- Iowa lawmakers are considering a bill to limit gender identity and expression in the classroom.
- The proposed law looks a lot like Florida's "Don't Say Gay" legislation.
A new bill proposed within the Iowa state legislature would require school officials and faculty members to get permission from parents before calling students a nickname that does not "correspond to the biological sex" listed on their birth certificate.
The bill was proposed last week and is supported by Republican Gov. Kim Reynolds. Republicans hold a majority in both houses of Iowa's state legislature. The measure is part of a wave of bills across the country attempting to limit or control gender expression and identity in and out of the classroom.
In addition to the limitation on nicknames, Iowa's Senate Study Bill 1145 would prevent a school district from providing "any program, curriculum, material, test, survey, questionnaire, activity, announcement, promotion, or instruction of any kind relating to gender identity or sexual activity."
The bill is similar to Florida's "Don't Say Gay" legislation, which forbids discussion of gender expression, identity, and sexual orientation in kindergarten classrooms through third grade. The text of the "Don't Say Gay" bill specifies that such discussions are not "age-appropriate or developmentally appropriate for students."
The Iowa law would prohibit the discussion of gender identity from kindergarten through third grade.
It would also extend the nickname restriction to all minor students enrolled in school. The text of the Iowa bill reads:
"A school district must receive the prior written consent of the parent or guardian of a minor child enrolled in the school district before allowing any employee of the school district to address the minor child using a nickname or a pronoun that does not correspond to the biological sex that is listed on the minor child's official birth certificate or certificate issued upon adoption if the certificate was issued at or near the time of the minor child's birth."
The proposed law risks further marginalizing trans and nonbinary students, according to Dr. Melanie Walsh, a psychology professor at the University of New Haven.
Young children in particular, Walsh said, might not yet have the awareness that they're trans or nonbinary or the language to express it. Limits on gender expression in the classroom can create a culture of fear, she said.
"What we're going to end up seeing is a rash of mental health issues as a result of this," Walsh said. "We know that for trans youth and gender-nonconforming youth in particular, that component of school belonging is so huge because they're spending so much time at school. And so to feel like you don't have any place where you can be yourself is particularly damaging."
Walsh predicts that this bill, if passed, would cause many children in Iowa to internalize negative feelings and self-hatred. It'll also make it hard for kids to come to terms with who they are.
"And when you have all that self-hatred, of course, that leads to higher rates of depression, anxiety, suicidality," she said.
The other issue is that names can be agender and ambiguous — and new ones are created every day.
Names like Leslie, Taylor, and Lindsay are associated with both men and women in the United States. Sen. Lindsey Graham, a male congressional lawmaker who represents South Carolina, is just one example.
Iowa's bill is supported by Moms for Liberty, a conservative 501(c)(4) nonprofit organization that describes its mission as "dedicated to fighting for the survival of America by unifying, educating and empowering parents to defend their parental rights at all levels of government."
This is not the first time that conservative groups have invoked "parental rights" as a way of setting school policies.
In the 1960s, for example, some parents opposed integration in schools because they viewed it as an extension of communism, according to Dr. Einav Rabinovitch-Fox, a gender studies historian at Case Western Reserve University.
"In the past, their solution was to turn to homeschooling or to private education, but what we are seeing today is the insistence to keep the children in school, but to impose specific conservative agendas on the public system," Rabinovitch-Fox said.
When such bills are introduced, it's important to examine whether the interest of a parent outweighs that of a child, according to Walsh.
"Who are these bills really protecting? What are these bills even protecting? Because they're certainly not protecting the children that I think the lawmakers think that they're trying to protect," Walsh said.