Iowa lawmakers vote to remove gender ID from state civil rights protections
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(DES MOINES, IOWA) — Iowa lawmakers voted Thursday to strike gender identity from state civil rights protections.
The state’s civil rights law currently protects against discrimination in the workplace, school, accommodations, housing and more based on someone’s “age, race, creed, color, sex, sexual orientation, gender identity, national origin, religion, or disability.”
The recent legislation on gender identity quickly made its way through the legislature, though not without facing large protests from critics who believe the bill will open up further discrimination against transgender people.
Transgender Americans — who are estimated to make up less than 1% of the U.S. population over the age of 13 — have been the target of hundreds of Republican-backed bills each year in recent years.
The new Iowa bill is one of more than 450 anti-LGBTQ bills in the U.S. being tracked this year by the American Civil Liberties Union.
Supporters of the legislation came to the Thursday hearing with a plethora of arguments — including concerns about religious freedoms, privacy in public accommodations and the belief that there are only two sexes.
“It would not be wise on the slippery slope of the sand using fluid definitions and feelings. Instead, let’s courageously build it on the tested, immovable foundations of fixed endings and historical truth,” said one community member.
The bill notes an exception for people who experience differences or disorders in sexual development — sometimes known as intersex — as covered by the federal Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990.
Opponents say that the legislation targets a small, vulnerable population and will worsen discrimination often faced by transgender people.
One community member, who said they were an Iowa educated and trained family medicine physician, said the lives of their patients depend on the outcome of the bill.
“As a doctor, I see firsthand how social determinants like stable housing, employment and access to public spaces are critical to my patients’ health,” they said. “The protections in our Civil Rights Code are not abstract. They are lifelines. When a person is denied housing because of their gender identity, they face higher risks of homelessness, violence and worsened physical and mental health.”
(WASHINGTON) — Gen. CQ Brown, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, and Adm. Lisa Franchetti, the Navy’s top admiral, are among the list of general officers provided to Congress this week indicating that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth could fire or remove from their current jobs, according to two U.S. officials.
Brown serves as the president’s senior military advisoer and has been chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff since October 2023, his four year tenure is supposed to end in 2027.
Franchetti has been the Chief of Naval Operations since November 2023.
Both officers had previously been criticized by Hegseth prior to his becoming defense secretary during the Trump administration.
This is a developing story. Please check back for updates.
(WASHINGTON) — Seven people have filed a federal lawsuit challenging President Donald Trump’s executive order declaring that the U.S. government would only recognize a person’s sex assigned at birth on government-issued documents.
The complaint, filed Friday in U.S. District Court in Massachusetts, accuses the State Department of rejecting some applications from transgender citizens or issuing documents with their sex assigned at birth. The lawsuit also accused the department of holding some passports and other documents submitted by transgender and nonbinary people.
“I’ve lived virtually my entire adult life as a man. Everyone in my personal and professional life knows me as a man, and any stranger on the street who encountered me would view me as a man,” said Massachusetts resident and plaintiff Reid Solomon-Lane in a statement provided by the American Civil Liberties Union, which filed the lawsuit.
“I thought that 18 years after transitioning, I would be able to live my life in safety and ease,” Solomon-Lane added. “Now, as a married father of three, Trump’s executive order and the ensuing passport policy have threatened that life of safety and ease. If my passport were to reflect a sex designation that is inconsistent with who I am, I would be forcibly outed every time I used my passport for travel or identification, causing potential risk to my safety and my family’s safety.”
The lawsuit lists seven plaintiffs. In a news release, the ACLU said more than 1,500 transgender people or their family members have contacted the organization concerned about not being able to get passports that reflect their identity
ABC News has reached out to the State Department for comment on the lawsuit.
Trump’s executive order, signed his first day in office, legally declared that there are only “two sexes, male and female” and defined a “female” as “a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell.” The order defined “male” as “a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the small reproductive cell.”
The executive order stated: “Invalidating the true and biological category of ‘woman’ improperly transforms laws and policies designed to protect sex-based opportunities into laws and policies that undermine them, replacing longstanding, cherished legal rights and values with an identity-based, inchoate social concept.”
The move was criticized by some medical and legal advocates, who argued the executive order rejected the reality of sexual and gender diversity.
In 2021, the State Department relaxed its rules, allowing applicants to self-identify as either “M” or “F” without needing medical certification or additional documentation to do so. Shortly after, the agency began issuing “X” gender markers for intersex or nonbinary residents.
In states across the country, some residents are allowed to self-select or change the gender or sex on their birth certificates and driver’s licenses.
(WASHINGTON) — The deadline has quietly passed on Attorney General Pam Bondi delivering a report to President Donald Trump on whether any leftover Biden administration policies infringe on Americans’ right to bear arms. It came just days after Democratic leaders sent her a letter suggesting there is “plainly no need for any new plan of action.”
Trump signed an executive order on Feb. 7 after making campaign promises to gun-rights groups like the National Rifle Association (NRA) that “no one will lay a finger on your firearms.”
The president instructed Bondi to “examine all orders, regulations, guidance, plans, international agreements, and other actions of executive departments and agencies” and determine if any of them violate the Second Amendment.
“The Second Amendment is an indispensable safeguard of security and liberty. It has preserved the right of the American people to protect ourselves, our families, and our freedoms since the founding of our great Nation,” Trump’s executive order reads. “Because it is foundational to maintaining all other rights held by Americans, the right to keep and bear arms must not be infringed.”
The 30-day mark for Bondi to report back to Trump through his domestic policy director would have been this past Sunday.
Andrew Willinger, executive director of the Center for Firearms Law at Duke University School of Law, told ABC News the broadly written executive order “signals to me that this isn’t a top priority” for the Trump administration.
“Obviously, if there were things that were on the administration’s radar as possibly violating the Second Amendment or violating the rights of gun owners in some way, they could have started to roll those back right away and wouldn’t have needed to take this intermediate step of issuing a directive to the Attorney General to figure out what those were,” Willinger said. “That suggests that there’s nothing out there that the administration viewed as so pressing that they have to get rid of it right away.”
‘Perfectly consistent with the 2nd Amendment’
After Trump signed the executive order, NRA Executive Vice President Doug Hamlin released a statement praising the president’s move.
“Promises made to law-abiding gun owners are being kept by President Donald J. Trump,” Hamlin said. “NRA members were instrumental, turning out in record numbers to secure his victory, and he is proving worthy of their votes, faith and confidence in his first days in office.”
John Commerford, executive director of the NRA Institute for Legislative Action, also released a statement, saying, “After a long four years, law-abiding gun owners no longer have to worry about being the target of an anti-gun radical administration. NRA looks forward to the advances and restoration of our rights that will come from President Trump’s respect for the Constitution.”
It is unclear whether or not Bondi met the deadline on delivering the report — nothing had been publicly released as of Wednesday. When ABC News asked this week about the Bondi’s pending plan of action, Department of Justice officials said they would check but had no immediate information on the report’s status. The White House also did not respond to ABC News’ inquiry about Bondi’s pending report.
Earlier this month, Rep. Jamie Raskin, D-Maryland, ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee, and Rep. Lucy McBath, D-Georgia, ranking member of the House subcommittee on Crime and Federal Government Surveillance, sent Bondi a letter.
“We are determined to protect our communities against lethal gun crime in a manner consistent with the Second Amendment,” they wrote.
The letter said that if Bondi carried out her examination “objectively and in good faith” she’ll find that actions taken by the previous administration to fight gun violence are “perfectly consistent with the Second Amendment.”
“There is plainly no need for any new plan of action to, in the words of the executive order, ‘protect the Second Amendment rights of all Americans,'” the letter said.
In his executive order, Trump instructed Bondi that in addition to reviewing all presidential actions taken on gun control from January 2021 to January 2025, he wanted her to review rules about firearms and federal firearm licensing implemented by the Department of Justice and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms, and Explosives (ATF).
Trump specifically asked Bondi to review the ATF’s “enhanced regulatory enforcement policy” — also called the “zero tolerance policy” — implemented in 2021 under Biden and former Attorney General Merrick Garland to identify federal firearms dealers who violate the 1968 Gun Control Act.
Under the policy, firearms dealers had their licenses revoked for willfully transferring firearms to prohibited people, failing to conduct the required background checks, falsifying records and failing to respond to a gun trace request. The policy prompted several lawsuits from gun dealers who argued their licenses were revoked over minor clerical errors.
Raskin and McBath claimed that in the three years since the policy was implemented, about 0.3% of the nation’s roughly 130,000 federal gun dealers had their licenses revoked.
“Through this policy, ATF has enforced the Gun Control Act as passed by Congress and had revoked the licenses of a tiny fraction of gun dealers who willfully violated the law,” Raskin and McBath said in their letter to Bondi. “The ATF’s enhanced regulatory policy has not prevented a single American who may lawfully possess a firearm from exercising his or her Second Amendment rights.”
The ATF reported that in fiscal year 2023, the agency found 1,531 violations after conducting 8,689 firearm compliance inspections. The inspections, according to the ATF, prompted 667 warning letters and 170 revocations.
“Law-abiding gun dealers remain in business throughout the country. In fact, there remain more gun dealers than there are locations of Starbucks, McDonald’s, Dunkin’ Donuts, Burger King, Subway, and Chick-fil-A combined,” Raskin and McBath said in their letter.
The Democratic lawmakers asked Bondi to respond to their letter by the end of the business day on Monday, explaining what standards she will use to determine if policies taken by the Biden administration violate the Second Amendment and how she will ensure her plan of action “does not increase the risk of violent crime, including gun deaths.”
Majority of Americans favor stronger gun laws
A Pew Research Center poll released in July 2024 found that 61% of respondents agreed that it is too easy to legally obtain a gun and 58% favored stricter gun laws.
“We know that the vast majority of Americans — including gun owners and Trump voters — support basic safety laws that crack down on crime and keep all communities safe. These policies are in no way inconsistent with the Second Amendment,” Kris Brown, president of the gun-safety advocacy group Brady United, said in a statement after Trump signed the executive order.
Brown noted that policies under Biden included expanding background checks for gun buyers and “cracking down on rogue gun traffickers.”
“They must be continued if this President actually wants to achieve any of his campaign promises around reducing crime, cracking down on drug traffickers, and reducing the flow of trafficked weapons across the southern border,” Brown said.
In the aftermath of the 2022 mass shooting at Robb Elementary School in Uvalde, Texas, that claimed the lives of 19 children and two teachers, Biden signed the Bipartisan Safer Communities Act, the first major piece of federal gun reform to clear both chambers in 30 years.
The law enhanced background checks for gun buyers under the age of 21 by giving authorities up to 10 business days to review the juvenile and mental health records of young gun purchasers, and made it unlawful for someone to purchase a gun for someone who would fail a background check. This legislation closed the so-called “boyfriend loophole” preventing individuals convicted of domestic abuse from purchasing a gun.
The law included $750 million to help states implement “red flag” laws to remove firearms from people deemed to be a danger to themselves or others, as well as other violence prevention programs. It also provided funding for a variety of programs aimed at shoring up the nation’s mental health apparatus and securing schools.
Willinger told ABC News that “short of asking Congress to appeal it,” there is little the Trump administration can do about the law.
“It’s possible that the administration could do stuff to hold up that money,” Willinger said. “I don’t know what wiggle room they have to do that.”
