The Iowa House and Senate on Thursday gave final approval to legislation that would remove protections barring discrimination against transgender people from the state’s Civil Rights Act, sending the measure to Gov. Kim Reynolds (R) for a likely signature.
The bill, introduced only last week, was fast-tracked by Republican lawmakers in recent days in the face of loud protests from LGBTQ rights activists. Thousands of protestors packed the state capitol Thursday, some of whom could be heard chanting expletives at lawmakers; the Des Moines Register reported at least four had been arrested.
The bill would mark the first time in history that a state has removed a protected class from a civil rights act.
Iowa’s Civil Rights Act, passed in 1965, originally offered protections against discrimination on the basis of race, religion or creed. Over the years, lawmakers have added additional protections banning discrimination because of ethnicity, national origin, gender, age, physical disability, sexual orientation, marital status, veterans’ status and, in 2007, gender identity.
The new bills strip gender identity from the list of classes protected from discrimination for the purposes of hiring, wage practices, housing and education.
It is the latest in a series of measures targeting the rights of transgender people to pass Iowa’s Republican-controlled legislature in recent years. Reynolds has signed legislation banning gender-affirming care for transgender minors, restricting transgender students from using bathrooms and locker rooms that align with their gender identity, and banning transgender women and girls from competing in women’s sports.
Most of those laws have been paused or struck down by state courts, in rulings that have cited the anti-discrimination language in the Civil Rights Act.
Sen. Jason Schultz (R), the chairman of the Senate Judiciary Committee and the bill’s lead author, said removing anti-discrimination protections for gender identity were necessary to implement those previously passed laws.
“The legislature in recent years has passed bills that garnered strong support protecting women and children in girl’s sports, in restrooms in schools and also tried to protect the taxpayers from having to pay for elective sex change operations under Medicaid,” Schultz said in committee testimony Wednesday. “We are waiting for the lawsuits to challenge the important protections for women, children and taxpayers to overturn them.”
Schultz said Iowa is the only state in the nation that both prevents discrimination based on gender identity under state law and has laws barring transgender people from sports and bathroom facilities.
Those two sets of laws, he said, “are at odds.”
Democrats objected to the bills. Senate Minority Leader Janet Petersen (D) recalled voting in favor of adding gender identity to the Civil Rights Act 18 years ago, a vote she took while holding her infant son on the House floor.
“It would be detrimental for our state to go back, for young people to worry about where they live, being able to get a job, being able to have financial stability, not being discriminated against,” Petersen said. “Do we want to be a state that advances human and civil rights, or do we want to be known as a state that yanks them away from people?”
The legislation also borrows from other states, where lawmakers have required birth certificates to state a person’s sex at birth. It would define the word “sex” under state law as pertaining to one’s gender assigned at birth.
“The ability to have identity documents that align with who we are is critical for all of us,” said Mark Stringer, executive director of the ACLU of Iowa. “For transgender people, documents that don’t align with who they are can also present the risks and harm of being outed as transgender.”
The bill is just one of hundreds of measures aimed at rolling back protections or rights for transgender people across the country. The ACLU is tracking 456 bills introduced in legislatures this year.
Just three have been passed so far: Alabama lawmakers approved legislation defining sex-based terms and requiring birth certificates to list one’s gender assigned at birth; Kansas lawmakers overrode Gov. Laura Kelly’s (D) veto of legislation to ban gender-affirming care for minors; and Utah lawmakers approved legislation requiring people to use changing rooms and bathrooms based on their sex assigned at birth.