Iowa cripples gender ideology with new law
Iowa is now the first state to pass a law excluding gender identity from its civil rights code, according to Fox News.
On Friday, Governor Kim Reynolds signed a bill that defines gender by biological sex, which means that Iowans are not entitled to additional civil rights protections for claiming to be transgender. The bill also removes the terms “gender” and “gender identity” from the civil rights law and recognizes only two genders for data collection. Any state, city, county, township, or school district that collects data on a population may only include “male” and “female” for gender.
Democrats added new civil rights protections for transgender people to state law in 2007. All Iowan Democrat lawmakers plus five Republicans voted against the bill that removed them.
"Today I’m signing into law a bill that safeguards the rights of women and girls," Governor Renyolds said before signing the bill into law. "It’s common sense to acknowledge the obvious biological differences between men and women. In fact, it’s necessary to secure genuine equal protection for girls. It’s why we have men and women’s bathrooms, but not men and women’s conference rooms. Girls' and boys' sports, but not girls' math, boys' math."
“Unfortunately, these commonsense protections were at risk because, before I signed this bill, the civil rights code blurred the biological line between the sexes,” she continued, acknowledging that this is a "sensitive issue for some, many of whom have heard misinformation about what this bill does. The truth is that it simply brings Iowa in line with the federal civil rights code, as well as most states."
State follows federal policy
The bill comes after the Health and Human Services (HHS) Department issued guidance last month affirming the existence of only two sexes.
“There are only two sexes, female and male, because there are only two types of gametes,” the guidance declared. “An individual human is either female or male based on whether the person is of the sex characterized by a reproductive system with the biological function of producing eggs (ova) or sperm.”
The statement aligns with President Donald Trump’s executive order prohibiting gender ideology in the federal government and acknowledging male and female as the only sexes. The EO also denies federal funds to any entity that promotes gender ideology.
“Across the country, ideologues who deny the biological reality of sex have increasingly used legal and other socially coercive means to permit men to self-identify as women and gain access to intimate single-sex spaces and activities designed for women, from women’s domestic abuse shelters to women’s workplace showers,” reads the order. “This is wrong. Efforts to eradicate the biological reality of sex fundamentally attack women by depriving them of their dignity, safety, and well-being. The erasure of sex in language and policy has a corrosive impact not just on women but on the validity of the entire American system. Basing Federal policy on truth is critical to scientific inquiry, public safety, morale, and trust in government itself.
“This unhealthy road is paved by an ongoing and purposeful attack against the ordinary and longstanding use and understanding of biological and scientific terms, replacing the immutable biological reality of sex with an internal, fluid, and subjective sense of self unmoored from biological facts. Invalidating the true and biological category of “woman” improperly transforms laws and policies designed to protect sex-based opportunities into laws and policies that undermine them, replacing longstanding, cherished legal rights and values with an identity-based, inchoate social concept.”
