Sign up for the Slatest to get the most insightful analysis, criticism, and advice out there, delivered to your inbox daily.
A mere three and a half weeks before the 2024 presidential election, I was sitting at the Manhattan Civil Courthouse, waiting for the clerk to process my name and gender-change petition. My nerves got increasingly frayed as time slowed down. After what felt like an eternity, I finally heard the clerk call out my deadname. Despite that jarring reminder of my past self, I just felt relief that the wait was over. I had taken the first step toward getting identity documents that match my gender identity and chosen name. But after transphobia prevailed on Election Day, my relief curdled into a knot of anxiety with one thought at its core: “I need to update my passport and Social Security card ASAP.” All the levers of federal power would soon be pulled to enact transphobic policies, so I needed to move quickly if I wanted to obtain documents that accurately reflected my identity. What’s more, I knew that if the incoming Trump administration and Republican majority in Congress had their way, then my very right to vote would also be threatened.
For trans people like me, having an accurate ID dispels the daily fear of being outed when asked to present identification. To enter a bar. To board a plane. To vote. That last one is especially important. Since before the election, Donald Trump and congressional Republicans have been pushing to pass the Safeguard American Voter Eligibility Act, legislation that would require proof of citizenship to register to vote. And now the new Republican House of Representatives has identified the SAVE Act as one of its top legislative priorities.
Although the law does not target trans people, it would make the already fraught process of voting while trans even more perilous. It threatens to deter trans people, currently one of the most civically engaged communities, from participating in our democracy.
More than 30 percent of trans people say they have faced harassment due to presenting a gender that did not match their ID, including at polling places in the 38 states that have voter ID laws. One Tennessee voter described the “terrifying” and “dehumanizing” experience of being forced to out himself when poll workers questioned his ID. Another, in Maryland, felt “humiliated, anxious, and discriminated against” after he wasn’t allowed to vote for over an hour. He vowed never to cast a ballot in person again. If it’s safer to stay home than to go to the polls, more and more trans voters will be similarly disenfranchised.
However, as I experienced in that Manhattan courthouse, the remedy for that disenfranchisement—updating identity documents—comes with its own challenges. Getting a court-ordered name change is not always easy or safe for trans people. Nine states require publication of legal name changes. Given that 64 percent of all trans adults report being verbally assaulted due to their gender identity—that number jumps to 75 percent for trans people who choose to physically present their gender identity most or all of the time—the forcible outing imposed by these mandatory publication requirements increases trans people’s risk of harassment or violence.
Even after obtaining a name change, there are yet more hurdles to clear to update all necessary identity documents. Seven states prohibit changing gender on a birth certificate. Four do the same for driver’s licenses. Twelve more states require proof of gender-affirming surgery to change gender on a birth certificate.
Given these barriers, it’s not surprising a recent survey found that less than half of trans people who go by a name different from their birth name had legally altered their name on any ID documents, despite the life-changing benefits of doing so.
The deluge of anti-trans laws passed by Republican state legislatures in recent years is making matters worse. In 2023 North Dakota joined the ranks of states requiring proof of gender-affirming surgery to alter a person’s gender on their birth certificate. Utah authorized courts to conduct an open-ended inquiry into whether a trans person’s gender is “sincerely held and part of the individual’s core identity.” And it’s not just legislatures—Indiana’s Supreme Court recently declined to hear appeals in two cases that determined that the state’s courts lack the authority to grant gender changes. Even the U.S. Supreme Court seems poised to decide that laws targeting trans people do not violate the Constitution’s equal protection guarantees.
These laws, combined with new or stricter voter ID regulations passed in 17 states since 2020, subject more trans people to an increased danger of discrimination at the polls. The SAVE Act would extend that disenfranchisement by discouraging trans people from registering to vote in the first place. Likely only a passport or birth certificate will meet the act’s proof-of-citizenship requirements. And just three days after Trump’s inauguration, his State Department started freezing any current and future passport applications that requested a change to the applicant’s sex marker or requested a nonbinary X sex marker, thus preventing trans people from being able to update their passports. Moreover, because only about half of American citizens own passports, for many trans people their potentially un-updatable birth certificate may now be their only option to register to vote under the SAVE Act.
It’s no coincidence that increased attacks on trans rights are coupled with increased voting difficulty for trans people. Both actions are about denying our right to exist, as was explicitly laid out in one of the flurry of executive orders Trump signed his first day in office—it declared that the federal government will recognize only two immutable sexes, male and female. Indeed, it was my now-realized fear that the transphobia on display during the election would reach the highest rungs of government that ultimately motivated me to jump through the hoops of legally changing my name and gender mere weeks before Election Day.
I am incredibly lucky that I was able to update all my documents before Trump was sworn in. Countless others are currently caught up in bureaucratic chaos at the State Department and may be forced to accept a passport with the wrong sex marker, if they’re able to obtain a passport at all. If the SAVE Act passes, these attempts to deny our existence will extend to our very ability to have a rightful say in American democracy.
