Wilson v. State of Iowa and Kim Reynolds for Iowa —
Part One:
Intersex in Iowa
Two Arrests. A Wrongful Assault Conviction. An Officer's Warning to Leave Iowa.
Sixteen Years Later, I Opened the Records.

By Sondra Wilson | Updated August 30, 2026

The events documented here became Part One of my July 23, 2024 Amended Petition in Wilson v. State of Iowa and Kim Reynolds for Iowa.

The petition called that portion:

“PART ONE: HARASSMENT, DISCRIMINATION, FRAUD, AND RIGHTS VIOLATIONS BY PUBLIC OFFICIALS IN STORY COUNTY CAUSED ME TO REMAIN HOMELESS FROM 2009–2018.”

It began with my May 22, 2006 arrest, continued through the restroom arrest, the resolution I understood I had received, the 2009 assault prosecution and officer's warning, my unsuccessful attempt to appeal, and the years I remained afraid to return home.

But that was not the end of Part One.

Later in the same Amended Petition, after recounting the events that caused me to reopen the old records, I returned to this history under the heading:

“PART ONE REVISTED: DISCOVERED BEHIND-THE-SCENES FRAUD FROM THE 2006 AND 2009 CASES; LIMITATIONS PERIOD WAS TOLLED, AND COMMENCED HERE.”

The petition identified November 2, 2022 as the point when I ordered the old dockets and discovered information I had not known when these events occurred.

That is why this series has three articles.

The first two tell the story largely in the order I experienced it.

The third begins when I finally saw the records.

I am presenting the evidence in that order intentionally, so readers can encounter the discoveries when I did rather than being told the ending in advance.

Table of Contents

 

I. Historical Context

II. The 2006–2009 Events That Kept Me Homeless and Impoverished

Article One: The Records Mismatch — May 22–July 21, 2006

Article Two: The Officer's Warning — March–June 2009

Article Three: Collateral Damage — 2022: I Finally Opened the Records

The Question Iowans Should Ask

III. Where Part One Fit into My Amended Petition

Part One — Story County: 2006–2009 and the Years of Homelessness That Followed

Part Two — Defamation and Rights Violations by Kim Reynolds for Iowa and the State of Iowa

Part Three — Iowa's Civil-Rights Trap and the Iowa Civil Rights Commission

Part One Revisited — What I Discovered in the Old Records in 2022

Part Four — Continuing Alleged Rights Violations and the Injunctive Relief I Requested

Why I Directed the Case Toward the State

The Underlying Controversy Was Never Tried

IV. Read What Happened After I Filed the Case

I. Historical Context

 

When these events began in 2006, I knew almost nothing about Iowa's longer history of persecuting LGBT+ and gender-nonconforming people.

I did not know about Iowa's sterilization laws, the 1955 Sioux City “sexual psychopath” roundup, or earlier cases in which transgender Iowans encountered discrimination without meaningful legal protection.

That history is documented separately in:

Before the Culture War: Iowa's Dark History of Persecuting LGBT+ People, 1838-2006

I did not know that history then. I was living inside its aftermath.

Click the below image to read the timeline, or keep scrolling to read the records and my testimony.

 

 

 

II. The 2006–2009 Events That Kept Me Homeless and Impoverished

 

Article One:
The Records Mismatch
May 22-July 21, 2006

 

They planned to let me go. Then I told the officer I was transgender.

On May 22, 2006, I was playing guitar off to the side of the Kum & Go building in west Ames when police approached me. I identified myself as Alexandra and provided my Social Security number. Officer Marshall told me that the information he retrieved came back under the name Alexander Wilson.

I explained that I was transgender and undergoing medical transition.

I was arrested.

Officer Rivera later told me that they had originally planned simply to ask me to leave, and that Officer Marshall decided to arrest me after running my identifying information and encountering the mismatch.

Two months later, when I returned to court, I used the women's restroom across the hall.

I was arrested again.

An attorney later presented me with what I understood to be the resolution: an apology from the City of Ames and a $1,500 payment. I accepted what he presented to me and spent years believing that, despite what had happened, the matter had ultimately been resolved in my favor.

What I did not know was what the surviving legal record said.

READ ARTICLE ONE — THE RECORDS MISMATCH

Article Two:
The Officer's Warning
March-June 2009

 

Three years later, while visiting Ames and gathering signatures for an animal-welfare petition, I was accused of assaulting a Culver's manager.

I denied it from the beginning and pleaded NOT GUILTY.

At trial, the central witnesses gave radically different accounts:

three hard kicks, one light kick, or no touching at all.

One of the manager's own witnesses testified that I never touched her.

Judge Steven Van Marel nevertheless found me guilty.

I attempted to appeal. In my handwritten filing, I told the court:

“I am homeless and do not have money to pay for this appeal but in the name of justice please hear me out.”

The appeal was later dismissed because the docketing fee had not been paid.

After the trial, an Ames police officer approached me privately, said he was speaking “off the record,” and warned me that based on what he was hearing “behind the scenes,” I should leave Iowa for my safety.

I took him seriously. I left.

There was something important about the judge's prior history with me that I still did not know.

READ ARTICLE TWO — THE OFFICER'S WARNING

Article Three:
Collateral Damage
2022 — I Finally Opened the Records

 

For years, I told essentially the same story about what had happened in Ames:

I had pleaded NOT GUILTY.
An attorney came to help me.
The City issued an apology and payment.
I believed I had ultimately prevailed.

In 2022, that understanding began to unravel.

An apartment denial and the Reliable Street dispute gave me compelling reasons to find out exactly what Iowa's old court records said about me.

For the first time in sixteen years, I obtained the dockets and began reconstructing what had happened behind the scenes.

What I found changed my understanding of the 2006 arrests, the resolution I believed I had accepted, and the 2009 prosecution.

Those discoveries later became what my Amended Petition called:

“PART ONE REVISTED.”

I will not summarize the discoveries here. Article Three presents the documents in the order I found them.

READ ARTICLE THREE — COLLATERAL DAMAGE

The Question Iowans Should Ask

 

In 2006, Iowa had not yet added gender identity to its Civil Rights Act.

But the deeper question is not simply what protections had already been written into statute.

Is this what we want to put a fellow citizen through?

I was an adult seeking medical care and trying to live peacefully in my own body. Less than a year after these events began, Iowa added gender identity to the Civil Rights Act.

The law changed. The injuries did not disappear.

III. Where Part One Fit into My Amended Petition

 

Intersex in Iowa is Part One of my documentary reconstruction of Wilson v. State of Iowa and Kim Reynolds for Iowa.

My July 23, 2024 Amended Petition organized the State case into four major parts.

“PART ONE: HARASSMENT, DISCRIMINATION, FRAUD, AND RIGHTS VIOLATIONS BY PUBLIC OFFICIALS IN STORY COUNTY CAUSED ME TO REMAIN HOMELESS FROM 2009–2018.”

This is the history reconstructed in Intersex in Iowa: the 2006 arrests, the resolution I understood I had received, the 2009 assault prosecution, the officer’s warning, my unsuccessful attempt to appeal, the years I remained afraid to return home, and what I later discovered when I reopened the records.

The petition then moved into:

“PART TWO: DEFAMATION AND RIGHTS VIOLATIONS BY KIM REYNOLDS FOR IOWA AND STATE OF IOWA; MY RIGHTS WERE VIOLATED AND I WAS HARMED.”

That history is reconstructed in Popularizing Discrimination, which examines the Good decision, HF 766, Medicaid coverage for medically necessary transgender healthcare, political messaging concerning transgender Iowans, canceled medical treatment, and the harms I brought before the court.

Click the image to read this section of the case.

The petition then moved into a third major history:

“PART THREE: FRAUDULENT MISREPRESENTATION BY THE IOWA CIVIL RIGHTS COMMISSION RECKLESSLY ENDANGERS MINORITIES AND MISLEADS TAXPAYERS; STATE DOESN'T HOLD BUSINESSES ACCOUNTABLE FOR LYING TO THE ICRC; URGENT REFORM NEEDED!”

That history is reconstructed in Iowa's Civil-Rights Trap, which examines Wilson v. Reliable Street Inc., et al., the ICRC process, the evidence I contend was withheld from me, the practical limitations problem that followed, and my attempts to obtain help elsewhere.

Then the Amended Petition returned to the history documented on this page:

“PART ONE REVISTED: DISCOVERED BEHIND-THE-SCENES FRAUD FROM THE 2006 AND 2009 CASES; LIMITATIONS PERIOD WAS TOLLED, AND COMMENCED HERE.”

That is where I described ordering the old dockets in November 2022 and discovering information I had not known when the original events occurred.

Finally, the petition moved into:

“PART FOUR: THE STATE IS STILL ACTIVELY CONSPIRING TO VIOLATE TRANSGENDER PEOPLES' RIGHTS AND ERODE LEGAL PROTECTIONS FOR ALL DEMOGRAPHICS WHICH ARE PROTECTED BY THE IOWA CIVIL RIGHTS ACT; URGENT INJUNCTIVE RELIEF REQUESTED IN ORDER TO HALT THIS CONSPIRACY AND INSTEAD IMPROVE THE STATE OF IOWA.”

Part Four addressed later political conduct, additional alleged acts, and the injunctive relief I was asking the court to consider.

Seen together, the four Parts were not separate stories. They were the chronology I brought before the court to explain how one period of injury led into the next.

Why I Directed the Case Toward the State

 

One issue the State later raised was that some of the conduct described in my petition involved city, county, local, or individual actors rather than the State itself.

I did not ignore that distinction.

I made a deliberate decision to petition the government as a whole for redress of a connected series of grievances.

The alternative would have required me to attempt separate lawsuits against numerous individuals, offices, agencies, and governmental entities. That would have meant multiple filing fees, multiple service requirements, multiple sets of procedural deadlines, multiple records, and potentially repeated testimony from many of the same witnesses.

It also would have fragmented a connected factual record across different cases, even though many of the same documents, witnesses, injuries, and questions of government responsibility overlapped.

For a self-represented person with limited financial resources, that approach would have been extraordinarily expensive, complicated, and impractical.

I also anticipated that many of the same records and witnesses would be relevant across the history I was presenting. My purpose was not to scatter one connected story into a collection of isolated lawsuits. It was to bring the entire pattern before the government and ask for redress.

That is also why the First Amendment mattered to me.

The First Amendment protects the right of the people:

“to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

That is what I was doing: petitioning the government for redress of grievances.

I was petitioning my government for redress of grievances arising through government officials, agencies, courts, rules, and statewide policies.

After the State argued that my petition included claims and allegations involving various local officials and other actors outside the State, I responded that the State was the proper institutional defendant under the doctrine of respondeat superior.

In my September 7, 2024 motion to reconsider, I wrote:

“Although § 1983 claims are typically filed against the county, city, and/or government official(s), due to the unique nature of this suit, wherein crimes and torts were performed by a wide variety of both state and local officials, the state appears to be the most appropriate party for this suit according to the longstanding, fundamental legal doctrine of respondeat superior.”

I argued that, because the history involved numerous government actors and institutions, the State was the appropriate institutional defendant, and that respondeat superior provided a basis for holding a principal responsible for wrongful acts of its agents committed within the relevant scope of their authority.

That was my legal theory. I do not present it here as a judicial determination that the State was legally responsible for every person or act described in my petition.

There was another reason I did not want to fragment the case into multiple lawsuits against local officials.

After an Ames police officer warned me to leave Iowa for my safety, I had lived for years with fear surrounding what had happened in that community. In my motion to reconsider, I explained that I did not feel safe filing directly against local officials there and instead felt safer bringing the matter to the State level.

I chose the course that seemed most practical, safest, and most faithful to the constitutional right I was trying to exercise: petitioning the government for redress of grievances.

The Underlying Controversy Was Never Tried

 

The district court later dismissed the claims against the State with prejudice before a jury ever decided the underlying factual allegations.

I moved to reconsider that result and specifically asked the court either to allow the case to proceed or, at minimum, to reconsider the “with prejudice” determination.

On September 9, 2024, the court denied the reconsideration motions “without further hearing.”

I do not regard those procedural dismissals as a resolution of the underlying facts documented in this series.

Later articles will reconstruct exactly how those dismissals occurred, what arguments the State made, what I argued in response, and why I continue challenging the result.

This page is not that part of the story. This page is the record of what happened before I ever reached that courtroom.

IV. Read What Happened After I Filed the Case

 

Part One tells what happened to me. The later installments show what happened when I finally asked the courts to do something about it.

 

Read: Wilson v. State of Iowa and Kim Reynolds for Iowa