"I Felt Criminal": Voter ID and Trans+ People’s Perceptions of Their Political Citizenship

Anti-trans+ moral panic has emerged as a persistent and increasingly significant feature of the UK political and media landscape since at least 2018, when a public consultation was launched on updating the Gender Recognition Act (2004). Trans+ communities and allies have interpreted calls to ‘clarify’ definitions of sex and gender within the Equality Act (2010) – with the intended effect of cementing sex binaries and legitimising trans-exclusionary practices – as attempts to undermine trans+ people’s rights and support their systematic exclusion from aspects of public life. While voter ID had been in place in Northern Ireland since 2002, it was introduced for the first time in England, Scotland, and Wales in May 2023, and was applicable to general elections from 2024. Prior to its introduction, civil society groups, including LGBT+ and trans+ organisations, raised concerns that minoritised groups could be negatively affected by these changes to in-person voting. Seeking to ascertain how trans+ people in the UK perceived the new legislation and its impact on their political participation, we find that for trans+ people in the UK, possession of legal citizenship fails to confer meaningful political citizenship or social citizenship in terms of participation, recognition and acceptance in public life. This paper draws on research conducted with trans+ voters in summer 2023 – online survey (n=205) and semi-structured interviews (n=15) – in the aftermath of the introduction of mandatory photo ID for in-person voting. This research explored trans+ people’s perceptions of the interaction between the new voter ID rules and their political citizenship. Participants indicated that the broad context of political discourse in the UK, including absence of political representation for trans+ people and a trans-hostile media, contributed to their experiences of invisibilisation and/or erasure from public and political life. In the wake of voter ID implementation, direct barriers to obtaining acceptable ID and concerns about intentional disenfranchisement and potential for transphobia at the polling booth created conditions that encouraged trans+ people to self-select out of electoral participation, and hence become ‘noncitizen’ in social and political spheres, ceding these citizenship rights in a bid to evade hostile encounters. Nonetheless, a significant minority of participants expressed commitment to exercising their voting rights in spite of – or in direct defiance of – these obstacles. We argue this insistence on performing political citizenship constitutes a form of noncitizen agency. As such, our paper seeks to shed light on the political citizenship status of a minoritised group whose political representation remains under-researched in UK political science and highlight the importance of “noncitizenism” as a framework for understanding tensions between legal citizenship, belonging, and citizenship claims among gender- and sexual minorities.