Iowa’s Republican-controlled state legislature passed a bill on Thursday that would remove gender identity as a protected class in the state’s civil rights code.
Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds is expected as soon as Thursday evening to sign the bill into law, which would roll back nearly two decades of civil rights protections for trans Iowans.
Iowa Democrats warned that the bill would open the door for employers and educators to discriminate against trans people in the state.
“This is a sad day for Iowa,” state Sen. Zach Wahls said during the Senate debate. “[This bill] will tell employers you have a green light to fire somebody because of who they are…and that’s just wrong.”
The votes in both chambers were met with outrage from hundreds of protestors who packed the Iowa Capitol rotunda, waving pride flags and sending messages of support to transgender Iowans.
If Reynolds signs the bill, Iowa would be the first state to remove nondiscrimination protections based on gender identity. In contrast, 22 other states explicitly bar discrimination based on both sexual orientation and gender identity.
A spokesperson for Reynolds’ office did not immediately respond to questions after the vote on whether she would sign the bill. But the Republican governor has signed anti-trans legislation in the past, including a bill banning gender-affirming care for minors and another barring transgender girls from participating in school sports.
The state Supreme Court ruled in 2007 that sexual orientation and gender identity are protected classes, which amended the state’s civil rights law for the first time since 1965 and helped pave the way for broader workplace protections for trans Iowans.
In 2019, Jesse Vroegh, a nurse with the Iowa Department of Corrections, won a lawsuit after he was denied the use of men’s restrooms and insurance coverage because he is transgender. That same year, EerieAnna Good and Carol Beal, two transgender women, also won a suit against Iowa’s Department of Human Services for denying them Medicaid coverage for their gender-affirming surgeries.
In both instances, the courts found that denials of equal coverage violated gender identity protections in the state’s Civil Rights Act. Now, the Iowa bill throws the future of these protections into jeopardy.
The bill, SF 418, defines sex based on a person’s anatomy at birth and mirrors the language of President Donald Trump’s executive order declaring that there are “only two sexes, male and female” as well as other state-level legislation attempting to redefine sex in a way that erases legal recognition of transgender people.
Since Trump signed his executive order in the first hours of his presidency, incarcerated transgender women housed in women’s prison facilities have been moved to men’s facilities and numeroustransgender people have been denied the ability to change the sex marker on their passports and other federal documents.
Advocates for LGBTQ rights, equity in schools and religious freedom in Iowa denounced the bill’s passage, arguing that an attack on any protected class threatens the broader safety of all Iowans.
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“By adding ‘separate but equal’ doctrine into Iowa code, our lawmakers have taken our state back to the 1890s,” Becky Tayler, the executive director of Iowa Safe Schools, said in a statement. “This is a shameful day in the history of our state.”