On the morning of March 13, Eden Knight, 23, posted a suicide note on Twitter after not being in contact with friends online for a few days. The note shared the long and harrowing story that led Eden to this point.
For the past few years, Eden had been living in the United States as a student and has most recently been studying at George Mason University. Originally from Saudi Arabia, Eden had come out as transgender, starting hormone replacement therapy in 2022. Coming from a very conservative Muslim family, Eden was hoping to claim asylum once her student visa expired. She never got the chance.
According to her Twitter post, two American lawyers contacted her about fixing the relationship with her parents, involving a Saudi lawyer. She was convinced to travel to Washington D.C., where she eventually became financially dependent on the lawyer. The lawyer pressured her into detransitioning and eventually took her back to Saudi Arabia, where being LGBTQ+ is criminalized, sometimes going as far as issuing the death penalty. It was here that Eden posted about taking her own life, which has since been confirmed.
“I did everything he asked,” Eden wrote. “I cut my hair, I stopped taking estrogen, I changed my wardrobe, I met my dad. And then I had another breakdown. My mom kept telling me to repent or I was going to hell, and I did… I repented, and I was broken.”
Her family, an affluent and influential family in both Saudi Arabia and D.C., shared a funeral announcement, using Eden’s dead name (defined by Merriam-Webster as ‘the name that a transgender person was given at birth and no longer uses upon transitioning.’).
So what is the point of me sharing this? Eden likely never even visited Iowa, her story seems to have nothing to do with anyone here. However, this story is just one of many LGBTQ+ youth. Though we may not have laws that imprison or kill LGBTQ+ people, laws that take away their rights are consistently being introduced and brought into effect.
A couple weeks ago, I attended the Union County edition of Legislative Coffee, where state senators and representatives come and answer questions from their constituents. Here, Senator Amy Sinclair and Representative Devon Woods shared the same sentiment: “These aren’t anti-LGBT bills, these are pro-parent bills.”
Two of the bills in question are House File 9 and Senate File 482.
House file 9 requires that if the school learns a student is not cisgender or straight, they are by law required to tell the parents of said student. From situations I have seen both in the news and in my own life, I know that this will be harmful to LGBTQ+ youths.
Though Iowan youths that are involuntarily outed may not face the death penalty, many will be subject to difficult situations at home. According to The Trevor Project, “14% of LGBTQ youth reported that they had slept away from parents or caregivers because they were kicked out or abandoned.” Others face consistent emotional and verbal abuse, sometimes leading to suicide like in Eden’s case.
In Senate File 482, students will be required to use bathrooms and locker rooms that coordinate with their sex at birth. A transgender boy will have no choice but to use the girls’ locker room unless he gets written consent from his guardians. If written consent is given, then he will be allowed “A. Access to a single occupancy restroom or changing area. B. Access to a unisex single occupancy restroom or changing area.”
Bathrooms and locker rooms are already tricky situations for young people. Students don’t want to have to change in front of each other, even when they all identify the same way. Throw someone with another gender identity in there and everyone gets more uncomfortable.
According to a 2019 study done by Harvard, transgender teens with a restricted access to bathrooms and locker rooms are at a higher risk of sexual assault. In a survey of almost 3,700 U.S. teens, 25.9% of them “reported being a victim of sexual assault in the past year.”
It is important to remember LGBTQ+ people are not the enemy. People often share the rhetoric of “protecting our daughters” like Rep. Steven Holt said recently. If a transgender person wants to sexually assault someone, it’s because they are a bad person, not because they are transgender. Look at our own city: Most if not all of these disgusting crimes have been committed by straight, cisgender men. I’m not going to start saying that all men aren’t allowed around any children because of this; I know that it’s just a few bad people.
Iowa was once a safer place for LGBTQ+ people. In 2009, Iowa became the third U.S. state to legalize same-sex marriage. Now, an Iowa bill had been introduced to ban same-sex marriage. What has happened to this state?
We need bills in place to protect children, including LGBTQ+ children, and the ones being put into law recently are doing the opposite. Numerous people have commented to me that they are afraid to raise children in Iowa because of these rules. We need to change what is happening in Iowa to make this state a safer place for ALL people, not just more comfortable for a select few.