The joys of court-ordered gender affirmation
... and the cruelty of forced bureaucratic disclosure
The very last day I was a resident of San Francisco, I sat alone in front of a judge so that he would make me a man—at least on a sheet of paper.
I had top surgery five years prior, was two years into taking testosterone, everyone was long used to calling me Kyle. I thought I didn’t care who the government thought I was and didn’t think I needed their affirmation. My community knew who I was. But then I started traveling more frequently for work.
All my Pixar coworkers knew me pre-transition. I wasn’t nervous that I would be outed per se, but travel is full of friction points, and you don’t realize how they are gendered until you confuse the TSA during a security pat-down. Think about the number of times you show your ID or credit card when traveling and how often your name might be called out on a loudspeaker. Imagine submitting your passport to travel abroad for a work conference and debating if/how/when to tell the organizers that your name and gender differ from the paperwork.
Most of my travel for Pixar was within California, up and back to Burbank, where I felt more or less at ease. But then that spring, I flew to Germany to premiere The Blue Umbrella at the Berlinale and then to Austin for SXSW—all while carrying papers that said, Katherine. I was out of my comfort zone, feeling out of my body, all while trying to enjoy a career high. I learned to metabolize the discomfort and put on a brave face whenever I flew with my boss.1 But I couldn’t take the dissonance anymore.
Shortly after returning from SXSW, my partner and I spontaneously decided to move to Brooklyn. We were expecting our first child, I was ready to spread some professional wings, and my dad’s health wasn’t improving. As we began wrapping up our life in the Bay, it occurred to me that it would be functionally (if not culturally) easier to change my gender in San Francisco than in New York City. And nothing motivates checking off annoying life todos like a deadline.
I still have the Transgender Law Center’s forty-page 2012 guide to updating your gender markers saved on my computer.2 At the time, TLC acknowledged that there was no one way to change your documents, but they presented a “model pathway” to move through the various government agencies. Step one: Go to Court.
After all the form-filling, court-filing, fee-paying, and newspaper-publishing, I got a date: July 9, 2013.
With our belongings already headed east on a moving truck and our Honda Element stuffed with camping gear—we headed to Courtroom 514, Judge Donald Sullivan, Superior Court of California, County of San Francisco, McAllister Street. I was 15th on the “uncontested calendar index.”
I don’t remember much except being nervous despite intentionally choosing one of the friendliest courtrooms for trans people in America. I took tenuous selfies in the bathroom mirror, where you can see that I wore my good dress shoes. I brought my Jack Spade briefcase! I wore a tie! My partner took pictures of me waiting to be called in. She also managed to covertly capture one inside the courtroom during the hearing. The empty chairs make the wooden walls feel taller. The giant silver government seal looms over the judge’s head, his mouth obscured by the mic. Two court employees are doing their jobs. I look so small, sitting alone. It was over quickly.
We celebrated that night over ice cream sundaes at Bi-Rite Creamery and said goodbye to our community. (Hi, Mattia!)
It took me many more years to follow through on the rest of that TLC checklist. I leveraged the SF court order to easily obtain an ‘M’ and Kyle on my New York State driver’s license. Phew. I applied for an IDNYC card—because it was new, because it got me free entrance to the MoMA, and, honestly, just because I could. I updated my record with the Social Security Administration. I slowly made my way through changing every bank account, every doctor’s database, every everything. I forgot about my passport. Life rolls on. Your paperwork isn’t a problem until it is.
In 2017, I was up for a new job reporting partly into ad sales at a large media company. There was an expectation of business travel and the possibility of international destinations. By this point, I was passing for a cis man most of the time and fully aware that I would interact with a much broader group of people in this new role. It was time to fix that passport.
Years into my legal manhood, I assumed this would be quick and easy. I had all the other documents. A court order saved in the cloud so I could prove myself at any time! A new social security card! TWO New York IDs! Nope. The United States Department of State National Passport Center rejected my initial application and returned this detailed letter outlining the information they needed from my “attending medical physician.”
I acquiesced to the government’s demands and finally got that updated passport, which came in handy when I ended up in Mexico City months later (twice!) trying to expedite the import of a Toyota Camry stuck in customs. (Wild, but true.)
In the years since I went through all of the above, and then some, helpful people in government have made some of these document-updating processes faster, more accessible, and more humane. You might have missed it; I certainly didn’t give it a proper celebration, but the Biden-Harris Administration announced sweeping improvements on Transgender Day of Visibility, March 31, 2022, which included:
allowing US citizens to declare their passport gender (including non-binary ‘X’) without additional documentation
streamlining identity validation at airports
updating TSA body scanners to reduce false alarms and unnecessary pat-downs
These days, I feel privileged that I don’t think about my identity documents beyond ensuring they don’t expire. My experience as a white, well-employed resident of a big coastal city in a Democrat-leaning state advantages me to a larger sense of security. But let me be clear: what can be given by executive order can be taken away just as easily.
We are seeing this unfold in real-time in Florida right now after a memo issued in January from the deputy executive director of their HSMV barred changing gender markers on driver’s licenses. I can’t stop thinking about these two paragraphs:
So, if I fly to Miami and use my New York State driver’s license to rent a car to drive to Key West—that’s fraud? (Or just gay?)
There is something deeply insidious about the current anti-trans legislative and policy efforts focused on regulating trans folks’ identity paperwork. (See also Iowa Governor Kim Reynolds proposing a bill requiring trans folks to list both gender markers on driver’s licenses.) These changes masquerade as minor paperwork tweaks but are actually strategic dominoes being knocked down purposefully to set off a cascading series of harmful scenarios that will force trans folks to continually disclose their identity regardless of consequence.
The stakes could not be higher. No matter how well we all clean up and present ourselves in acceptable ways to the broader cis-hetero culture—all trans people live their days with some fear of violence. The threat level varies by circumstance, of course. But I doubt any of us ever feel truly safe. And most of that fear comes from unwanted disclosure to hostile people.
My embarrassment from having my old name called out over the airport PA while traveling for work is admittedly an annoyance that passes. But forced disclosure impacts people’s ability to work, travel, receive medical care... and vote.
I’m exhausted by all of this. I wish I had a better end to this newsletter. I wrote a whole other version of this essay about Brandon Teena and the violence of disclosure that I couldn’t get through. And it’s not lost on me that all of my efforts to be safe and aligned in this body rely on unstable government myth-making and the uncomfortable conceit of “passing.”
I heard there is some sort of big game tonight…
See you next week.
xx Kyle
PS Hat tip to Krys Malcolm Belc and his book The Natural Mother of the Child which inspired my inclusion of governmental documents.
Grateful I had such a fantastic boss—thank you, Marc! A story for another time: TL;DR Pixar was a wonderful place to become Kyle. ❤️
TLC’s latest “ID Please” guide, updated August 2023, runs 63 pages.
I feel all of this. Thank you for sharing your experience. The process here in Utah was personally exhausting, until our state Supreme Court case. It generally can be when we put our necks out so far, I guess.
Thank you, Kyle.