Photo by Nuva Frames, available via Shutterstock

Nick Covington is an Iowa parent who taught high school social studies for ten years. He is also the co-founder of the Human Restoration Project, an Iowa educational non-profit promoting systems-based thinking and grassroots organizing in education. Editor’s note: An Iowa House Judiciary subcommittee voted 3-0 on January 31 not to advance this bill.

House File 2082 sought to make Iowa the first state in the country to remove gender identity as a protected class under the Iowa Civil Rights Act and reconstruct it as a “disability.” That framing spreads harmful misinformation under the medical model of disability and undermines our shared goal of creating a safe and inclusive future for Iowa’s families and young people. 

We should understand that HF 2082 is both cruel and unnecessary, as transgender identity is not a disability and disability is also a protected class under Iowa Civil Rights law. 

The medical model of disability treats disability as a problem of impaired individuals, who need to be “fixed” by medical intervention in the same way that, say, a cancerous tumor needs to be removed for a patient to be cured. That is certainly how many of our elected officials have spoken about our transgender friends, family members, and neighbors. They have characterized trans people as a problem to be solved or a malignancy to be surgically excised from the body politic. 

The legislation proposed by Republican State Representative Jeff Shipley deliberately ignores the social model of disability, where the problem is not inherent in individuals. Rather, disability is the product of an exclusionary, inaccessible, and disabling world. This is also the argument for using the identity-first language of “disabled people”, as in, people who are dis-abled by an ableist society. Solutions, then, must also exist in the world by making society more inclusive, accessible, and accommodating; not less.

As HF 2082 also continues the political attacks for which 2023 set a record, many LGBTQ families in Iowa have chosen to leave rather than be subjected to further discrimination. Last year, I had to learn from the New York Times that a former Ankeny High School student of mine, a very talented young artist and thinker, fled with his family from Iowa to Minnesota. “It was their son’s safety that worried them,” the article read, “as Iowa Republicans passed anti-transgender laws and used what they felt was dehumanizing rhetoric.” 

They are not alone. A recent Hulu documentary highlighted LGBTQ midwesterners who have been uprooted by fear and discriminatory legislation, including an Indianola family of five with a transgender parent that moved to Maryland in 2022. They told the Des Moines Register they “needed to leave Iowa for Maryland to put themselves in the best mental health position as parents,” adding, “Indianola was a happy place for the family’s children to grow up, but Maryland is a better place for their family as a whole.”

College-educated students already leave the state at higher rates than our neighbors, including one University of Iowa student who told KCRG-TV last May she was “concerned about legislation passing affecting LGBTQ+ Iowans.” ”I don’t feel safe outside of Iowa City,” she said, “And I can’t imagine myself living here long term out of fear for myself, potentially for children in the future and friends.” 

Proponents of HF 2082 believe their legal recategorization will justify “gender dysphoria” as an individual impairment. But by placing it within the medical model of disability, they simply highlight their own role in reinforcing exclusionary and discriminatory policies and practices in creating an unhealthy environment for LGBTQ Iowans. Their promise to legally construct transgender identity as a disability doubles-down on transphobia and ableism. It’s a vow to trap people in a medically-bounded and legally controlled life as a transgender person in Iowa for which the only solution is escape. Transgender Iowans are not a medical problem to be fixed, and the state of Iowa loses when young people take their talents, passion, and the fruits of their education elsewhere. 

So let us collectively oppose HF 2082 and put it in the dustbin of failed, dehumanizing ideas we simply have no use for. Let us communicate to our friends, family members, and neighbors that their civil rights are secured and their full humanity is never up for debate in a statehouse committee room. Instead of an Iowa dominated by fears of exclusion and discrimination, let us move to create an inclusive and accommodating future for Iowa that young people can imagine living in freely and raising families of their own.