Voting While Trans
E.J. Graff
October 18, 2012
http://prospect.org/article/voting-while-transA man walks into a polling place. The rolls list him as female. Can he vote?
[...]
So it made my day to hear Keisling, the National Center for Transgender Equality executive director, declare a coming victory. "Science is on our side, first of all," she explained. "Common sense is on our side. Decency is on our side. When you get that combination, you win every time."
But of course, winning is not the same as has won—which is why we were discussing the right to vote, and whether transpeople will be able to exercise it this year. Until NCTE launched its "Voting While Trans" initiative, it had never occurred to me that there's no need to list voters as either male or female. The 19th amendment is nearly 100 years old; I'm pretty sure that I have a right to vote whether "E.J. Graff" is male or female. At the polls, the only info that matters is whether I've registered to vote and whether I live at the qualifying address. Why identify my sex? Would I get a different ballot?
But ID, Keisling was explaining to me, can be one of the central hardships for transpeople, whose presentation and legal identification may not match. "It's absurd," Keisling told me. "We still put gender markers on things that don't need to have them. For instance, driver's licenses. The nice policeman doesn't pull you over and say, So you're a man, you can go 82, but if you're a woman you could only go 72." When I said that, presumably, my driver's license has my sex so the cop knows it's really me, Keisling pointed out that most identifying data has disappeared from driver's licenses since states started putting pictures on those little pieces of paper. So I went and checked. Sure enough, my Massachusetts driver's license no longer has my height or weight--people lie about both, and what does it matter, really? Nor does it have my race or ethnicity, since that's insultingly irrelevant, and often complicated. So why does it need to list my sex?
