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GOP lawmakers advance bill to strip gender identity protections from Iowa civil rights law
The bill could be debated on the House floor as early as Thursday
Feb. 24, 2025 2:09 pm, Updated: Feb. 25, 2025 8:25 am
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DES MOINES — Iowa House Republicans advanced legislation that would remove gender identity from the Iowa Civil Rights Act in an unprecedented move to repeal civil rights protections for transgender Iowans that have been in place for nearly two decades.
The proposed legislation — House Study Bill 242 — passed the House Judiciary Committee, 13-8, making it eligible for debate in the full House. Rep. Brian Lohse, a Republican from Bondurant, joined all Democrats in opposing the bill.
The bill — now renumbered House File 583 — could be debated on the House floor as early as Thursday. A public hearing is scheduled for Thursday at 9:30 a.m.
A similar bill — Senate File 418 — was introduced in the Iowa Senate Monday. A subcommittee hearing on the bill is scheduled for noon on Tuesday.
The vote followed roughly an hour of testimony on the bill earlier Monday from transgender Iowans, parents, religious leaders, school safety advocates and attorneys. Two Republican members of a three-member House Judiciary subcommittee signed off on moving the bill to the full committee in the morning.
Individuals packed a committee room Monday to speak about the bill, which would remove gender identity as a protected class in the Iowa Civil Rights Act, while protesters chanted outside.
House Judiciary Committee Chair Rep. Steven Holt, R-Denison, briefly paused the subcommittee hearing as chanting from protesters outside the committee room drowned out speakers inside the room.
State troopers, at Holt’s urging, also escorted 40-year-old parent and Drake University student Chris Morse, who identified herself as “gender queer,” from the committee room for failing to adhere to a two-minute time limit per speaker.
Various speakers argued that the bill would restore traditional definitions of male and female and protect women's spaces from biological males. Opponents, including representatives from LGBTQ rights organization One Iowa and the Episcopal Diocese of Iowa, countered that the bill would lead to increased discrimination and harm.
Critics argue such proposals target a small, vulnerable population that already faces higher risks of bullying, suicide, poor mental health and housing instability.
The Williams Institute at the University of California-Los Angeles School of Law estimates that about 0.3 of percent the Iowa population — or about 7,100 people — are transgender.
One Iowa Executive Director Max Mowitz condemned the proposal as “a scourge on our history.”
The bill states any state law or policy “that prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex shall be construed to forbid the unfair treatment of males and females in relation to similar situations members of the opposite sex.” However, removing gender identity and relying only on sex to protect people from discrimination is not enough, Mowitz said, and could still lead to discrimination of women who lack distinct feminine characteristics.
“I'm a transgender Iowan,” Mowitz said. “I love the state and I love the people here. Myself and my trans family is part of what makes the state amazing. We deserve dignity and love. The state raised me. We deserve better than this.”
Republican lawmakers and supporters of the bill said the legislation is needed to bar transgender women from women’s bathrooms, locker rooms, domestic violence shelters, prisons, rape crisis centers and more.
The bill states the term “equal” does not mean “same” or “identical.” It also says separate accommodations based on sex “are not inherently unequal,” and that distinctions based on sex in context such as prisons, shelters and restrooms are “substantially related to the important government objectives of protecting the health, safety, and privacy.”
Amber Williams, a lobbyist for an Iowa organization called Inspired Life, recounted seeing a transgender woman exit the stalls of a women’s restroom two weeks ago.
“I couldn't shake the instinctual discomfort and heightened awareness that many women feel in these situations,” Williams told lawmakers. “I quickly left without using the restroom, because in that moment, my sense of safety and privacy had been compromised.
“This isn't about hatred or exclusion. It's about acknowledging that women have the right to feel secure in spaces meant for them. Biological differences impact safety, fairness and competition, and policies that blur these distinctions threaten the protections women have fought hard to secure.”
Additionally, she argued the bill ensures that sex-based protections “cannot be overwritten by … subjective definitions of gender.”
“Women's rights cannot exist if the very definition of woman is eroded,” Williams said. “… This legislation is a step toward reaffirming those rights, ensuring that women's safety privacy and equal opportunities are upheld.”
Attorneys, school safety advocates, legal experts and civil rights activists, however, note there is a lack of documented evidence in Iowa of transgender individuals or men pretending to be transgender harassing or attacking women in shelters, locker rooms, restrooms or other places.
Civil Rights Act added gender identity in 2007
Gender identity was added to the Iowa Civil Rights Act in 2007 when Democrats controlled the governorship and both chambers of the Iowa Legislature. Today, Republicans have complete control of the state’s lawmaking process.
The act protects certain classes from discrimination in employment and wages, public accommodations and services, housing, education, lending and more.
Should the bill pass and be signed into law, Iowa would become the first state in the nation to remove a protected class from a state’s civil rights act, according to a legal expert and Iowa Safe Schools, an organization that advocates for young LGBTQ Iowans.
Twenty-three states — including Iowa — and the District of Columbia prohibit discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity, according to Human Rights Campaign, a national LGBTQ rights organization. Additional states have adopted a federal legal framework that says gender identity discrimination is prohibited under federal sex-based employment protections.
What would the bill do?
The legislation combines elements of bills that failed to advance last year in the Legislature, which sparked consecutive weeks of raucous protests at the Iowa Capitol.
The bill also would:
- Strike the definition of gender identity and define “sex” in state law as “the state of being either male or female as observed or clinically verified at birth.” It would define “gender” as a synonym for sex that “shall not be considered a synonym or shorthand expression for gender identity, experienced gender, gender expression or gender role.”
- Create a new section in state law to define “female” as an individual who has, will have or would have, “but for a developmental anomaly, genetic anomaly, or accident,” a reproductive system that produces ova and “male” as an individual who produces sperm;
- Require all state and local government data collection to identify individuals as either male or female;
- Eliminate the ability for transgender Iowans to change their birth certificate.
Iowa House Speaker Pat Grassley, R-New Hartford, said while House Republicans in the past have felt it unnecessary to remove legal protections for gender identity, a 2023 Iowa court ruling has made it a necessity. That ruling allowed Iowans on Medicaid to receive coverage for gender-affirming surgery.
Grassley said the bill also would uphold policies passed by Statehouse Republicans that provide protections regarding girls’ sports, locker rooms and restrooms, and prohibiting sex reassignment surgeries on minors. None of which have been challenged in Iowa courts to date.
“We Iowans are forced to pay several million dollars for permanent sterilizations of previously healthy Iowans through genital mutilation and misapplied hormones, which then require ongoing medical costs,” said Chuck Hurley with the Christian conservative group The Family Leader.
‘If we start taking away civil rights now, where does it stop?’
Opponents argue the bill would erase transgender Iowans under the law and allow them to be denied housing, employment and medical care based on their gender identity.
Paden Sheumaker is “a Black queer Iowan.”
“To take away the right for people to be treated fairly in the state would be to spit in the face of everyone who was fought tooth and nail for these rights,” Sheumaker told lawmakers. “Have you ever been discriminated against just for being who you are, just for existing as yourself? I have, and I can tell you, it is dehumanizing. It is demeaning, it is disheartening and it is terrifying. Many queer and transgender and gender nonconforming Iowans have felt this, and that is while our rights are protected.
“ … If we start taking away civil rights now, where does it stop? How long until we demonize more Iowans under the guise of protecting others?”
Rep. Ross Wilburn, a Democrat from Ames, opposed the bill.
Wilburn said his transgender son has faced discrimination in the workplace and left the state over similar legislation targeting transgender Iowans.
“I came to the legislature to create opportunity, not to take away civil rights from any group of people,” he said. “… It does take away civil rights, whether you agree or not. I guess the courts will determine that, should this proceed forward. But in the bill itself, it says separate is not necessarily inherently unequal.”
Wilburn said the language in HSB 242 echoes that associated with the 1896 U.S. Supreme Court decision in the case of Plessy v. Ferguson, which declared segregation on the basis of race to be legal.
“That statement in and of itself, of separate but equal, takes us back in time and creates a system of unjustice,” he said.
Rep. Samantha Fett, R-Carlisle, argued the bill “is not about discrimination” and was carefully crafted “to stop the infringement on the rights of anyone that disagrees with gender theory.”
GOP lawmaker: All protected classes in the law are ‘problematic’
Holt argued transgender individuals still receive the same constitutional protections as any other Iowan, and argued more broadly that all protected classes included in the civil rights law (such as race, creed, sex, sexual orientation, national origin, religion and disability) — not just gender identity — are “problematic.”
“The problem with protected classes, in this particular case, is that it elevates rights above other citizens, even though all citizens are supposed to be afforded equal protection under the law,” Holt said.
Democrats argued the state’s civil rights law does not give special rights to transgender Iowans. Rather, it guarantees equal treatment for all Iowans.
Holt spoke of a female student at a Des Moines community college culinary arts program “who was shocked to find a much older male in her restrooms and changing facilities.”
“When she spoke to the college, she was told that she was the problem, and since this transgender individual was a protected class, she had no recourse” he said. “Her feelings, her security, her safety didn’t matter. She left the college dispirited that her rights as a woman did not matter. ... The discrimination is happening now.”
He asserted transgender individuals still will be protected from housing and employment discrimination under a 2020 U.S. Supreme Court decision that affirmed the federal prohibition on sex discrimination in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 extends to discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.
“We are standing for truth in this legislation and for the rights of all Iowans,” Holt said.
Rep. Lindsay James, the ranking Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee from Dubuque, decried House Republicans for advancing “culture war, political-punch-down bills that just continue to divide folks, instead of bringing Iowans together around the real issues that our state is facing.”
Rep. Beth Wessel-Kroeschell, a Democrat from Ames, floor managed the 2007 legislation that added gender identity to the Iowa Civil Rights Act.
“We should be welcoming and protecting all Iowans. This bill is a disgrace to our heritage of recognizing the value of all the people often before the rest of the country has done so,” Wessel-Kroeschell said of Iowa outlawing slavery when it became state in 1846, admitting women to a public university before most states, and being among the first states to recognize same-sex marriage.
“We will be the first state to take a step backward,” she told House Republicans. “I choose to stay on the right side of history. Think long and hard about how you want to be remembered.”
Comments: (319) 398-8499; tom.barton@thegazette.com
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