Activists liken GOP to Nazis for bill that outs trans folks & changes the meaning of “equal” rights

On Tuesday, Republicans in the Iowa state legislature swept a bill through committee that would add identifiers to the birth certificates of all transgender people in the state.

House Study Bill 649, proposed by the Republican governor Kim Reynolds and sponsored by state Rep. Heather Hora (R), was written to address what the far-right conservative Republican majority considers disparities when it comes to transgender people in the state.

Related:

Sen. Tommy Tuberville says Dems. want women to go extinct while promoting his anti-trans bill

He said the Democrats have “no common sense” and don’t think “about the future for anybody other than themselves.”

The bill passed the house education committee on a party-line vote.

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The legislation proposes a sweeping redefinition of terms in the state’s statutory code in an effort to define “man” and “woman” to conservatives’ satisfaction.

Among other requirements, the bill mandates that the state mark the birth certificates of transgender people with both male and female identifiers, which would have the effect of labeling them as neither sex and forcibly outing them as transgender.

More than a hundred members of the public showed up to the committee meeting to oppose the bill, and many wore pink triangles to draw attention to the parallels the legislation has to Nazi tactics in the 1930s and ’40’s labeling LGBTQ+ people with identifiers.

As the bill was debated, Republican state Rep. Brooke Boden mocked the idea trans people would object to being forcibly outed.

“What I hear from the trans community is that they are proud to be trans, and I guess that that would be OK to identify it as that and make sure that your birth certificate represents those things.”

Other language in the bill overturns precedent in the civil rights struggle and applies it to trans Iowans, proclaiming that “separate” is “not inherently unequal.”

“The term ‘equal’ does not mean ‘same’ or ‘identical’,” the bill states.

Even the bill’s sponsor, Rep. Hora, was flummoxed when asked to provide a definition of equal as it applied to her proposed legislation.

“Equal would mean … um … I would assume that equal would mean … I don’t know exactly in this context.”

House Bill 649 awaits a vote by the full state House.