The first laws in 2024: Utah, Florida, & Iowa
Hello everyone. I hope you are all enjoying your February. The first responses from the 2022 US Transgender Survey have come out yesterday, so I look forward to talking about those more next week, but if you want to learn more about this survey, you can click here. Once the data becomes available, it will be an amazing resource for practitioners and researchers, as was the 2015 survey. And, if you are new to this newsletter, don’t forget to subscribe for free:
This week, I want to talk a bit about the updates of the laws which are being proposed/have passed in Utah, Florida, and Iowa. There were over 500 anti-LGBTQIA+ laws in the United States in 2023 and 2024 is looking to be a similar attack on LGBTQIA+, especially transgender, rights. Below, we will be lookin at Utah, Florida, and Iowa both because they are the first states to propose laws but also because we can see both old anti-LGBTQIA+ laws plus new attacks which may be used in other states.
Utah: In late January, Utah legislature passed a bathroom bill which was signed by the governor on 30 January. This is the first anti-trans bill passed in the US in 2024. This bill will would bar transgender individuals in bathrooms and locker rooms that match their gender identity in schools, as well as limit bathroom access in government buildings. The language is fairly broad, and may “bar transgender Utahns from sex-designated public programs, like scholarships or health and resource centers.” GLSEN has a great blog post on why bathroom bills like these, which target an already vulnerable group, are bad. Specifically, they: 1) Put transgender individuals in more danger, 2) They hurt student success, 3) They can lead to public health crisis, and 4) They are impossible to enforce.
Florida: As always a lot of anti-LGBTQIA+ activity is going on in Florida. To start, the Department of Highway Safety and Motor Vehicles have decided that people can no longer change their gender identity on their drivers license. Instead, it needs to match their sex assigned at birth. The department Deputy Executive Chairman said “…misrepresenting one’s gender, understood as sex, on a driver license constitutes fraud.” This would mean that people who change their gender will not be able to have a license which reflects that change, and opens transgender individuals up to harassment if their license does not match their presenting gender and gender identity. The legislature is currently proposing a law that would enshrine this change, and require health insurance to cover destransitioning. On the positive side, a bill that was going to ban Pride flags in government buildings failed.
Iowa: Things in Iowa seem to be changing quickly as some are trying to create laws that wipe transgender people out of the legal system. Recently, the Governor of Iowa has proposed a new law which defines gender as the sex assigned as birth. If a person goes through the process of changing their gender, then all subsequent paperwork must have both a person’s sex assigned as birth as well as their current gender identity. This second part was deleted from the bill, but future legislatures may try to do something similar. At the current state, the bill will define sex as such:
This would erase transgender and intersex people from Iowa law. This push started after the legislature failed to pass a bill which would strip gender identity from the state’s civil rights law.
Conclusions: These three states were chosen for two reasons. One, they represent the earliest push towards attacking LGBTQIA+ people this year. And each of these different bills show us what the attacks may look like this year. We are seeing tried and true attacks (e.g. the bathroom bills) as well as trying out new attacks (definition of sex and gender), these are what we need to be aware of. As an organization working with LGBTQIA+ people, even if it is not central to your mission, speaking out about these bills and working to make yourselves a safe space is incredibly important.