O n Monday, May 13, progressive members of the Minnesota house of representatives brought all their radical social policies to the floor in one fell swoop with a vote on the so-called “Equal Rights Amendment” (ERA). If they are passed by both the Minnesota house and senate, there is no requirement that ballot proposals be signed by the governor. The proposed amendment would be put before voters as a ballot question in an upcoming election, likely in November 2026, and a majority vote is needed to adopt the amendment to the state constitution.
Proponents claim that the ERA is needed because it would guarantee equal rights to all Minnesotans. The truth is quite different.
Article I, section 2 of the Minnesota constitution already prohibits sex discrimination. That said, Minnesota courts have recognized that laws based on physiological characteristics unique to one sex do not constitute sex discrimination under the state constitution. Minnesota’s proposed ERA would eliminate this sensible distinction.
Far from protecting equal rights, Minnesota’s proposed ERA would require courts to ignore real biological differences, stripping women and girls of many longstanding legal protections. The proposed language would expand the definition of sex discrimination to include discrimination on the basis of decisions regarding pregnancy, “gender identity” or “gender expression,” and sexual orientation. The inclusion of pregnancy decisions would enshrine an unlimited right to abortion in the state constitution, while defining sex discrimination to include “gender identity” or “gender expression” would require public institutions to ignore biological differences between males and females. Ignoring real differences in the name of some false notion of “equality” ultimately harms both sexes but is especially damaging to women and girls.
Minnesota already has a judicially created right to abortion that requires public funding and has been used to strike down common-sense health and safety laws regarding such procedures. If passed, the proposed ERA would be used to eliminate the few remaining protections for women, girls, and preborn children in the state.
The redefinition of sex discrimination to include “gender identity” and “gender expression” ignores biological reality. As drafted, the proposed ERA requires any legal distinctions based on sex to satisfy the highest level of judicial scrutiny to survive. Government officials would be required to show that any differences in the law are necessary to achieve a “compelling state interest” and use only the most “narrowly tailored means” to do so. This level of judicial review will make it impossible to uphold many common-sense distinctions in the law protecting women and girls.
Males who “identify as women” will get priority access to women- and girls’-only spaces such as restrooms, locker rooms, domestic shelters, and prison facilities. Rather than competing against their biological counterparts, male athletes like Lia Thomas and others will choose to compete against females, taking athletic opportunities, medals, records, and scholarships previously available only to women and girls. Should the ERA change Minnesota’s constitution, males will have a constitutional right to take away women and girls’ access to society.
The inclusion of “gender identity” and “gender expression” ignores biology and devalues women and children in society.
These concerns are not hyperbole. Gender ideology has already begun to harm Minnesota women and girls.
Since last year, the Minnesota Correctional Facility Shakopee Women’s Prison has housed at least two male inmates who “identify as women.” Bradley Richard Sirvio, currently housed in Shakopee, is serving a life sentence for convicted homicide. For the female inmates serving their sentences, being forced to share their space with male criminals is cruel and unusual punishment. That punishment fits no crime.
The Minnesota court of appeals has twisted equal protection on its head while abandoning all regard for the privacy, safety, and dignity of young girls in Minnesota. This, when Minnesota girls have worn gym clothes underneath their regular clothing the entire day to avoid the locker room after the school allowed a male to play girls’ athletics and use the girls’ locker facilities.
After the introduction of the new ERA in 2023, a Minnesota nonprofit that serves victims of sexual abuse withdrew from a state grant program at the risk of closing its doors. The ERA could force this organization to house males who “identify as women” to receive state funding.
The same gender ideology embedded in the proposed ERA has led to increasing confusion and anxiety among young girls who question whether they have been born into the wrong bodies. Adolescents and teens are seeking to “change identity” through medicalization at increased rates. Exposure to pornographic content and sexually abusive experiences and social contagion are some contributing factors to attempts to “change identity.”
Under the proposed ERA’s language of “gender identity,” objections to so-called “gender-affirming care” for girls, no matter how sound as a matter of evidence-based medicine, could be characterized as unconstitutional sex discrimination. Nations considered politically to the left of the United States have recently stopped prescribing so-called “gender-affirming care” to children except in cases of clinical trials and research. In June 2023, Joshua Cohen of Forbes noted how “longitudinal data collected and analyzed by public health authorities in Finland, Sweden, the Netherlands and England have concluded that the risk-benefit ratio of youth gender transition ranges from unknown to unfavorable.”
England and Scotland recently stopped prescribing puberty blockers to children except in clinical trials due to these concerns. These changes in practice were concurrent with the findings from the Cass Report, commissioned by Britain’s National Health Service (NHS), which found that there is little evidence to support prescription of puberty blockers to children. “It is unusual for us to give a potentially life-changing treatment to young people and not know what happens to them in adulthood, and that’s been a particular problem that we haven’t had the follow-up into adulthood to know what the results of this are,” Dr. Hilary Cass, the report’s author, told BBC News.
In Minnesota, Democratic legislators have sidelined these global concerns. In the 2023 session, for example, this same Minnesota legislature passed a bill that could give courts temporary emergency jurisdiction of children when the child is unable to receive so-called “gender-affirming care” under the custody of his or her parents, putting this in the same category as abuse and neglect. A leading provider at Children’s Minnesota Gender Health Program testified in favor of this bill before the Minnesota legislature. On April 28, 2023, Governor Tim Walz signed this bill into law. Minnesota families from across the political spectrum have already experienced the harm of government’s promotion of this gender ideology to their children. As drafted, the proposed ERA would make such ideology the law of the land and could give children a constitutional right to experimental and potentially dangerous medical “treatments.”
The evidence is clear: When law demands public affirmation of separating sex from “gender,” women and children suffer the consequences. The passage of Minnesota’s proposed ERA would be a step toward an androgynous future in which government demands its citizens ignore reality and embrace a false equality of the sexes. By government edict, the rights and protections that have allowed women and girls to flourish in the public square and economic life of this country will be erased, with no one remembering that those protections were the legal foundation of true equality of the sexes.
Rebecca Delahunt serves as the director of public policy with the Minnesota Family Council. Renee K. Carlson serves as general counsel for True North Legal and Minnesota Family Council.