The price of discrimination 

In the deepest, most profound sense, I’m an Iowan at heart. I moved to Cedar Rapids in 1968 when I was 11 years old and graduated from high school and Coe College there. Then I moved away for law school and my first lawyer years in Boston, but it didn’t take hold; seven years later, I returned to Cedar Rapids because I believed in the promise of my state. That promise: we are a good, friendly hard-working people who always do the right thing, regardless.  It was Iowa — Cedar Rapids — where I wanted to build a law practice and raise my two daughters. And wow, I succeeded in doing that in ways that I could never have imagined. Before it was over, we lived in one of the city’s best neighborhoods where my daughters (adoptees from Korea) thrived, and where my law practice expanded tenfold, employing a dozen people.  Still, there’s a wrinkle in this story. I’m transgender and in 2009, I was the first Iowa lawyer to ever transition from male to female while overseeing a law firm. While Iowa’s legal and judicial communities were exceedingly supportive of my gender transition, many of my clients were not. Consequently, in March 2010, I closed up shop and moved to the Twin Cities where I felt safe to live as the true me, a woman. Once there, I founded an award-winning legal access nonprofit, orchestrated the creation of a nonprofit law firm to help middle-income people, and created a diversity and inclusion training company that ultimately trained all of Iowa’s judges and Supreme Court justices. Still, I’m an Iowan. Minnesota, though it has much to offer, isn’t Iowa. I miss my fellow Iowans who are willing to strike up conversations with strangers in grocery store parking lots. Thus, last year I planned to return to Iowa — at age 64, I’m thinking of my last breaths and I desperately want them to occur on the soil of my beloved state. However, I waited to see how the 2020 elections turned out, and for me, a transgender person, they were a disaster. Indeed, when Pat Grassley declared that Iowa voters had given Republicans a “mandate” to govern, it was clear that returning to Iowa would be impossible.  If you’re transgender, or gay or lesbian or bisexual, the phrase “mandate” means that people will come after you. You’re now a target.  Unfortunately, that is exactly what’s happened. I keep abreast of Iowa politics and see that 15 different bills targeting LGBTQ people (primarily transgender humans like me) have been introduced in this legislative session. There’s now even a bill to prohibit the kind of training I do — on the historical advantages that white people have had over people with other skin colors — meaning that the state’s Republican leaders are even trying to prohibit me from making a living.  On top of that, there’s the new voting restriction law, which effectively targets anyone who isn’t white in skin color. It’s a horrible message to everyone from a marginalized community, regardless of skin color or LGBTQ status: you are not welcome here.  All of this is appalling and confirms that my instincts were good in not returning to Iowa.  Now for what this kind of discrimination costs.  Instead of returning to Iowa, I bought a house in the rural outer western Twin Cities suburbs — a place where I can see a farm from my sunroom window, which reminds me of Iowa. Instead of going to an Iowa builder, the dollars to buy that house stayed here in Minnesota. Additionally, the dollars to buy new furniture, new rugs, a deck for the home, and a host of other things that come with new home ownership will stay here in Minnesota, benefitting Minnesota businesses.  I would have so much more preferred to spend those dollars (maybe $600,000 altogether) in Iowa, but overt discrimination (including transphobia) prevented that.  Even more, in my time since I left Iowa, I have learned so much about how to make society more welcoming to people who are “Other.” I’ve been declared a leader on helping to heal communities. Yet, this too is likely not something that I’ll not be able to share by returning to Iowa.  It very well may be that I never again live in Iowa, a place that I so love. Intolerant and ignorant people have kept me in Minnesota. In the end, it’s not only me, but Iowa, that are the losers. Someone needs to understand this.  In 2009, when she was a civil trial attorney in Cedar Rapids with more than 100 trials, Ellen (Ellie) Krug transitioned from male to female; she later became one of the few attorneys nationally to try jury cases in separate genders. The author of “Getting to Ellen: A Memoir about Love, Honesty and Gender Change” (2013), Ellie has trained on diversity and inclusion to court systems, law firms, Fortune 100 corporations, and colleges/universities on nearly 1,000 occasions. A hopeless idealist, Ellie has presented her inclusivity training, Gray Area Thinking®, across the country. She presently lives in a far western suburb of the Twin Cities.