It’s funnel week at the Iowa Capitol, so by Friday a bill needs to be approved by a committee in either the House or Senate to be considered for passage this legislative session. It’s supposedly a fixed deadline, but it’s really just an observed custom, because there are existing exceptions for certain bills — such as those involving taxes — and leaders of the House and Senate have the power to revive dead bills after funnel week passes.
One bill that will definitely live through funnel week is House File 2389. Introduced by Gov. Kim Reynolds, the bill would change how state laws and regulations are made in ways that would undermine the rights of transgender people.
The governor introduced the bill, originally numbered as HSB 649, one day after a subcommittee of the House Judiciary Committee rejected another that would have stripped protection against gender identity discrimination out of the Iowa Civil Rights Act.
Normally, a bill focused on changing how laws are made would be assigned to the Judiciary Committee or the State Government Committee, but HF 2389 was assigned to the Education Committee at the request of its chair Rep. Skyler Wheeler, a Republican from Hull. Wheeler, who says his approach to lawmaking begins with a literal interpretation of the Bible and who has been one of the strongest supporters of the anti-LGBTQ legislation passed in recent years, fast-tracked consideration of the bill.
In an unusual move, HF 2389 was passed by both a subcommittee of the Education Committee and the whole Education Committee on the same day. Those party-line votes approving the bill came only two working days after the governor introduced it.
HF 2389 creates new definitions in Iowa Code that would have to be used in all laws and regulations. It defines a female as “a person whose biological reproductive system is developed to produce ‘ova’ and a ‘male’ as a person whose biological reproductive system is developed to fertilize the ova of a female.”
“The term ‘woman’ or ‘girl’ refers to a female and the term ‘man’ or ‘boy’ refers to a male,” the section continues.
The bill classifies a person “born with a medically verifiable diagnosis of disorder or difference of sex development” as disabled and eligible for “legal protections and accommodations afforded under the federal Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990 and applicable state law.”
It would allow transgender people to be denied equal access to some facilities, declaring that the “term ‘equal’ does not mean ‘same’ or ‘identical. Separate accommodations are not inherently unequal.”
HF 2389 also changes how “vital statistics” are collected for “complying with state antidiscrimination laws or… [for] state public health, crime, economic or other data.” Not only would state agencies be restricted to just using the definitions in the bill, so would every “city, county, township, or school district.” That would prevent cities, counties, school districts and the state from having accurate information about trans people and “erases nonbinary people from the law entirely,” the LGBTQ rights advocacy group One Iowa noted in a news release.
The bill would also prevent trans Iowans from updating birth certificates as they currently can. It requires that any reissued birth certificate requested by a trans individual has “a designation of the sex of the person both at the time of birth and at the time of establishment of the new certificate of birth.”
The version of the bill the governor introduced would have required the driver’s license of a trans Iowa “the sex designation of the person both at the time of birth and at the time the application is made.” That provision was removed from the version the Education Committee passed.
After the committee approved the bill, ranking member Sharon Steckman, a Democratic representative from Mason City, asked Wheeler to schedule an additional public hearing on HF 2389. That hearing was held at the State Capitol on Monday evening.
“No one should have to come to the capitol week after week after week to protest for their basic human rights,” Aime Wichtendahl told the committee. “And make no mistake, this bill is a repeal of civil rights. It’s a full-frontal assault on the civil rights act.”
Wichtendahl made history in 2015 by becoming the first transgender Iowan elected to public office, when she won a seat on the Hiawatha City Council. Wichtendahl has been reelected twice to the council, In December announced she is running for the Iowa House in District 80 as a Democrat.
“In the 17 years since gender identity was added to the civil rights act, there has not been one instance of a trans person gaining access to women’s spaces, or men pretending to be trans, in order to harass and assault women,” Wichtendahl said on Monday.
“Queer and trans people have had enough. We are human beings, we are American citizens, we are Iowans. We do not deserve the abuse we’re getting from our government.”
Over a hundred people registered to speak at the hearing, most in opposition to the bill. Hundreds more supporters of trans rights showed up in the Capitol’s rotunda and in the hallway outside the meeting room to protest against the bill.
After the hearing was announced last week, Gov. Reynolds used her campaign email account to send a message to her supporters asking them to turn out to speak on behalf of the bill, and providing instructions on how to register. The message made a distinction between “Democrats and their allies” and “Iowans.”
“We know the Democrats and their supporters are going to show up – trying to say there is no real difference between men and women,” the email said. “We need Iowans to come out to speak on this common sense issue.”
While Wichtendahl was correct that in the 17 years since gender identity was added to the Iowa Civil Rights Act there have been no incidents of the sort bill supporters say they are worried about, that didn’t matter any more than that fact that there were no complaints about transgender girls participating in school supports did when that bill was passed in 2022.
Supporters of HF 2389 said the matter was simple, with several suggesting the bill’s gender definitions have divine sanction.
“God created woman and man. Period,” Denise Bubek, the first person to address the committee, said.
Bubek is the deputy director of the Family Leader Church Ambassador Network. The Family Leader is Iowa’s largest rightwing evangelical political organization.
God came up several times, and Courtney Collier evoked both God and the devil in her testimony supporting HF 2389.
Collier has become a familiar face at the capitol over the last few years, testifying in favor such bills as last year’s school book ban and this year’s attempt to strip gender identity protection from Iowa Code. She said God created the definition of man and woman, and transgender people were suffering from confusion caused by a “nonsensical social engineering trend, which is orchestrated by the devil himself.”
A total of 24 people testified at the hearing on Monday, with Chair Wheeler having supporters and opponents of the bill alternate. Along with Bubek and Collier, the dozen pro-bill speakers included two leaders from local chapters of Moms for Liberty, although neither mention their connection to the group, and the chair of the Dallas County Republicans, who also didn’t mention her party leadership role. A professional anti-trans activist from Wisconsin also spoke in favor of the bill. She didn’t mention she doesn’t live in Iowa.
Laura Becker, who has a YouTube channel called The Based Detransioner, told the committee about her regrets after having gender-affirming medical care, when she considered her a trans man. Becker says she realizes now that her doctors misdiagnosed her, and she identified as trans to escape the abusive treatment she received from her parents. Becker apparently believes her situation is the norm.
“In Iowa, we have the opportunity to prevent trauma like I went through,” she said.
“We” is an odd choice of pronouns, since Becker lives in Milwaukee.
Steve Deace, who used to host a popular rightwing talk radio show in Iowa before moving to an online platform, told the committee “there are no facts” to support opposition to the bill. Deace attracted national attention in 2020 by promoting COVID-19 misinformation and conspiracy theories, and on Monday he worked a COVID reference into his testimony.
“There is as much basis in fact in what you’re being asked to oppose, as there would be for wearing a mask to stop an airborne contagion of a respiratory virus,” he said. “Which is to say none.”
Todd Ertzen, Deace’s online co-host, was even more strident in his testimony. Neither Deace nor Ertzen mentioned their show or their connection to each other, although it’s possible they felt they were famous enough that it was unnecessary.
“We send our kids to school, thinking they’re going to get an education,” Ertzen said. “They fertilize and water them [sic], with pornography, with pronouns, with social-emotional learning. And that’s how we get all this tolerance and diversity out there.”
Ertzen was referring to the protesters who were loudly chanting outside the committee room for most of the meeting. He equated protesting in support of transgender rights with “domestic terrorism,” and warned that an unspecified “they” are “promising you they’re going to come into your house and take your kids.”
Ertzen referenced one of the chants from the protesters, “We will not go silently.”
“Whether they go silently or not, we’re not the East Coast,” he said. “They need to go.”
Rep. Wheeler began the hearing by complaining about the chanting outside the room, and stopped the hearing several times until the noise of the protest diminished. He warned at the outset he would not add any time to the hearing to make up for the stoppages, saying that doing so would be giving in to “the heckler’s veto.”
“Shameful we weren’t able to get through more,” Wheeler said at the end of the hearing.
Of course that was entirely his decision. He knew how many people signed up to speak, but decided to keep to a strict schedule he set.
In addition to Wichtendahl, the dozen speakers opposing the bill included two representatives from One Iowa, one from Iowa Safe Schools, a priest representing the Episcopal Diocese of Iowa, as well as several transgender Iowans who described how this bill would make their lives and the lives of their friends and families worse.
“What dystopian novel are we in this time because I’m finding us slipping and going backward,” Alexandra Gray, a Black trans woman, asked the committee. “At one point in time, people of color — Black people — were declared 3/5ths of a person. I’d like to know what percentage of a person queer people are going to get so that I can base my life around it.”
Gray, a Des Moines resident, was wearing a pink triangle as she testified.
“I oppose this bill because it will destroy people…” she said. “This bill is literally playing with lives and understand that you all aren’t making laws for yourselves — you are making laws for the generations to come.”
Matthew McIver, who is the father of an LGBTQ child, reflected on how much Iowa has changed since he moved here 16 years ago.
“I am an Iowan by choice,” he told the committee. “I moved my pregnant wife here in 2008 to found an organization called the Des Moines Social Club. Months later the Varnum decision came down, and One Iowa held its celebration at that club. It was a beautiful day.”
Bills like HF 2389 will make it hard for the state to attract and retain talented people, McIver said.
“I would not advise people I love to move to Iowa today.”
Attorney Breanna Young warned the committee that HF 2389’s language is, from a legal standpoint, “vague, confusing and it will lead to unintended consequences.”
It was a point One Iowa’s Keenan Crow also raised when he addressed the committee.
“This legislation is not written for Iowa,” Crow said. “It is national legislation poured into Iowa without any regard to existing Iowa law. And what that means is, as previous speakers have mentioned, we are looking at a nearly innumerable number of unintended consequences in our future.”
The definitions in the bill “will override definitions in other statues that already exist,” Crow said. “The word ‘mother’ itself is mentioned 325 times in Iowa Code. Are you confident, have you gone through each of these statutes to ensure that you haven’t created any unintended consequences there?”
Committee members do not respond to questions from the public during the hearing, but the answer in this case is obviously no. Even if the bill hadn’t received fast-tracked approval from the committee, Wheeler doesn’t have the legal training needed for such a review. He works for a religious nonprofit that provides services to people with disabilities, and is the head baseball coach at Unity Christian High School in Orange City.
Max Mowitz, program director at One Iowa and a trans Iowan, spoke for many who opposed the bill, when he told the committee, “I’m here because I love this state. And I’m here because I want a better future for all Iowans.”
The hearing, which began at 5:01 p.m., adjourned at 6:01 p.m.
