Iowa Becomes the First State to Repeal Civil Rights Protections for Trans People

Over the last five years, legislators across the country have escalated their attacks on trans youth and adults.

Iowa, however, now holds the dubious distinction of becoming the first statehouse to repeal civil rights protections for trans people. The bill legislators passed on Thursday explicitly removes civil rights protections that had been enshrined in state law. Once the pro-discrimination bill is signed by Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds, trans people in Iowa will no longer be considered a protected category under state law.

The bill’s supporters were clear: They want to be able to discriminate against trans people — and don’t want any barriers like pesky civil rights protections in the way.

“If signed, Iowa will become the first state in American history to remove a protected class from its Civil Rights Act,” wrote Erin Reed, a journalist and trans rights advocate, “setting a dangerous precedent for broader rollbacks of anti-discrimination protections.”

Introduced last week, the new legislation was pushed through at breakneck speed. The Republican-led Iowa Legislature voted 60 to 36 in the House and 33 to 15 in the Senate to pass the bill, which now heads to Reynolds’s desk for signing. Reynolds has been a keen participant in the Republicans’ anti-trans onslaught so is unlikely to push back.

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Iowa included gender identity in its civil rights code since 2007 with the aim of protecting against employment, housing, health care, education, and other widespread discrimination that trans people face.

A 2024 study from the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law found that 82 percent of trans people reported experiencing discrimination or harassment at work due to their gender identity or sexual orientation — nearly double the number of cis LGBTQ+ individuals who reported experiencing discrimination. One in 5 trans people have experienced homelessness at some point in their lives.

The move to revoke civil rights — and remove “gender identity” as a protected category — is directly at odds with the Supreme Court’s 2020 decision in Bostock v. Clayton County, which held that the 1964 Civil Rights Act protects employees against discrimination based on sex and gender identity. In line with the Trump administration’s anti-scientific enforcement of two strictly binary sexes, the Iowa bill defines sex as assigned by anatomy at birth.

The Republicans behind the law were unambiguous that civil rights protections were a barrier to enforcing other anti-trans laws on their traditionalist, pro-natalist agenda. It is harder to ban people from bathrooms, from educational spaces, from the public and professional sphere, when those people are understood to have rights.

“All of these common-sense policies are at risk so long as gender identity remains in the Iowa civil rights code,” state Rep. Steven Holt, a Republican supporter of the bill, said on the House floor.

Holt was, of course, referring to the sort of policies that have led to the harassment of both trans and cis people in women’s bathrooms. Such measures have opened the door to proposed genital inspections for children who want to play sports, not to mention the denial of potential lifesaving health care — all in the name of a “common-sense” gender fascism that, for all its alleged naturalness, takes an extraordinary amount of effort and violence to enforce.

It should not need repeating that trans women have never been found to pose a higher risk of perpetrating an assault in a women’s bathroom than cis women; there is no correlation between trans-inclusive policies and a rise in safety risks. Rather it is trans people, particularly trans people of color, who are at significantly elevated risks of violence, including deadly violence.

I only restate this here because much mainstream coverage of anti-trans attacks like the Iowa legislation — including in the New York Times — depicts these discriminatory assaults as if they represent a debate with two reasonable opposing sides, without clarifying the truth: Republican claims to women’s safety concerns are based on a phantasma of threat, and part of a broader drive to erase bodily autonomy.

Over 2,500 people arrived at the Iowa State Capitol on Thursday to protest the bill, with hundreds filling the building’s rotunda. Their understanding of the situation was far more accurate than the mainstream press. “Fuck you, fascists!” they chanted, as lawmakers took away their fellow Iowans’ civil rights