Identity Document Congruency and Political Participation: A Secondary Data Analysis of the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey

With over 1,200 anti-transgender bills considered across the United States in 2025 alone, political rhetoric and policy proposals have increasingly targeted transgender and gender diverse (TGD) people. National and state-level attempts to revoke TGD people’s access to identity documents congruent with their name and gender are becoming a focal point of these legislative attacks. Identity documentation is needed to enroll in school, benefit from public services, and register to vote. When coupled with the disproportionately higher rates of poverty, housing instability, and discrimination that marginalized communities experience, identity document incongruency compounds their vulnerability to political suppression. However, scant research has interrogated the relationship between TGD people’s identity document congruency and their political participation. In turn, I investigate whether the level of identity document congruency is associated with participation in electoral and civic political activities among a sample of TGD adults.

I use data from the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey (n=27,715), one of the largest, most comprehensive data sources available on TGD people’s lived experiences.

Dependent variables measure 1) the number electoral political activities—i.e., giving money to a presidential campaign or voting in the most recent election—and 2) informal political activities (i.e. attended a political protest/rally, contacted a government official). Formal electoral activities often require identity documents while informal civic activities do not; thus, I analyzed informal and formal political activities separately. My primary independent variable measured the level of congruence between participants’ chosen name and gender with the name and gender listed on their identity documents (2=All, 1=Some, and 0=None). Controls included age, race, gender, income, sexual orientation, housing stability, census region, and political self-efficacy. To account for the bounded nature and skew of the dependent variables, I used negative binomial regression modeling for my analysis.

Over two thirds of the sample (68.9%) reported that none of their identity documents had the name or gender marker they prefer listed. On average, participants reported engaging in nearly double the number of informal civic activities (M=1.77; SD=1.55) than electoral activities (M=.93; SD=1.12). The number of electoral activities was 12% (B=.16, SE=.02, IRR=1.12, p<.001) higher for both TGD people with some and all identity documents congruent compared to those with no congruent identity documents. The number of civic activities was higher among TGD people with some (19%) (B=.17, SE=.01, IRR=1.19, p<.001) or all (6%) (B=.06, SE=.02, IRR=1.06, p<.001) identity documents congruent in comparison to those with no congruent documents.

Ultimately, findings suggest that identity document congruency may facilitate TGD people’s formal and informal political participation rates; demonstrating the need to center the values of self-determination and social justice in policy advocacy and practice. TGD people not only find themselves under legislative attack, but their constrained access to sociopolitical engagement limits their ability to vote for policy makers and advocate for policy positions that value their needs and concerns. In turn, further research should explore predictors of TGD engagement to leverage their growing political attention towards TGD justice.