Hundreds gathered in the hallways and rotunda of the State Capitol to protest the attempt to strip transgender Iowans of civil rights and stop the state government from recognizing the existence of their identities via a bill Republicans are fast-tracking through the Iowa House. “Trans rights are human rights” and “Say no, fight back,” they chanted as HSB 242 was pushed through both a subcommittee and the House Judiciary Committee in a matter of hours on party-line votes.
Rep. Steve Holt, a Republican from Denison, introduced the bill last week on Thursday afternoon. Holt was also the chair of the subcommittee that approved HSB 242 on Monday morning. And he’s the chair of the House Judiciary Committee, which approved the bill in the afternoon.
“If the majority party wants to get something through, they can get it through,” Rep. Sami Scheetz, a Cedar Rapids Democrat, told Little Village late last week after HSB 242 was introduced.
Last year, Scheetz was on a subcommittee that considered a similar bill that would have removed gender identity from the Iowa Civil Rights Act. To protect the rights of LGBTQ Iowans, gender identity and sexual orientation were added to the act in 2007, when Democrats controlled both chambers of the Legislature and the governor’s office.
Rep. Jeff Shipley of Birmingham introduced a bill in the 2024 legislative session to strip gender identity out of the Iowa Civil Rights Act, eliminating protections for transgender and nonbinary people. The House subcommittee on which Scheetz served alongside two Republicans — subcommittee chair Charley Thomson of Charles City and John Wills of Spirit Lake — unanimously rejected Shipley’s bill, killing it for the year.
Even before Monday morning’s subcommittee hearing, it was obvious the bill would quickly move to the House floor for a final vote. Not only had Holt scheduled both the subcommittee hearing and the committee hearing for HSB 242 — something that’s almost never done — House Speaker Grassley issued a statement after the bill was filed on Thursday saying “we have decided it is time to give this bill the full consideration of the Iowa House Republican caucus.”
HSB 242 goes farther than Shipley’s bill did, and incorporates the provisions contained in a bill Gov. Reynolds introduced in the House after Shipley’s was rejected. That bill and HSB 242 change definitions in state law to stop state and local government from recognizing transgender Iowans according to their gender identities.
The bills redefine gender as just a synonym for “sex,” and recognizes only two, female and male. The definitions for those are based on whether an individual would have produced ova or sperm “through the course of normal development, or would have but for a developmental anomaly, genetic anomaly, or accident.” Sex — and therefore, gender — is to be determined at birth. What is recorded on a birth certificate fixes how Iowa law will define that person for legal and government purposes for the rest of their lives.
The two bills use the exact same language when it comes to banning transgender women from women’s facilities, including bathrooms, domestic violence shelters and rape crisis centers, and preventing them from being placed in women’s prisons or other detention facilities. The language used evokes the history of racial segregation in America.
“The term ‘equal’ does not mean ‘same’ or ‘identical,” both bills state. “Separate accommodations are not inherently unequal.”
The bill would also require state and local governments to use its definitions of female and male, and only those definitions, when collecting any data, deliberately preventing the lives of trans people from being reflected in those official statistics.
Last year, Reynolds’ bill was fast-tracked in the House. It passed the subcommittee and committee levels quickly, but never made it to the House floor for final consideration because the Senate never took up the bill. This year is different.
On Monday, Sen. Jason Schultz, a Republican from Schleswig, introduced SF 418, the Senate version of HSB 242. It was immediately scheduled for a subcommittee hearing the following day. Following the same pattern as the House, Schultz is the chair of the subcommittee, and once it passes the subcommittee, it will go to the Senate Judiciary Committee, where Schultz is also the chair.
“It’s an ideological priority for the governor, for leadership in both chambers,” Sami Scheetz said. “Unfortunately, the Republican Party views attacking transgender people as a successful political weapon.”
“I think it’s abominable that we’re going to potentially be the first state in the nation to take away civil rights protections that already exist in our code,” he added. “And for our state to say that it’s OK to openly discriminate against transgender and nonbinary Iowans is frankly just disgraceful.”
According to Holt, it’s necessary to remove civil rights protections for trans people, because that might lead to courts overturning the anti-trans bills Iowa Republicans have passed, beginning with the ban on trans girls and women participating in school and college sports on teams that match their gender identities. Holt says laws that discriminate against transgender people are necessary in order to protect girls and women.
Holt’s references to transgender people on Monday portrayed them as just boys and men who want to disguise themselves as girls and women, either to excel in girls’ and women’s sports or to act as sexual predators. The people who testified in favor HSB 242 in the subcommittee echoed Holt, though some went further and claimed trans people are delusional and oppressing others by insisting on having rights.
“Absolutely praise Jesus for this bill that you brought forward. It rectifies a grievous error from 2007 that weaponized Iowa’s civil rights code to discriminate against Iowa’s girls, women and children, giving protected rights to hypothetical terms used by delusional people for something that is physically nonexistent,” Evelyn Nikkel of PELLA PAC told the subcommittee. “Because these terms are codified in our law, gender identity is magically elevated to a protected class with preferential and unfair advantages.”
Nikkel called transgender Iowans a “privileged class [that] rides roughshod over Iowans’ inalienable legal rights stopping ours with theirs.”
PELLA PAC (Public Education Libraries & Legal Advocacy Political Action Committee) was incorporated last December. Nikkel has been very active this session, testifying in support of bills restricting the availability of books in public libraries, and other Christian conservative priorities.
Tamara Scott, the state director of Concerned Women for America, spoke in favor of HSB 242, but told the subcommittee it doesn’t go far enough.
“I support this bill, HSB 242, in restoring the civil rights code to the pre-2006 [sic] language, when code was added that weaponized our code and pitted Iowans against Iowans,” she said. “I want to thank you for removing the gender identity, but I also ask you to also [sic] include sexual orientation, which is listed right behind in the code.”
Concerned Women for America was founded by a California-based evangelical leader, Beverly LaHaye, in 1978 to oppose ratification of the Equal Rights Amendment, and other efforts to ensure women were treated the same as men under the law. Over the years, it has expanded its scope to include, among other things, opposing abortion, LGBTQ rights, same-sex marriage, sex education in schools, stem-cell research, family planning services and promoting instruction based on in its version of Christianity in schools.
But it wasn’t just the pro-HSB 242 side that invoked religion in the subcommittee hearing. Testifying against the bill, Chris Morse cited her inclusive and compassionate religious traditions.
During her testimony, Morse told the subcommittee her church had been reflecting on Psalm 37 during Sunday service. She began reading the psalm to the lawmakers.
Do not fret because of those who are evil
or be envious of those who do wrong;
for like the grass they will soon wither,
like green plants they will soon die away.
At that point, Holt told Morse her time was up. Morse continued, and after Holt had repeated himself twice, he had two Iowa State Troopers remove her, still speaking, from the hearing room.
Holt also paused the subcommittee twice, saying the protesters in the hall were making too much noise. During the second break, a state trooper using a megaphone ordered the protesters to quiet down. It had little effect, but after Rep. Heather Mattson, a Democrat from Ankeny, took the megaphone and asked protesters to be quieter, they lowered the volume.
During the protest, state troopers arrested two people, charging them with interference with official acts. It’s a very broad charge, often used against people who ignore police orders, but no details on the arrests were immediately available.
If the purpose of the subcommittee on Monday had actually been to consider testimony from the public before making a decision, what Diane Crookham-Johnson said might have affected its outcome.
Crookham-Johnson, an attorney from Oskaloosa, has served as the finance director for the Iowa Republican Party and on the Iowa Board of Education under Gov. Terry Branstad and Gov. Reynolds.
“I’m here today asking you to vote no on this bill,” she said. “I stand before you as a local attorney who has assisted in 2024 more than eight Mahaska County residents on legal processes and documents so that they could confirm their gender identity. Folks who work in our businesses, attend our schools, attend our churches. Folks who shop in our stores, rent our apartments and buy our homes. Folks who pay property taxes to support all of our communities.”
“This bill doesn’t impact some unknown person ‘over there.’ This bill impacts our people in your districts, people in your state and even your most conservative counties of Iowa. I ask you today to please represent all Iowans, and vote no on this bill.”
As had been the obvious outcome since Holt introduced HSB 242 on Thursday, his subcommittee advanced the bill with only Republican support. In the afternoon, his committee approved the bill with only Republican support.
During the Judiciary Committee meeting, Rep. Beth Wessel-Kroeschell, a Democrat who has represented Ames for the last 21 years, spoke about her role in codifying protections for LGBTQ people in the Iowa Civil Rights Act.
“In 2007, I was the floor manager of the bill to add sexual orientation and gender identity to the Iowa Civil Rights Code,” she said. “When people ask me what my proudest moment was, or has been, in this chamber, my answer is always passing that civil rights bill.”
“It should be noted it was passed with support from both parties.”
Wessel-Kroeschell told her colleagues that the 18-year-old legislation “has made Iowa a better place for all,” and called Holt’s bill “a disgrace to our heritage of recognizing the value of all people.”
“I choose to stay on the right side of history,” Wessel- Kroeschell said. “Think long and hard about how you want to be remembered.”
Shortly after that, Republicans on the committee voted to send HSB 242 to the House floor for final consideration. Holt announced a public hearing on the bill has been scheduled for Thursday. But as Speaker Grassley’s statement made clear, no amount of public input is going to stop the bill from getting a final vote in the House.
“This is what democracy looks like,” was one of protesters’ chants on Monday. It referred to the protest in the hallways and rotunda, not what was happening in the subcommittee and committee.
