in the state of Iowa,” you Temu Dick Cheney looking creep.
He went on to say, “I think having a patchwork of different ordinances really creates a lot of confusion for businesses, it creates a lot of confusion for schools. We did what we did last year to ensure equal rights for everyone, and that is what we’re doing here today.”
Holt, and every other Iowan lawmaker in favor of this bill, is lying through their teeth. They are not so dimwitted that they truly believe allowing for the discrimination of a previously protected class of Iowan is, somehow, a win for equality. They are, like all conservatives across America, simply towing the line in Donald Trump’s culture war against trans Americans.
In the process, they are denying nearly one million Iowans’ express desire to protect their trans friends, family and neighbors. If that isn’t a failure of democracy, I don’t know what is.
Aly Gibbs (She/They) is a trans writer who reports on news important to the queer community.
