Brandyn Gallagher should be on the road right now. Instead, the 36-year-old, who has spent the last five years driving an 18-wheeler, is at home in northwest Arkansas looking for a new job.
Gallagher doesn’t want to give up trucking. They pivoted to the profession after working as a consultant for diversity, equity and inclusion programs, and were happy it provided some financial stability to help pay off their student loans. But they are worried that a new state rule about gender markers on driver’s licenses might put them at risk when they’re on the road.
In March, Republican Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders signed an emergency order eliminating the “X” gender-neutral marker option, which had been in place for 14 years. Gallagher has an X on their license to denote their identity as a trans and intersex person. The order also forces trans people to provide an amended birth certificate with their correct gender marker, which they can obtain only after getting a court order and presenting medical documentation of surgery, before they can change the gender marker on their license.
A Pulaski County Circuit Court judge blocked the order in June, and Gallagher updated their license with an “X,” which matches their passport and Transportation Security Administration documents. But the Arkansas Supreme Court reinstated the order later that month, and within weeks Gallagher had received a letter from the state Department of Finance and Administration telling them that the office’s internal computer system would list them as “male” going forward.
Gallagher has stopped trucking out of fear of what might happen if they’re stopped by the police while hauling hazardous materials — a high-paying position they had secured earlier this year — and a scan of their ID shows an incongruence between their physical license and the state’s records.
“Everything else has an X on it because I am biologically neither female nor male,” Gallagher told HuffPost. “It didn’t make any sense for the state to be making a new emergency rule that contradicts established federal policy. But they did, and it came completely out of left field.”
Arkansas is one of at least five states, including Florida, Montana and Texas, to enact policies this year that bar trans and nonbinary people from updating the gender marker on identification documents such as state driver’s licenses or birth certificates. Missouri quietly added its own requirements for individuals to show documentation for “proof of full transition” from a surgeon or to get other medical documentation.
Experts warn such policies not only pose barriers to employment, banking and housing but could also have major implications for trans people as they try to vote in November. About 210,800 eligible transgender voters who live in states with voter ID requirements do not have an ID that reflects their correct gender, according to a new estimate from the Williams Institute, an LGBTQ+ policy research center.
Conservatives have long championed voter ID policies as a way to weed out possible election fraud, even though research shows those rates to be exceptionally low. In practice, voting rights experts say, these policies deter low-income people, people of color and trans people from voting. Since 2020, Republican-led states have enacted stricter requirements for voters, and 36 states have some sort of voter ID law.
The federal government allows individuals to self-select their gender when applying for documentation such as passports and Social Security cards. But Republican-led states are increasingly making it difficult for trans people to update their gender marker on state-issued documents — and doing so without much fanfare, meaning many trans people may not know about the changes until it’s too late. Experts say that many state officials have skirted typical legislative processes, instead quietly issuing internal agency policies, memos and executive orders to keep trans people from having documentation that reflects their gender identity.
“Now increasingly we’re seeing either categorical barriers being thrown up by agency heads or, at the very least, really onerous barriers that serve no purpose being thrown up so that people have to encounter insurmountable roadblocks, like surgery requirements, in order to be able to change their gender markers,” Peter Renn, an attorney at Lambda Legal, a civil rights group that advocates for LBGTQ+ issues, told HuffPost.
This has turned everyday tasks, such as applying to jobs or for loans, into administrative nightmares and has put trans people at risk any time that they have to show an ID.
“There’s a serious privacy intrusion when people are saddled with presenting documents that out them as transgender, and we know that rates of hostility, harassment and violence against transgender people are extremely high,” Renn said. “So putting people in a position where they have to out themselves to a gas station cashier at 2 a.m. is a recipe for disaster.”
Rowan Fowler, a 49-year-old trans woman, decided to permanently leave Oklahoma because of the state’s rules about birth certificates and the growing hostility toward trans people.
Fowler began to medically transition in 2021. Within the first three months, she updated her name and gender marker on her Social Security card and Real ID.
At the time, Oklahoma allowed people to amend the gender marker on their birth certificates. Through a legal settlement, the state issued its first amended document to a nonbinary person. But in November 2021, Republican Gov. Kevin Stitt issued an executive order barring people from changing their gender on birth certificates.
Fowler couldn’t change her birth certificate, and she said she has had issues with credit bureaus still using her deadname because she cannot provide them with updated documentation.
“There’s nothing I can do about it,” she said. “It’s very frustrating.”
Fowler said that her birth certificate has been changed once already, when she and her brother were adopted at 8 years old — and that that modification happened without any interference from the state.
“The only person that information affects is me,” she said. “It affects no one else, both who is listed as my father and how my gender marker is listed.”
She said the political climate in Oklahoma, which has bred some of the harshest anti-trans legislation and rhetoric, ultimately pushed her to move to California. She faced a barrage of harassment both before and after she updated her ID documents in Oklahoma.
“I was refused entry into a bar when I was going out with a bunch of friends,” Fowler recalled. “We were going to see a concert. [The bouncer] looked at my driver’s license and refused to let me in.”
Fowler and Gallagher have decided to share their experiences as part of ongoing litigation headed by Lambda Legal and the American Civil Liberties Union, respectively, two of the largest legal advocacy groups in the country fighting these new restrictions.
In June, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 10th Circuit found Oklahoma’s policy to be unconstitutional and said it discriminated against transgender people, including Fowler and two transgender men who were plaintiffs in Lambda Legal’s lawsuit. Renn, who is also one of the attorneys on the case, said the state government is now trying to appeal the decision.
Policies that block trans people from updating their identity documents go hand and hand with broader legislative attempts by Republican officials to pass bills defining “male” and “female” based on a person’s reproductive organs and adopt the concept of “biological sex,” which many biology and sex researchers say are not grounded in modern science.
These attempts have largely failed, but experts warn that if former President Donald Trump were to be reelected this fall, legislative erasures of trans identity could become the law of the land. In Project 2025, the Heritage Foundation’s playbook for a second Trump presidency, conservative officials want to legally redefine sex as “biological binary sex” and erase any mention of “gender identity” or “sexual orientation” from all laws, federal agency rules and regulations.
“I think the common denominator across all of these efforts is that they’re motivated by the same goal, which is to prevent transgender people from being able to live openly as who they are and ultimately to erase their legal existence,” Renn said.
There is so much at stake for trans voters, and state-level ID restrictions could have serious consequences on their turnout in November.
The Williams Institute report looked specifically at the implications of these policies in states like Georgia, which has one of the the most restrictive voter ID laws in the country — and which Joe Biden carried in the 2020 presidential election by only 11,779 votes. The report estimates that there are 14,900 eligible trans voters in Georgia who do not currently have accurate identification.
“There is a chilling effect,” Lauren Kunis, CEO and executive director of VoteRiders, told The 19th News. “There is an unsafe and intimidating environment around existing as trans in society, and definitely in being able to go to the polls safely and cast a ballot.”
This year has already seen trans people being blocked from participating in the political process. In Ohio, several transgender Democratic candidates running against Republicans for the state legislature were barred from getting on the ballot because of a decades-old law that requires candidates to disclose their deadnames in their applications. Two candidates appealed to local election officials and were able to enter their races.
There aren’t any credible accusations of trans people voting illegally, said Elliot Isme, the executive director of the LGBTQ+ Victory Institute, which helps support elected officials.
“The reaction to trans political participation is in part because of an ugliness from the far right that wants to harm trans people for their own political gain, not because they actually believe trans rights negatively affect people,” Isme said, “but because they will do whatever it takes to win their elections regardless of who it hurts.”
CORRECTION: A previous version of this article misstated the region of Arkansas in which Gallagher lives.