Journal Club: The Real Harm of Incorrect IDs
A 2022 study digs into the mental and emotional harm of having official identification that doesn’t match a person’s real identity.
by Veronica Esposito
In October the Supreme Court issued a stay in the case Orr v. Trump, essentially allowing the U.S. State Department to resume misgendering trans Americans on their passports. In passing that judgment, the Court wrote a sentence that legal analysts have found particularly vile: “Displaying passport holders’ sex at birth no more offends equal protection principles than displaying their country of birth—in both cases, the Government is merely attesting to a historical fact without subjecting anyone to differential treatment.”
Legal journalist Chris Geidner described these words as “an abusive sentence, ignoring the purpose of equal protection guarantees, the evidence presented in the case, and the very existence of trans and nonbinary people.”
Beyond abusive, that sentence—and the Court’s further assertion that displaying the wrong sex on passports does no harm to trans people—is incorrect based on the science. Research by Kyle K.H. Tan and colleagues demonstrated that sizable harm is done to trans people when they are unable to get passports that properly identify their correct sex.
In their paper, Tan et al. set out to determine exactly what happens when trans and nonbinary New Zealanders are unable to get their proper sex listed on a passport. As they note in the paper, there is already such a wide body of research on this topic that the World Health Organization describes “lack of access to IDs with the correct gender marker” as contributing to “multiple co-occurring health problems among trans and nonbinary people.”
Studying some 818 trans and nonbinary New Zealanders, the researchers found that only 16% of the respondents possessed the correct gender markers on both their birth certificates and passports. Typical barriers included non-inclusive gender options, cost, and fear of discrimination. According to the study, compared to those who had the correct gender markers on their documentation, those without faced “significantly higher average [levels] of psychological distress and greater odds of suicidal ideation.”
It is notable that, at the time of the study, New Zealand allowed residents born in the country to change their documents simply by declaring their gender, and requested that those born overseas provide some proof of having received HRT or a gender-affirming surgery in order to change their gender marker. While these barriers are real and significant, they are of course much lower than having the Federal government weaponized to make it impossible to attain correct gender identification.
Even under this relatively permissive regime, Tan and colleagues found that barriers to changing gender markers exerted serious harms on trans and nonbinary people, particularly when it meant that individuals could not get the correct gender marker.
This paper builds on extant research showing similar harms, as Tan and colleagues cite two other studies from within the U.S. demonstrating significant harm done to trans people who cannot get correct identification:
Scheim et al., who utilized data from the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey, found that trans and nonbinary participants with all of their IDs reflecting their correct name and gender markers reported lower prevalence of suicidal ideation, serious mental distress, and planned suicidal behavior, as compared with their counterparts with no IDs reflecting their preferred name and gender marker. . . .
Our findings also corroborate patterns from another study that sampled trans and nonbinary residents of two U.S. states and found that residents with documents that reflected their changed name on both their passport and driver’s license/state ID reported lower levels of anxiety and depression compared with their counterparts who did not have their name changed on either document.
Contrary to the assertions of the Supreme Court, the empirical evidence is quite clear: preventing trans Americans from having correct passports does pose a material harm. There is also a simple, concrete solution. As Tan et al. write, “A low-cost, effective way to promote the mental health and wellbeing of trans and nonbinary individuals is to enable them to use a name and gender marker that reflects who they are, in all aspects of their daily life.”
Beyond subjecting trans people to worse mental health, the Trump Administration’s discriminatory policies have already caused trans people to curtail travel and are exposing them to harm that likely extends well beyond the realm of travel. As Olivia Wood writes, the Trump Administration’s passport policy “creates real material barriers for trans people in a number of areas of society and will expand an underclass of effectively undocumented and semi-documented trans people who will face bureaucratic barriers to basic forms of participation in society, such as being employed.”
The ultimate outcome of Orr v. Trump remains to be seen, but the harm done by the administration’s discriminatory policies regarding passports is already here and quite material. Furthermore, it is unfortunately likely that the Supreme Court will double down on its demonstrably false claims that misgendering trans people on passports does no real harm to the community. Sadly, what has been the policy of the Federal government since 1992—simply letting trans Americans have accurate passports—is likely to become impossible until an anti-authoritarian regime takes hold in Washington.
Veronica Esposito (she/her) is a writer and therapist based in the Bay Area. She writes regularly for The Guardian, Xtra Magazine, and KQED, the NPR member station for Northern California, on the arts, mental health, and LGBTQ+ issues.