{"id":4490,"date":"2025-03-03T20:35:55","date_gmt":"2025-03-03T20:35:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/iowa-removes-gender-identity-from-civil-rights-law-justia-news-march-3-2025\/"},"modified":"2025-03-03T20:35:55","modified_gmt":"2025-03-03T20:35:55","slug":"iowa-removes-gender-identity-from-civil-rights-law-justia-news-march-3-2025","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/iowa-removes-gender-identity-from-civil-rights-law-justia-news-march-3-2025\/","title":{"rendered":"Iowa Removes Gender Identity From Civil Rights Law \u2014 Justia News \u2014 March 3, 2025"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<div itemprop=\"articleBody\">\n<p data-sourcepos=\"7:1-7:360\">Last week, Iowa enacted a <a href=\"https:\/\/www.legis.iowa.gov\/legislation\/BillBook?ba=SF418&amp;ga=91\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener nofollow\">new law<\/a> that removes \u201cgender identity\u201d from the list of protected classes under the Iowa Civil Rights Act. It passed the Iowa Senate 33-15 and the Iowa House of Representatives 60-36 on Thursday. These votes went mostly along party lines with Republicans in favor and Democrats opposed, although five Republicans in the House broke ranks to vote against it. Governor Kim Reynolds signed it into law on the following day.<\/p>\n<p data-sourcepos=\"7:1-7:360\">The Iowa Civil Rights Act is the main anti-discrimination law in the state. It covers areas such as employment, housing, and education. The law didn\u2019t protect the LGBTQ+ community until 2007. That year, the state expanded the list of protected classes to include sexual orientation and gender identity. (The new law doesn\u2019t remove sexual orientation from the list.)<\/p>\n<p data-sourcepos=\"7:1-7:360\">Governor Reynolds justified the change by saying that it protects women and girls. She also has claimed that the change brings Iowa into alignment with federal law and the consensus in most other states on this issue.<\/p>\n<p data-sourcepos=\"7:1-7:360\">It\u2019s true that federal civil rights statutes don\u2019t explicitly list sexual orientation and gender identity among protected classes. However, the U.S. Supreme Court <a href=\"https:\/\/supreme.justia.com\/cases\/federal\/us\/590\/17-1618\/\" target=\"_blank\" rel=\"noopener nofollow\">ruled in 2020<\/a> that federal protections against sex discrimination in employment cover gender identity. The federal government has applied the same logic to some parallel civil rights laws, such as the Fair Housing Act. Nearly half the states explicitly list gender identity among protected classes in laws prohibiting employment and housing discrimination. Several other states echo the federal approach, explicitly interpreting a ban on sex discrimination to cover gender identity.<\/p>\n<p data-sourcepos=\"7:1-7:360\">The new Iowa law also includes a provision on birth certificates. These must match a person\u2019s sex at birth. (A transgender person won\u2019t be allowed to update the sex marker after their transition.) Another provision changes \u201cgender identity\u201d to \u201cgender theory\u201d in a pre-existing law that forbids instruction of this topic to children in K-6 grades. According to the new law, \u201cgender theory\u201d means the idea that a person can have an internal sense of gender different from their sex at birth.<\/p>\n<p data-sourcepos=\"7:1-7:360\"><strong>Photo Credit: Konstantin_Shishkin \/ Shutterstock.com<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<p><script>(function(d, s, id) {\n            var js, fjs = d.getElementsByTagName(s)[0];\n            if (d.getElementById(id)) return;\n            js = d.createElement(s); js.id = id;\n            js.src=\"https:\/\/connect.facebook.net\/en_US\/sdk.js#xfbml=1&version=v2.11&appId=1639788792774312&autoLogAppEvents=1\";\n            fjs.parentNode.insertBefore(js, fjs);\n        }(document, 'script', 'facebook-jssdk'));<\/script><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Last week, Iowa enacted a new law that removes \u201cgender identity\u201d from the list of protected classes under the Iowa Civil Rights Act. It passed the Iowa Senate [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":4491,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[6],"tags":[2137,2149,3978,4909,309,153,450,310,2154,408],"class_list":["post-4490","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-lawyers","tag-civil","tag-gender","tag-identity","tag-iowa","tag-justia","tag-law","tag-march","tag-news","tag-removes","tag-rights"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4490","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4490"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4490\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4491"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4490"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4490"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/usatrustedlawyers.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4490"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}