On Tuesday, the ACLU of Iowa and Lambda Legal Defense and Education Fund, a nationwide civil rights organization dedicated to defending and advocating for LGBTQ people, filed a lawsuit in federal court in Des Moines challenging SF 496, the education bill signed into law by Gov. Kim Reynolds in May.
“This is a federal civil rights lawsuit challenging the constitutionality of SF 496,” ACLU of Iowa staff attorney Thomas Story said during an online news conference on Tuesday. “Our plaintiffs are Iowa Safe Schools, which is a state[wide] organization dedicated to helping LGBTQ+ youth, and seven brave, young students from all over the state.”
“The suit argues that SF 496 as a whole, and in its ‘Don’t say gay or trans,’ book banning and forced outing provisions, violates Iowa’s students rights under the First Amendment, the 14th Amendment and the Equal Access Act.”
“We have simultaneously filed a motion for preliminary injunction and are asking the District Court of the United States for the Southern District of Iowa to block the state from enforcing SF 496 during the course of the suit. And ultimately, we seek to have this law declared unconstitutional,” Story said.
Although the Republican lawmakers who pushed the bill through the legislature and Gov. Reynolds have denied it was aimed at LGBTQ students, teachers and school staff, SF 496 prohibits “any program, curriculum, test, survey, questionnaire, promotion or instruction” referencing sexual identity or gender orientation in primary school, and requires school districts to remove all books with “descriptions or visual depictions of a sex act” except for approved science or health class texts. During debates on the bill, all the examples of books to be banned presented by Republicans were works featuring LGBTQ characters and themes.
The new law also has a provision that educators and mental health professionals who testified during committee hearings on SF 496 said would drive a wedge between transgender and nonbinary students and teachers and school counselors they trust. If a student asks to be called by pronouns or a name that doesn’t correspond to the gender listed in official school records, even in private, a teacher or counselor is required to report that request to a school administrator. The administrator must then inform the student’s parents or guardian of the request, and receive written permission before the teacher or counselor can address the student in the way the student has requested.
“On its face, in its intent and purpose, and as applied, SF 496 forces educators to silence their LGBTQ+ students and deny them access to books, information, and ideas about sexual orientation and gender identity,” the ACLU and Lambda Legal argue in the brief filed Tuesday. “SF 496’s vague and overbroad language invites arbitrary and discriminatory restrictions on the rights of Plaintiffs and other LGBTQ+ students, stigmatizing them, preventing them from associating with each other for purposes of mutual support, education, and advocacy, and depriving them of the comfort of knowing other LGBTQ+ people exist and are happy and healthy members of our community.”
The law went into effect before the beginning of the current school year, and starting in January, school officials will face penalties for any violations. More than 1,000 books have been removed from public schools across Iowa in response to SF 496.
“Reading has always been a fundamental part of how I learned to understand the world around me,” Puck Carlson, an Iowa City high school senior and one of the plaintiffs, said during the news conference on Tuesday. “Every student should have the right to do the same. To be able to learn about people, culture and other factors, and to be able to learn about all of the world around them. Not just parts of it.”
“Furthermore, every student should see themselves in their libraries, so they not only understand the world around them, but also that they belong in it. Like it or not sex and sexuality are parts of the teenage experience. Refusing to provide adolescents with information about it means they’ll seek out their own information, from the internet or from others in ways that are significantly less safe than books reviewed by teachers and librarians.”
“Removing books that discuss queer topics or people from schools tells our queer student that they do not belong there, that they are shameful. I am not shameful. I have an LGBTQ little sister who I love more than anything in the world, and she is not shameful. She deserves to be herself and know that she belongs.”
Percy Batista-Pedro, another plaintiff and a junior from Waterloo, spoke to the impact the law has on whether students feel safe at school.
“I have experienced harassment in school because of my transgender identity, but SF 496 and its provisions to shut down open, healthy discussions of LGBTQ issues and its silencing of students like me make me fear for my happiness and safety more than ever.”
Batista-Pedro said SF 496 creates a “climate to shame and invite violence against transgender people.”
SF 496 wasn’t the only legislation signed by Gov. Reynolds this year aimed at young LGBTQ Iowans. In March, Reynolds signed a bill that banned any prescribing of medications or any medical procedure as part of gender-affirming care for transgender individuals under the age of 18, despite being warned by American Medical Association and other healthcare experts that it was “inappropriate and harmful.”
On the same day she signed that bill, Reynolds also signed SF 482, which bans anyone — student, teacher, staff member or visitor — from using a school bathroom or locker room that does not match that person’s “biological sex … as listed on a person’s official birth certificate issued at or near the time of the person’s birth.” There had never been any complaint filed regarding transgender individuals using school bathrooms or locker rooms that correspond to their identities before the governor signed the bill, just as there had never been any complaint filed about transgender girls and women participating in school and college sports before Reynolds signed a law banning such participation last year.
All these bills passed the Iowa Legislature with votes from only Republicans lawmakers.
On Tuesday afternoon, the governor’s office released a written statement in response to the lawsuit.
“Protecting children from pornography and sexually explicit content shouldn’t be controversial,” Reynolds said in the statement. “The real controversary [sic] is that it exists in elementary schools. Books with graphic depictions of sex acts have absolutely no place in our schools.”
