A Common Sense Approach In IDs For Trans-people

Last week, I wrote about the Real ID Act (Real ID Act Strikes Connecticut) and how the law creates hardship on seniors and low income people, in addition to trans-people. That providing documentation that reflects a trans-person true is a challenge, some require surgery, some require the you are only under medical care, this creates a nightmare of hurdles that we have to navigate around.

I just came across an article in the Harvard Kennedy School Student Journal about how documentation affect trans-people the article Fair and Accurate Identification for Transgender People in the LGBTQ Policy Journal at the Harvard Kennedy School: 2011 Edition, Harper Jean Tobin writes that,

Identification documents such as driver’s licenses, birth certificates, and passports are a ubiquitous and essential currency of contemporary life. These documents are used in everyday official and commercial transactions to establish a person’s identity, age, citizenship, and residency. We commonly need to present such documents whenever we start a new job, apply for an apartment or a loan, enter a government building, purchase alcohol, board an airplane, apply for public benefits, including everything from a library card to food stamps, and, in many jurisdictions, vote. Most of us seldom give any thought to these documents other than to lament the quality of our photographs; for the vast majority of Americans, the information on such documents is a combination of the essentially impersonal (e.g., date of birth) and the fairly obvious (e.g., eye color).

But imagine that these everyday documents contained information about you that was not only of a private and personal nature but also could easily lead to discrimination and harassment from which you might lack any legal protection or recourse. For transgender people, identification documents and other official records frequently function as something akin to a scarlet letter, with the “F” or “M” designation contradicting the holder’s appearance and social identity and outing him or her as transgender. State and federal policies in the United States today make it impossible for many transgender people to update these documents to reflect their lived gender. These restrictive policies create not only an enormous indignity but a significant barrier to economic and other opportunities and at times even compromise personal safety.

As I wrote in Real ID Act Strikes Connecticut this has created a problem for me because in order to get a Real ID approved ID, I will have to present two forms of IDs of which one has to be a primary ID such as a birth certificate or a passport, right now both of them list me as male.

Ms. Tobin goes on to write that,

Some form of surgical treatment is deemed medically necessary for many, but not all, transgender people. Surgical procedures are costly, invasive, and often contraindicated by other medical conditions. Data from a national survey of transgender people reveals that while a large majority of transgender people undergo hormone therapy as part of gender transition, only a minority undergo any form of gender reassignment surgery. Genital reconstructive surgeries are especially rare, with fewer than one in five transgender women and fewer than one in twenty transgender men having undergone them (Grant et al. 2010).

Most state and federal agencies today rely on outdated policies that require proof of surgical treatment to update identification and other documents, which means that most transgender people are unable to update key documents to reflect their lived gender. Many have various identity documents with different gender designations. Nationally, the percentage of transgender people who are unable to update identification and official records to reflect their lived gender varies from 41 percent for driver’s licenses and 51 percent for Social Security records to 74 percent for birth certificates. Prior to a change in federal policy in June 2010, 75 percent of transgender people were unable to obtain a passport that reflected their lived gender, and 79 percent were unable to update all their identification and records (National Center for Transgender Equality and National Gay and Lesbian Task Force forthcoming).

This reiterates what I have been writing, that for many trans-people surgery is not an option fro numerous reasons. For me, my insurance does not cover any expenses related to me being transgender which forces me to pay for all my related medical expenses out of my own pocket.

In the article, Ms. Tobin writes that the federal and state governments are slowly changing their policies to move away from having surgery. Here in Connecticut, since the mid-nineties, the DMV only requires a letter from a doctor stating that you are transsexual. Now other states are following Connecticut lead. The federal government has changed their policy governing passports and now only requires a letter from your physician. In her conclusion Ms. Tobin writes that,

There is simply no serious public policy justification for retaining policies that forbid gender change or condition it upon proof of surgery. Correction of gender designations would do no more to assist identity theft or fraud than updating names, especially when a licensed professional is required to sign off. In fact, identification that fails to reflect an individual’s lived gender actually makes it harder to verify the individual’s identity. Nor is the concern that certain records, such as birth records, are historical in nature and should not be changed persuasive, since such documents are regularly amended to reflect name changes, adoptions, and other events. Restrictive policies on gender documentation change represent a serious government intrusion into the most personal aspects of an individual’s life and create economic barriers and hazards for transgender people in their everyday lives (Tobin 2007).