Republican lawmakers advanced a bill Tuesday defining sex and requiring transgender Iowans to have the gender assigned at birth listed on their government-issued IDs.
The move came just a week after transgender allies and supporters celebrated in the halls of the Iowa State Capitol when a proposal to remove “gender identity” as a protected class under the Iowa Civil Rights Act failed. As protesters gathered again Tuesday, they did not see another win.
Crowds gathered outside the subcommittee room chanted “Trans rights are human rights” and “We will not be silenced” as advocates and members of the public spoke for and against the House Study Bill 649, Gov. Kim Reynolds’ proposal on identification and sex segregation related to transgender Iowans. Reynolds’ legislative liaison Molly Severn said the measure “protects women’s spaces and rights afforded them by Iowa law and the Constitution.”
Multiple transgender Iowans said the legislation would harm transgender people by putting them in greater danger of violence and discrimination. Emma Denney, a University of Iowa doctoral student, compared the requirement for transgender people’s gender transition to be listed on IDs like driver’s licenses to the Nazi regime making gay people wear pink triangles during the Holocaust.
“Trans people already face overwhelming employment and housing discrimination in Iowa under existing law ,and the governor’s bill would force us to out ourselves and open ourselves up to more violence anytime we have to show an identification,” Denney said. “… This is untenable and we in Iowa will not stand for it. I urge you to vote no for the safety of all Iowans, and for the safety of any trans person in this country.”
Pete McRoberts with the ACLU of Iowa spoke against the ID provision, asking lawmakers to consider the violation of privacy it would entail. The bill would require anyone who has had gender-affirming health care or surgeries to have that personal medical information publicized on their driver’s license, he said. He pointed to the incongruence with this proposal versus the state’s other protections against having to disclose personal medical information on IDs, such as a 2021 law that prevented state and local governments from requiring government-issued identification to include a person’s COVID-19 vaccination status.
“This is what you have to show to pick up groceries; this is what you show if you get pulled over,” McRoberts said. “That personal information is there for one reason: to establish identity. The idea that a government-issued driver’s license would require somebody to display the most personal medical history is unconscionable.”
Rep. Brooke Boden, R-Indianola, said she supported “continuing the conversation” on the legislation. Boden said that she believed it was important to have that designation listed on IDs, citing a hypothetical a situation where a police officer would need to incarcerate someone detained after a traffic stop. Many Iowa jails and prisons are segregated by sex.
She said that she was interested in ensuring that designating people as transgender on IDs was done in a “respectful” manner.
“What I hear from the trans community is that they’re proud to be trans,” Boden said. “And I guess that, that would be okay to identify as that, and make sure that your birth certificate represents those things.”
The legislation includes definitions of two sexes, and saying that spaces where “health, safety and privacy” are a concern can not allow people born of the opposite sex access to single-sex facilities. Under the proposal, transgender people would not be permitted access to bathrooms, locker rooms, domestic violence shelters and detention facilities that do not align with their gender assigned at birth.
The bill includes language stating that “separate accommodations are not inherently unequal.”
Several supporters of the bill said the measure is necessary to protect women’s safety and health. Shelly Flockhart, speaking in support of the bill, said she was a victim of domestic abuse. She said female-only spaces for victims of sexual and domestic abuse — spaces that would not be required to allow transgender women access under the bill — are needed to protect women and provide them a place to recover.
“I want you to protect women to be able to have the groups and the resources that they need, so that they have a safe space,” Flockhart said.
Lobbyists with the Iowa Coalition Against Domestic Violence and Iowa Coalition Against Sexual Assault are registered in opposition to the bill.
Connie Ryan, executive director of the Interfaith Alliance of Iowa, likened the bill’s language on separate accommodations not being “inherently unequal” to the “separate but equal” doctrine established by the U.S. Supreme Court in the 1896 Plessy v. Ferguson case on school segregation, overturned by the court in 1954 through Brown v. Board of Education.
“I know that sometimes the law is passed with the hopes of ending up in the court to set precedent,” Ryan said. “I hope that you would not want Iowa to go down in history as a state that stands on the side of ‘separate but equal.’ Please stand on the side of history that always understands that separate is never equal, and equal under the law always matters.”
Rep. Sharon Steckman, D-Mason City, questioned whether the bill’s ID provisions would violate Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA) protections of personal medical information, as well as questioning what domestic abuse shelters were reporting problems with transgender people’s use of their facilities.
Steckman said she was “appalled” the governor would introduce a bill specifically targeting a minority group in Iowa.
“I can’t see any other purposes than discrimination,” Steckman said. “Trans people account for 0.29% of our entire Iowa population. Somebody said this is an important bill — I can think of a million other things we should be doing besides going after 0.29% of our population.”
The House Education Committee plans to consider the bill at the full committee meeting Tuesday afternoon.
