Message of Solidarity & Support, Freedom & Mutual Care from the University of Iowa Department of Gender, Women’s & Sexuality Studies

The Department of Gender, Women’s and Sexuality Studies at the University of Iowa emphatically affirms our concern for and ongoing support of LGBTQIA+ students, colleagues, and community members.  We especially assert our unwavering solidarity with trans, nonbinary, and/or gender nonconforming students, who have recently become the targets of discrimination as well as hostile and misleading representation.   

As a faculty, we are familiar with the substantial body of research on sex and gender across a host of fields, including biomedicine, history, anthropology, psychology, and political science. Experts across all fields understand that sex and gender are not and never have been sheerly binary. Many have traced the long history of gender diverse or gender nonconforming individuals and communities in the Americas and across the world. We know that gender-affirming healthcare has been judiciously vetted by the nation’s top medical associations, including the American Medical Association, the American Academy of Pediatrics and the American Psychological Association, along with international bodies such as the World Professional Association for Transgender Health. We fully support ensuring access of transgender, nonbinary and/or gender nonconforming students to bathrooms and changing rooms corresponding to their gender in or to preserve their bodily sovereignty, gender self-determination, and physical and psychological well-being.

As a faculty, we want to address our students directly: we see you, we care about you, and we are here to offer a soft place to land and a generative place to think in this too-often hostile environment. To do so is part of our educational and research mission.

We want to emphasize our year-round advocacy and affirmation of the value and human rights of every single one of us. 

In solidarity and with love