Iowa's Republican-dominated Legislature voted Thursday to pass a bill removing gender identity as a protected class

FACE OUR FEARS: The attacks on transgender people are an attack on all of us

Iowa's Republican-dominated Legislature voted Thursday to pass a bill removing gender identity as a protected class. The bill defines sex based on a person’s anatomy at birth and removes gender identity from a list of protected groups that employers, businesses and landlords may not discriminate against.

The Des Moines Register reported that Iowa House members voted 60-36 Thursday afternoon with five Republicans joining Democrats in opposition. More than 2,500 people filled the Iowa Capitol as chanting filled the hallways from Iowans opposing a bill removing gender identity from the Iowa Civil Rights Act Iowa’s Gov. Kim Reynolds is expected to sign this bill, ending 18 years of state law protection for the trans and gender-expansive communities in Iowa.

Rep. Aime Wichtendahl, the first openly transgender member of the Legislature, spoke against the bill on the House floor, saying that the bill “deprives us of our life, liberty and pursuit of happiness." Rep. Wichtenendal added that “the purpose of this bill and the purpose of every anti-trans bill is to further erase us from public life and to stigmatize our existence. The sum total of every anti-trans and anti-LGBTQ bill is to make our existence illegal.”

Let that sink in.

After the vote, protesters in the gallery shouted "shame!" and booed legislators as they left the capitol. And regardless of what TERFs want you to think, trans rights and women’s right intertwine, as Rep. Wichtendahl warned "the removal of gender identity as a protected class will prevent the infringement on the rights of others, particularly women, who stand to be erased, along with decades of gains toward equality."

And of course, all of this stems from the Trump administration’s obsession with limiting the recognition of trans people.

The New York Times reported that the Trump administration has sought to end funding for hospitals that provide gender-transition treatments to minors, to bar transgender women and girls from competing in women’s sports, to house transgender women in federal prisons with men, to no longer reflect the gender identities of transgender people on passports and to bar openly transgender people from serving in the military.

At least 373 bills attacking transgender health care, usually for minors, were introduced in statehouses over the past two years, according to the Trans Legislation Tracker.

REALITY CHECK: A recent peer-reviewed research letter in JAMA Pediatrics found that just 0.017 percent of youth were coded as trans and received puberty blockers. And just 0.037 percent were trans and accessed hormone therapy.