A festive signing ceremony was the perfect cap to a month where Iowa’s elected Republicans displayed scant awareness that transgender Iowans are human beings.
Throughout hearings and debates about a law barring trans girls and women from playing girls and college women’s sports, Republicans concocted menacing-sounding scenarios of cisgender girls losing races, games, scholarships, and roster spots to a crush of Iowans with unfair advantages.
A couple used offensive language to refer to trans girls and women and equated trans gender identity with mental illness or delusion. Many ignored or rejected witnesses’ repeated reminders that there has never been a problem in our state in girls competitions with people who were assigned male at birth. Similarly unmoving was testimony that trans Iowans are disproportionately subject to bullying and other discrimination.
More:Kim Reynolds bans transgender girls from female sports, signing Republican-backed law
No, the concern was only ever about the on-its-face absurd idea that girls sports are on a precipice of becoming a Title IX-erasing farce. Unable to provide evidence for this beyond incessant references to one Ivy League swimmer, lawmakers instead decided the vague prospect of an Iowa girl someday, somewhere, facing a competitive disadvantage easily outweighed the costs of removing other Iowans’ rights and denying them opportunities to play sports with their friends and enjoy the mental health benefits that sports provide.
More:Transgender girls would be barred from playing girls’ sports under Iowa Republican bill
Far from putting “common sense aside for wokeness,” as Sen. Tim Goodwin accused Wednesday, some Democrats in the Legislature acknowledged that, in a few contexts, real and difficult questions about fairness exist. They pointed out, accurately, that governing bodies have already been handling those questions for years and that Iowa’s new law was devoid of nuance or compassion.
Nothing capsulized that better than Gov. Kim Reynolds’ decision to have a public bill-signing ceremony in front of cheering “Save Girls Sports” advocates. It’s one thing to take a victory lap after lowering taxes; the harm that opponents of that law predict isn’t spelled out in the bill itself. On Thursday, Republicans threw a party for exclusion.
It was reminiscent, of course, of the midnight signing of the law prohibiting mask mandates last spring. That caused needless confusion the following morning and delivered an unmistakable “COVID is over, you cowards!” message to those on the wrong side of the vote. (COVID was not, in fact, over.)
Not all Republicans in the House and Senate were present for the votes; only Rep. Michael Bergan of Dorchester voted “no” among Republicans.
What now? Trans girls who started track practice last week will have to either quit or join the boys team, even though they are girls. Golf, tennis and soccer players can no longer look forward to the official March 14 start of practice. Litigation is all but certain.
Commercial consequences should be ignored or at least secondary in discussions about what is right — but we would support the National Collegiate Athletic Association in making clear that it won’t have any part of uninformed laws that perpetuate hate. The NCAA could even start by telling Iowa State’s and Iowa’s women’s basketball teams, which are expected to earn the right to host national tournament games this month, to instead pack their bags to play in more welcoming states.
“You shouldn’t have to wake up every morning and worry about the next thing the government is going to do to you, your business, or your children,” Reynolds told the nation Tuesday night. She was referring to the Biden administration. She should have pointed a finger at herself.
*story by desmoinesregister.com
