Speaking to the crowd gathered at College Green Park in downtown Iowa City for the Transgender Day of Visibility (TDOV) rally on Tuesday, Katie Freeman began by talking about the sounds — shouts, chants, angry and despairing screams — they heard in protests inside the Iowa State Capitol last year as Republican lawmakers voted to strip gender identity protection from the Iowa Civil Rights Act and change state law to eliminate recognition of trans people as trans people.
“That sound stays with you,” they said. “It stays in your body. It wasn’t just noise, it was truth.”
Freeman, a member of the Coralville City Council, is transgender and was the first featured speaker at the TDOV rally. The rally was the culminating event of a weeklong series organized by the Corridor Community Action Network (CCAN) to celebrate TDOV. This was the fourth year for CCAN’s weeklong celebration.
The rally featured speakers, live music, sign painting and a clothing swap. Organizations that provide assistance to trans people, such as the Johnson County Transgender Advisory Committee, set up tables to offer advice and support. And while people were enjoying themselves and the beautiful weather at the rally, less than 12 hours earlier, it seemed as if this year’s TDOV might get off to a bad start.
On Monday night, a man took down and stole the Trans Pride flag that had been flying at the Johnson County Administration Building. The facilities manager emailed the members of the county board of supervisors to inform them of the incident. The man reportedly also approached the building to taunt the custodial workers inside.
“I keep a Trans Pride flag in my office, so I said we’ll use that instead,” Johnson County Board of Supervisor Chair Jon Green told Little Village. “And we ran that up the pole.”
Asked what he thought about the incident, Green said, “I was disappointed, but not surprised.”
The man has not yet been publicly identified, but the matter was turned over to the Johnson County Sheriff’s Office, along with video showing the man’s face and his vehicle’s license plate. Green’s Trans Pride flag was flying on Tuesday morning as TDOV began.
The display of the Trans Pride flag alongside the Iowa and U.S. flags was done at the suggestion of Supervisor Mandi Remington. Remington is also the founder and executive director of CCAN. She served as organizer of the rally in College Green Park.
In their speech on Tuesday, Freeman talked about how important resilience has always been for trans people.
“Resilience through history, resilience through community, resilience through showing up. Even when we are scared, even when we are angry, even when we are exhausted,” they said.
Freeman cited the example of Frances Thompson, a disabled Black trans woman who testified in 1886 before a congressional committee investigating the massacre of Black citizens in Memphis by white mobs. Thompson is the first trans person known to have addressed Congress, and did so at great risk to her own personal safety. The testimony of Thompson and other survivors of the massacre is credited with helping to spur the ratification of the 14th Amendment.
“Trans women have always stood at the edge of power and pushed back, from throwing the first bricks at Stonewall in 1969 to the movements rising today,” Freeman said. “We have refused silence, we have refused erasure, and refused to back down in the face of oppression. This is who we have always been.”
That refusal to be erased or to back down was on display at a Coralville City Council meeting last week.
At the beginning of the March 24 meeting, Mayor Laurie Goodrich issued a proclamation recognizing March 31 as Transgender Day of Visibility in Coralville. Following the standard form of such official documents, with wherefores followed by a therefore, the proclamation used fairly generic language to acknowledge transgender people’s “creativity, compassion, intelligence and hard work” make them “valued members of the community” who face discrimination “in every setting imaginable,” and “for us all to work together to eliminate discrimination and injustice.”
Members of the transgender community in Coralville were dissatisfied with the proclamation as soon as the text went public a week before. Coming after years of anti-trans laws passed in Iowa, constant hostility from the Trump administration and just weeks after Gov. Kim Reynolds signed into law a bill stripping the authority of local governments to protect the civil rights of transgender Iowans without the approval of the legislature, the proclamation seemed to ignore what is actually happening to trans people. Community members emailed the mayor to offer input the week before the proclamation was issued, but Goodrich declined their help. Tara McGovern, a Coralville resident and member of the county’s Trans Advisory Committee, shared their email exchanges with Little Village in which the mayor says their help is not needed.
McGovern addressed this as they officially accepted the proclamation at the March 24 meeting.
Referencing the latest anti-trans bill signed by Gov. Reynolds, McGovern said, “Regardless of one individual’s signature on an evil bill, the inherent value of trans Iowans is immutable, and the people will always stand up to protect and celebrate each other. The work we do for ourselves and for each other is collaborative and inclusive.”
The proclamation was neither, McGovern contended.
“We asked to be a part of the process preparing this proclamation, and we were denied that privilege,” they said.
Accepting the proclamation on behalf of Coralville’s trans community, McGovern shared a pair of additions they would have recommended.
“Whereas, the human rights of transgender people are under attack across the country and there are multiple laws already on the books restricting the rights of transgender Iowans. Whereas, we commit to continuing the fight to equal access and equal protection for all transgender people.”
McGovern finished by calling on all members of the council to work to defend the rights of transgender people, and not leave it all up to Councilmember Katie Freeman.
After McGovern finished their remarks, Mayor Goodrich thanked them, adding, “I feel we did incorporate your ideas and thoughts.” The remark produced an audible wave of disagreement from the residents attending the meeting.
Another member of the Johnson County Transgender Advisory Committee, Sean McRoberts, spoke at the rally in College Green Park.
“We’re just a couple of years old, but we’ve already made some great connections in our community, and established some programs that are uplifting trans lives,” McRoberts said.
The committee was created by the board of supervisors in March 2024 following the prosecution of seven trans rights activists who took part in a peaceful protest on the University of Iowa campus the previous October. Tara McGovern was one of the seven, and the only one who was in a position to resist pressure from the Johnson County Attorney’s Office to take a plea deal. When McGovern went to trial, the prosecution’s case fell apart and McGovern was acquitted.
So far, the committee has “been able to gather people from across Johnson County, educators and activists, artists and civic leaders — all kinds of folks — to look at what are the pressing questions for trans people here in our community and what might county government do about them,” McRoberts said.
During its first year, the committee was able to set up two grant programs that are still ongoing. The first provides funding to Lavender Legal to assist trans residents of Johnson County with legally changing their names. The second, facilitated by the Emma Goldman Clinic, provides funding to assist trans residents seeking gender-affirming care.
The committee is now turning its attention to “long-term pressing problems like housing,” McRoberts said. Another project is creating a map of accessible bathrooms in the county that are safe for trans people to use.
“That will be coming out over the course of this summer,” McRoberts said. “There will be a map through the Johnson County website, facilitated by Johnson County IT.”
Johnson County Supervisor V Fixmer-Oraiz, who helped create the committee, also spoke at the rally.
“I am proud to represent Johnson County as the only transgender county supervisor in the state of Iowa,” they said. “If you’re wondering how many [supervisors in Iowa] there are, there are 381. And I get to be the one out of 381, so that’s cool.”
Fixmer-Oraiz said TDOV is “a tricky celebration for those of us who are trans.” Not everyone celebrates it, and drawing attention to yourself as a transgender person in the current atmosphere is “challenging to say the least.”
“It’s important to be visible, it really is,” they said. “It’s a beacon and a target at the same time. And for years, it’s felt like a target, even though I hope that it is a beacon. I want us to see us everywhere. Because the fact of the matter is, we are everywhere. And that’s because we’re human. We’re just human beings trying to be. And that’s all it is.”
Instead of delivering a speech, Fixmer-Oraiz said they wanted to do something “a little bit unusual,” and read a poem — “love song at the lion’s gate” by Adrienne Maree Brown — to the crowd instead. The poem touches on love and how personal connections survive even when a chaotic and violent world separates people.
When they finished, Fixmer-Oraiz called Mandi Remington to the stage and presented her with a proclamation from Jon Green, as well as the Trans Pride flag that had been flying over the county administration building earlier in the day, which he was giving to CCAN. It had been replaced on the flag pole by the Trans Pride flag from Fixmer-Oraiz’s office.
Even as TDOV was being celebrated on Tuesday, the struggles trans people face in the United States multiplied. The White House issued a press release, obviously in response to TDOV but never mentioning it, that praised President Trump for all the anti-trans actions his administration has taken since he was sworn in for a second term last year. And earlier in the day, the U.S. Supreme Court handed down a decision that will likely overturn state laws prohibiting conversion therapy.
In their speech at the beginning of the rally, Katie Freeman talked about the importance of dealing with the stress and exhaustion caused by the constant flow of anti-trans actions.
“How do we hold the joy and the fear, the authenticity and beauty of becoming, and the reality of what it costs?” they asked. “Because we have to, we have to be able to sit in the comfort of fear, the kind that’s created because we’re not safe as we stand face-to-face with state troopers at the Capitol. We have to feel it when we’re harassed or assaulted just for walking down the street in our so-called safe communities. We have to feel it when we speak truth to power in city halls across this state.”
“We sit with that fear, and then we transform it,” Freeman continued. “We turn it into power. Because when it feels like everything has been taken away, when it feels like there is nothing left, that is when something else rises. Because the fight to live, the fight to live as yourself, this is where our power lives, and it doesn’t live in isolation … Every fight for human rights and freedom is the same fight. There is no version of liberation where only some of us are free. We cannot have true liberation, even through our transness, if our Black, brown, Indigenous and immigrant kin are still fighting for theirs.”
Freeman told the people gathered for the rally that “even now, even in this moment when it feels like we are losing, we are not. Not in the ways that matter most.” The existing systems of power in society may be hostile to trans people, but that’s why trans people are “building something outside of those systems.”
“Something rooted in community, through Trans Mutual Aid, Iowa City Mutual Aid. We are taking care of each other, and that matters. Because that is how we survive. More than that, that is how we thrive. That is how we begin to build a world we actually want to live in.”
