Part I
"Are you voting with your sister's ID?"
On November 8th, 2016, Finley Wolff, a then-35-year-old man, approached the polls of Lafayette, Indiana, to vote for a new President.
Unlike thousands of other residents, though, Wolff was stopped when the poll workers saw his driver’s license.
“Are you voting with your sister’s ID?” Wolff remembers one official asking. “What’s going on here?”
Wolff, in fact, was not voting with his sister’s ID. He was a transgender man in the middle of his transition. While he had begun medical treatment, he hadn’t yet changed the name, photo, and gender marker on his ID, which meant that he no longer resembled the picture on his driver’s license when he went to the polls.
For transgender people who have begun medically transitioning, strict voter ID laws can create additional complications. Many who have begun to transition often end up looking very different from their pre-transition selves, sometimes to the point of being unrecognizable, as in Wolff’s case in Indiana. In addition to the changes in appearance, a trans person voting with a name or gender marker that does not seem to match their gender presentation can rouse suspicion about voter fraud—potentially forcing someone to out themself as trans to explain the discrepancies, and risking being turned away from the polls if they cannot convince officials there that they are eligible to vote.
This difficult situation has not changed from when Wolff tried to vote in 2016; in fact, a Williams Institute study from February 2020, estimated that more than 378,000 voter-eligible trans people—or 42.4% of all voter-eligible trans people—might face barriers in the November 2020 election to voting due to voter registration requirements and voter ID laws. The study also estimated that around one-fifth of those at risk would reside in the eight strict photo ID states, where an acceptable ID must fall into very narrow parameters, and can rouse suspicion when it does not.
While Wolff was eventually allowed to vote after several minutes arguing with poll workers, his experience voting while trans points to a larger issue: lacking an accurate government-issued ID can keep transgender people from accessing things like housing, employment—and the fundamental right to vote.
Part II
A $25,000 ID
Government-issued IDs in the United States today can often be lifelines. They allow people to rent or own a home, find a job, board a plane, and drive a car. And in all but 14 states, some form of government-issued ID is required to either vote or register to vote.
Yet despite how essential they are to modern life, IDs are not always easy to access—and they can have costs for trans people that no other group has to bear.
Jeff Graham, the executive director of Georgia Equality, an organization aimed at increasing LGBTQ+ equality in that state, which also has strict photo voter ID laws, agrees, saying that the current voter ID laws there can disproportionately impact rural communities, the elderly, and low-income folks. But it is Georgia’s laws around gender marker changes make its ID laws not only restrictive (which are also currently becoming more so) but also expensive for trans voters.
To change one’s gender marker on a Georgia driver’s license, a person must submit evidence (either a court order or a physician’s letter) of gender affirmation surgery. Without a surgery—which, according to the Philadelphia Center for Transgender Surgery, can cost up to $25,000—no gender marker change is possible. And Georgia isn’t alone; according to the Movement Advancement Project (MAP), eight states require surgery in order for someone to get their gender marker changed on their driver’s license. (Along with Georgia, Tennessee is the only other state to have both strict photo ID requirements and require surgery to change a gender marker on an ID.)
Even in states without such restrictive gender marker laws, however, the process isn’t always easy. Some are easy to understand and do not require a doctor’s letter; others are more difficult and limit the number of medical providers from whom they will accept a letter. Some states have no process set in stone, and some have no clear policy at all. And even when states do have non-burdensome policies around gender marker changes, human error (or judgement) can come into play.
Mathiae Rowe, a 20-year-old nonbinary college student in Duffield, Virginia, saw the impact of human error when some of his friends decided to change their gender markers. To change a gender marker in that state, one only has to request a new license from the DMV and fill out a form. The state also recently added the X gender marker as an option, which, for some nonbinary people, can represent their gender more accurately than an M or F marker, and which Rowe’s friends wanted to get. But when they got their updated IDs, they did not get what they had asked for.
“They actually had to go back to the DMV and fix it, because the person that selected their gender markers selected it as female, instead of the [X] selection that they [requested],” said Rowe.
Gender markers, and the confusing, highly variable laws surrounding them, are one of many areas in which protections for trans people in the U.S. are notoriously patchy. Because gender is not a federally protected class, any protections based on gender are up to the states to determine. (The one exception is employment discrimination: in June of 2020, the Supreme Court ruled that Title VII extends to protect people on the basis of sexuality and gender identity in the workplace and while looking for work.) However, 21 states in the U.S. do not prohibit housing discrimination on those bases; 23 do not prohibit discrimination in public accommodations such as restaurants or hotels); and 35 do not prohibit discrimination in credit lending.
The effects of these variable protections are significant. In terms of housing, for example, while transgender adults make up about 0.4% of the U.S. population, a recent study found that 8% had experienced homelessness sometime within the last year. Another study from 2019 found that 63% of homeless binary transgender adults and 80% of gender-non-conforming adults were experiencing unsheltered homelessness—sleeping rough, rather than staying at a shelter or sleeping in a car—compared to 49% of their cisgender peers.
Part III
Dog Tags and Discharge Papers
For how much importance we place on government-issued IDs, however, they are a relatively new invention.
Identification issued by the government was not at all common until World War I, says Professor Claire Potter, a professor of history at the New School for Social Research.
“Most people didn’t have birth certificates in the 19th century,” said Potter. “You didn’t need identification for anything, you know - and how you identified yourself often was through letters of introduction, if you were upper-class.”
“But after World War I, there’s this sort of new nationalism,” Potter continued. “And so then, of course, the United States, um, closes down immigration, restricts immigration by 1926, right? So they’re really trying to restrict mobility. And, um, so that’s the point at which people need to have a passport.”
The rise of government-issued identification continued throughout the first half of the 20th century: after WWI came Social Security numbers and cards with the Social Security Act of 1935. Some states began issuing drivers’ licenses sporadically throughout the first half of the 20th century, and all states were officially issuing them by 1954.
World War II saw the rise of another new type of ID: dog tags and discharge papers. While dog tags identified a soldier killed in battle, discharge papers were a type of ID that former soldiers could use to reap benefits that the GI Bill of 1944 conferred: education, guarantee of home ownership loans, and unemployment benefits.
However, the GI bill came with a requirement: to be eligible for its benefits, one had to have been honorably discharged. In the Army and the Air Force, “blue discharges” (charges that were technically neither honorable nor dishonorable, but often carried the same stigma as dishonorable discharges) were disproportionately given out to Black and queer military members during WWII—and while they were abolished in 1947, they rendered more than 48,000 soldiers ineligible to claim the benefits of the GI Bill.
Government-issued IDs discrediting or complicating people’s lives—usually marginalized people—has not abated over the last 70-odd years. To get an ID at all, Professor Potter pointed out, you need papers indicating your identity; if, say, someone is homeless and has no identifying papers, how are they supposed to get an ID? And if they don’t have an ID, how are they supposed to rent or buy a home?
The financial impact of identification can also be considerable: drivers' licenses can cost up to $89, and baseline state ID cards can range from $1-2 to $64, both depending on the state. This is also to say nothing of passport fees , where a new passport book for an adult can cost up to $145.
The financial cost of political participation, though, is only one of the unseen penalties imposed by voter ID laws. Despite the necessity of government-issued IDs, people without papers, or money, or even the ability to go to a DMV might find it hard or impossible to get the ID they need.
For trans people, who may have to jump through a series of hoops to get an ID that accurately reflects their gender, voting becomes doubly difficult—so much so that more than 378,000 voter-eligible trans people might have faced barriers to voting in November 2020 as a direct result of voter ID and registration laws. And given the patchy, variable protections, trans people also face widespread social and economic inequalities in addition to those voting barriers, putting them at a disadvantage in nearly every area of protection under the law.
Part IV
"[It] was worth it to me."
Some, however, also see reasons for hope.
One primary reason is the U.S. Equality Act, a bill which has passed the U.S. House of Representatives and is currently being considered by the Senate. If passed, it would provide protection in employment discrimination, strengthening the current Title VII protections—but would also protect LGBTQ+ Americans from housing, education, credit, and public accommodations discrimination. Legally speaking, the Equality Act passing into law would create some of the first explicit trans rights legislation.
Professor Potter believes the bill would make “a huge difference” for trans people, if passed. Today, if someone is discriminated against for being trans in New York, they can file charges against the discriminatory person or organization. If they’re discriminated against in Lawrence, Kansas? Not so much.
But there are some justified skeptics of the impact the Equality Act will make, too. Finn Meyerhoffer, a 21-year-old trans man from Appomattox, VA., isn’t sure how much would actually change in his day-to-day life with the passage of the act. “I can hope, but my experience is that people are stubborn,” he said.
At one of Meyerhoffer’s two jobs, his employer has expressed transphobic sentiments to the extent that he goes by his deadname and uses she/her pronouns at work. Meyerhoffer could potentially file a suit against his employer under Title VII for sex-based discrimination—but lawsuits can be expensive, time-consuming, and ultimately might not help to combat the day-to-day bigotry that Meyerhoffer and thousands of others face in Virginia and across the U.S.
In addition, the Equality Act would be passed into law as an addendum to the Civil Rights Act of 1964, so that it would offer the same kind of protections offered by that act, such as housing anti-discrimination laws, that are not currently in effect for LGBTQ+ people at the moment. Yet that act, too, has not been able to prevent insidious forms of voter suppression and strict voter photo ID laws that have increased over the last two decades. So while the Equality Act would make the bold step of including gender as a federally protected class, it is not completely clear how it would protect trans people from the risk of voter suppression.
It is hard to say, though, what a world without trans disenfranchisement—voting, economic, and social—would look like. Meyerhoffer isn’t sure. Wolff thinks it should involve eliminating the courthouse aspect from the name and gender marker change process to simplify it, and to offer trans people more privacy throughout their social transition. Professor Potter thinks that finally passing the Equal Rights Amendment—aimed at equalizing different genders in society—would solidify trans rights within the Constitution. Rowe thinks a good starting point would be to do away with the often-required doctor’s approval for a gender marker change.
What does seem to be a common thread is that things cannot stay the way that they are now.
For Wolff, part of this much-needed change has meant moving from Lafayette to Orlando, Florida. Among other things, he’s found it a much easier place to vote: in 2020, he voted early and in person without a hitch—although he did have to wait in line for nearly three and a half hours in the pouring rain.
Despite the wait and the downpour, Wolff says he felt comfortable voting in Orlando. “People were decent to each other,” he said. “I didn’t have to worry too much about anyone clocking me, or other issues with voter access.”
Wolff did say, though, that he still doesn’t regret voting in Lafayette, even with the difficulties he experienced at the polls.
“[It] wasn’t ideal, but was worth it to me,” Wolff said. “I would much rather vote than be disenfranchised over this.”