TWIBS: Iowa Lawmakers Hate Iowans
Iowa’s state legislature has passed a bill disallowing municipal protections for marginalized Iowans, who have been abundantly clear about who they want to protect.
by Aly Gibbs
This Week in Barrel Scraping (TWIBS) is Assigned Media’s longest running column! Every Friday, Aly Gibbs digs deep from the well of transphobia and finds the most obnoxious, goofy thing transphobes have said or obsessed over during the week and tears it to shreds.
Folks, freedom ain’t free… uh, or expensive. It’s a myth, actually! At least when it comes to America, which I’ve been told my whole life is the land of the free and the home of the brave, but actually seems to be a nation of cowards who want to restrict the civil liberties of minority citizens as much as they possibly can.
So, Iowa passed a law Tuesday that disallows municipalities from establishing ordinance that would provide civil anti-discrimination protection for anybody who isn’t already included in the Iowa Civil Rights Act. Or, as the case may be, anybody who was included in the Iowa Civil Rights Act, but was removed by Republican lawmakers as part of their genocidal culture war against transgender Americans.
I reported on this last month, knowing that the proposed law, House Study Bill 664 (now House File 2541), was very likely to pass through the Iowa state legislature. The Iowa General Assembly has been majority Republican since 2016, and I don’t need to tell you that modern conservatism is dominated by members of an unhinged death cult centered around obliterating anybody who is not white, cisgender and heterosexual (and preferably a man), or otherwise does not express complete obeisance to those people as their supreme rulers. Deviation from these “cultural norms” must be punished, and Iowa’s state lawmakers are doing just that.
In Iowa City, Laura Bergus, a city council member and lawyer, told The Associated Press that Iowa City enacted their own local protections against discrimination based on gender identity almost 30 years ago. When state lawmakers rolled back civil protections for trans Iowans (and, it should be mentioned, made it impossible for any trans person born in Iowa to have the gender marker on their birth certificate amended), Iowa City passed a new resolution to reaffirm their right to protect local citizens. HF2541 now makes that sort of legal affirmation unlawful.
Bergus described the new law as “extreme overreach,” and said that Iowa City is considering legal action against the state.
Like I mentioned in my reporting last month, this discriminatory legislation is explicitly unwanted by a large percentage of Iowans. Nearly a third of Iowa lives in a city or county where local anti-discrimination laws were passed to protect trans Iowans. In the last year, countless Iowans have turned out to show support for their trans friends and neighbors. Even some Republican lawmakers and voters in Iowa were not on board with the initial amendment made to the Iowa Civil Rights Act.
Republican lawmakers in Iowa have repeatedly bleated that the state cannot be governed by, as they call it, a “hodgepodge” of disparate civil rights laws. They believed that, if the state says trans people are not protected from discrimination, it would create problems for enforcing the law in municipalities that say trans people do deserve that protection.
There is, of course, a simple solution to this perceived problem:
Quit being fucking cowards and restore the Iowa Civil Rights Act to a state that protects all Iowans, rather than picking and choosing who deserves civil rights and who doesn’t. Stop waging this unbearable, meaningless genocide against trans Americans, and simply let us live our lives in peace, you miserable bastards.
Aly Gibbs (She/They) is a trans writer who reports on news important to the queer community.
