Last week, Iowa enacted a new law that removes “gender identity” from the list of protected classes under the Iowa Civil Rights Act. It passed the Iowa Senate 33-15 and the Iowa House of Representatives 60-36 on Thursday. These votes went mostly along party lines with Republicans in favor and Democrats opposed, although five Republicans in the House broke ranks to vote against it. Governor Kim Reynolds signed it into law on the following day.
The Iowa Civil Rights Act is the main anti-discrimination law in the state. It covers areas such as employment, housing, and education. The law didn’t protect the LGBTQ+ community until 2007. That year, the state expanded the list of protected classes to include sexual orientation and gender identity. (The new law doesn’t remove sexual orientation from the list.)
Governor Reynolds justified the change by saying that it protects women and girls. She also has claimed that the change brings Iowa into alignment with federal law and the consensus in most other states on this issue.
It’s true that federal civil rights statutes don’t explicitly list sexual orientation and gender identity among protected classes. However, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in 2020 that federal protections against sex discrimination in employment cover gender identity. The federal government has applied the same logic to some parallel civil rights laws, such as the Fair Housing Act. Nearly half the states explicitly list gender identity among protected classes in laws prohibiting employment and housing discrimination. Several other states echo the federal approach, explicitly interpreting a ban on sex discrimination to cover gender identity.
The new Iowa law also includes a provision on birth certificates. These must match a person’s sex at birth. (A transgender person won’t be allowed to update the sex marker after their transition.) Another provision changes “gender identity” to “gender theory” in a pre-existing law that forbids instruction of this topic to children in K-6 grades. According to the new law, “gender theory” means the idea that a person can have an internal sense of gender different from their sex at birth.
Photo Credit: Konstantin_Shishkin / Shutterstock.com
