Linda Schreiber is a member of the League of Women Voters of Johnson County.

This past week, Iowa’s legislature rolled back human rights for transgender people. Senate File 418 was rushed from draft bill to passage within a week and sent to Governor Kim Reynolds, who signed it on February 28.

Iowans should ask questions.

This law is not about transgender women playing sports. Fewer than ten collegiate student-athletes out of more than 500,000 across the country identify as transgender, Charlie Baker, the N.C.A.A. president, said in January.

According to a report published by the Williams Institute at UCLA Law School in 2022, of an estimated 332 million people living in the U.S.—some 1.3 million adults and 300,000 young people ages 13 to 17—identify as transgender. That works out to about a half percent and 1.4 percent of the population, respectively.

Of the 1.3 million adults and 300,000 young people, not all identify as women or play sports. (Iowa’s 2022 law on sports specifically targeted transgender girls and women women.)

The number is even smaller when it comes to middle school and high school transgender athletes. Gillian Branstetter, a spokesperson for the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), told Newsweek that Save Women’s Sports, a leading voice in the bid to ban transgender athletes from competing in girls’ sports, identified only five transgender athletes competing on girls’ teams in school sports for grades K through 12.

Iowa’s legislation is also not about bathrooms, because there’s a solution for that. Visit Tribute Eatery & Bar in Coralville’s Iowa River Landing to see how all public restrooms should be designed for cost and function: one restroom, individual stalls with floor-to-ceiling dividers and doors, and no entrance door. Minnesota K-12 schools use the same design concept to make supervision and monitoring easy and effective.

Iowa Republican lawmakers seem to believe reproduction is based on faith, based on the wording of Senate File 418. But it should be about science and education.

The website Those Nerdy Girls explains how reproduction is rooted in science and chromosomes. Most people either have XY chromosomes and develop typical male anatomy or have XX chromosomes and develop typical female anatomy. But this isn’t true for everyone. Some people are XXY or XO and have slightly different anatomy and hormone levels than their typical XY or XX counterparts. Even when sex chromosomes are XX or XY, body parts don’t always develop into strictly female or male anatomy.

Some XX individuals are born with testes, penis, and scrotum, and some XY individuals are born with a vulva and vagina but no uterus. Other times the external anatomy looks like something in between a penis and vulva and is called “ambiguous genitalia.” There are lots of different combinations.

More research, not less, is needed to understand why chromosomes develop atypically or mismatch.

These same legislators must believe that God determines human anatomy.

Fact-based science education is critical to understanding. When lawmakers dictate education curriculum from their legislative desks in Des Moines, Iowa, students lack the necessary information to prepare them for post-secondary education, future jobs, and life.

Faith plays an important role in our lives, but faith does not and cannot replace knowledge.

For more information, check out these websites:

Video animation of typical fetal sexual differentiation
Video animation of differences in development
Video lecture on fetal sexual differentiation
Genetics and Chromosomal Sex
Typical Male Development
Typical Female Development
Differences in Sexual Development FAQ on Intersex Conditions
BuzzFeed Video – What it’s like to be Intersex