“Today, I signed into law a bill that safeguards the rights of women and girls,” Gov. Kim Reynolds (R-Iowa) said in a video posted to X.
Sounds good to me! What’s in the bill? Reproductive freedom with abortion and birth control that is accessible to everyone who needs it? Strengthened domestic violence protections? Gun safety measures to keep kids from being murdered in school? Better access to mental health treatment? Better oversight of children in the foster care system in order to ensure that children are not placed in abusive environments?
Sadly, the answer is none of the above. Gov. Reynolds did not, in fact, do anything to protect the rights of women and girls. What she did was intentionally and maliciously hurt transgender people in the state.
With the stroke of her pen, Gov. Reynolds ended “18 years of protection against discrimination based on gender identity in Iowa’s civil rights law,” the Des Moines Register reports. “The signing makes Iowa the first state in the country to take away civil rights from a group it has previously protected in law.”
“Before I signed this bill, the civil rights code blurred the biological line between the sexes,” Reynolds said. “It also forced Iowa taxpayers to pay for gender reassignment surgeries, and that’s unacceptable to me, and it’s unacceptable to most Iowans.”
But targeting a specific group of people to kick out of the Civil Rights Club is apparently acceptable.
I probably don’t need to tell you this, but this move is a disgusting and dangerous escalation of the Republican war on transgender people.
“Gov. Reynolds has chosen to put Iowa on the wrong side of history,” Max Mowitz, executive director of One Iowa, told Iowa Public Radio. “By signing this bill into law, she has made it legal to discriminate against transgender Iowans in nearly every aspect of life — where they live, where they work and where they go to school. This law sends a devastating message: that transgender Iowans are not worthy of the same rights, dignity and protections as their neighbors.”
Iowa Republicans, however, are claiming that this is no big deal and that transgender people will be fine. Federal law will protect them instead.
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The federal government? The one led by Donald Trump, who declared in his inaugural address that there are only two genders and said during his campaign, “I will take historic action to defeat the toxic poison of gender ideology and reaffirm that God created two genders, male and female.” That federal government?
I call bullshit.
So do Iowa Democrats. “The majority party is removing the rights of fellow Iowans to housing, credit and jobs,” House Minority Leader Jennifer Konfrst said. “Do not tell me the federal government will save us because they’re already attacking the communities we’re attacking today as well.”
The purpose of the bill Gov. Reynolds just gleefully signed it to support a coordinated attack against transgender people in the state.
As the Des Moines Register reports, “[Iowa] Republicans said the move will help other recent legislation they passed survive court challenges, including a ban on transgender youth from receiving gender-affirming medical care, restricting transgender students from using school bathrooms that align with their gender identity and banning transgender women and girls from competing in female sports.”
I see. Republicans know that discriminating against transgender people is wrong. But what’s a poor major political party supposed to do? Well, just erase transgender people from the state’s civil rights protections, I guess.
What makes this even more disgusting is that Iowa Rep. Aime Wichtendahl is openly transgender. So the people who supported and passed this bill did so even though they actually know and work with a transgender person. And yet Iowa Republicans are operating as if transgender people are some kind of terrifying specter haunting public restrooms and school sports teams. But they’re not. They’re real people.
“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,” Rep. Wichtendahl told Iowa Public Radio. “The sum total of every anti-trans bill and anti-LGBTQ bill is to make our existence illegal, to force us back into the closet. If we want jobs or a place to live, we have to go back, is what they are telling us.”
Iowa is, unfortunately, a harbinger of things to come. Republicans are working overtime to ruin transgender people’s lives. Unless you’re a straight cisgender white man, you’d best believe that you, too, are a target.