Iowa is set to become the first state to roll back previously passed civil rights protections based on “gender identity.”
On Thursday, the legislators at the Iowa state House passed a bill along party lines that would remove gender identity from the list of those specifically protected against “discrimination” in the state’s civil rights act. Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds has signaled that she will sign the bill into law.
The bill’s sponsor, Republican state Representative Steven C. Holt, maintained that including transgenderism in the civil rights act was illegitimate because transgenderism is based on “feelings” not on “immutable truth,” and enshrining it law undermines women’s rights, the Washington Post reported.
“Every Iowan deserves to have their civil rights protected and to be treated with dignity and respect — and that includes women,” Holt said.
Democrats and transgender activists have attacked the bill as a “disgrace” and “discrimination.”
Democrat Rep. Beth Wessel-Kroeschell shrilly attacked the bill saying, “This bill is about taking away the right to a home, job and education for law-abiding Iowans. This bill creates a caste system where one group of people, Iowa trans citizens, do not have the same rights.”
For her part, Democrat Rep. Aime Wichtendahl, who is a transgender person, called the bill “devastating personally,” and insisted it made “a hollow lie” out of the state’s motto, “Our liberties we prize, and our rights we will maintain.”
Wichtendahl also accused Republicans of taking away the “humanity” of trans people.
Still, despite the hand wringing of Democrats, the state’s supreme court has already undermined transgenderism to a degree by ruling that discrimination based on sex does not include gender identity.
Democrats had added gender identity to Iowa’s 1965 Civil Rights Act in 2007 when they controlled the state legislature and the governor’s office. They also passed the law along party lines at that time.
As the bill was being debated in the state House in Des Moines, thousands of radical transgender supporters flooded the capitol building in a noisy protest in favor of defeating the measure.
The new legislation removes gender identity as a protected class and defines gender as biologically determined and not “a synonym or shorthand expression for gender identity, experienced gender, gender expression, or gender role.”
The bill now goes to the governor’s desk.
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