One argument often raised against nonbinary inclusion is that it will render efforts at identification and surveillance by law enforcement more difficult. This argument has long been made with respect to any changes to official sex markers, even from M to F or F to M.3 15 But the argument takes new forms with respect to nonbinary gender, which would also require the recognition of an X category or, alternatively, the elimination of any sex or gender markers altogether. The question is, does law enforcement need binary M and F sex markers to identify peo- ple, determine police or emergency response, or track crimes?316 Third- gender recognition is the best option in this context, at least at present.
Those who assert the importance of binary gender markers for iden- tification documents do not explain why law enforcement needs those markers in addition to photographs.3 17 In Zzyym v. Pompeo,3 18 the court concluded that the State Department's policy of requiring an applicant to mark either M or F on a passport application was arbitrary and ca- pricious.319 Not all law enforcement databases include sex or gender designations, and in the case of transgender individuals, the designations in various databases may already conflict.320 The "identity fraud" ar- gument - that criminals will change their gender markers so that their names do not come up in law enforcement databases - is not a unique problem with recognizing nonbinary gender; it is a problem with any system that allows corrections to gender markers. The State Department already allows sex marker corrections between M and F, without proof of surgery.32 1 Moreover, fraud concerns are dubious considering the
315 See, e.g., Lisa A. Mottet, Modernizing State Vital Statistics Statutes and Policies to Ensure Accurate Gender Markers on Birth Certificates: A Good Government Approach to Recognizing the Lives of Transgender People, 19 MICH. J. GENDER & L. 373,413-I5 (2013).
316 See WoLF Letter, supra note 213, at 2 (arguing that the government has "legitimate interests in recording and maintaining accurate information about its residents' sex, for purposes of identi- fication, tracking crimes,... and determining the appropriate emergency medical and police services").
317 Even if photographs can be tampered with, those seeking to commit fraud can tamper with the gender marker as well, or can simply find false passports with M or F markers that match their own appearances. Facial recognition and other biometric forms of identification are better tailored to address fraud concerns.
318 No. i5-cv-02362, 2018 WL 4491434 (D. Colo. Sept. I9, 2018).
319 Id. at *i. Zzyym brought suit under the Administrative Procedure Act, which disallows agency actions that are "arbitrary, capricious, an abuse of discretion, or otherwise not in accordance with law." 5 U.S.C. § 7o6(2)(A) (2012).
320 See Zzyym, 2018 WL 4491434, at *6 (noting that a passport holder's identity could be verified without checking the gender designation because databases include "other fields" such as "social security number, date of birth, name, etc.").
321 Mottet, supra note 315, at 415.
number of other countries, including Australia, New Zealand, and India, that have managed nonbinary markers without apparent incident.3 22 The United States accepts passports from these countries with nonbi- nary gender markers.323 The International Civil Aviation Organization, the UN agency that sets international standards for machine-readable passports, has long allowed "X" as a sex marker for "unspecified. '3 24 As Judge Jackson put it during a hearing in the Zzyym case, "I'll bet you that if the State Department rethought its policy and decided to accept the X designation, the sun would still come up tomorrow. 325
Another version of this argument might be that law enforcement and emergency services routinely use binary gender identifiers to visually identify crime suspects and people in need of assistance.326 But author- ities may use any number of descriptors for these purposes, not just per- ceived sex or gender presentation, but also race, age, height, weight, and other identifying features. Under equal protection doctrine, this limited use of visually identifying features, even racial ones, is widely regarded as permissible.327 It is therefore implausible that recognition of nonbi- nary gender rights would invalidate the use of perceived gendered char- acteristics for purposes of visual identifications. Nor should it.
Opponents of nonbinary gender recognition have also expressed the worry that it would skew crime statistics, obscuring the fact that men commit more violent crimes than women.328 But considering the vast disparities in violent crime rates between men and women, the number of criminals likely to identify as nonbinary is too small to have this effect.329
322 See Zzyym Transcript, supra note 139, at 37. The lawyer from the State Department in Zzyym was not aware of any evidence that jurisdictions that recognize an X designation had any law enforcement trouble. Id. at 46.
323 Id. at 35-36 (discussing how the U.S. State Department will permit noncitizens from Australia to enter the United States with an X designation on their passports, but will not allow citizens of the United States to leave with an X designation).
324 Int'l Civil Aviation Org. [ICAO], Machine Readable Travel Documents, at 14, ICAO Doc.
9303 (7th ed. 2015), https://www.icao.int/publications/Documents/9303-P4-cons-en.pdf [https:/
perma.cc/H6DH-LFN4] (allowing "F for female, M for male, or X for unspecified").
325 Zzyym Transcript, supra note 139, at 52.
326 Bela August Walker, Note, The Color of Crime: The Case Against Race-Based Suspect De- scriptions, 103 COLUM. L. REV. 662, 671 (2003) ("The description of a criminal suspect, whether created by the victim, an eyewitness, or the police, always begins with race and gender.").
327 R. Richard Banks, Race-Based Suspect Selection and Colorblind Equal Protection Doctrine and Discourse, 48 UCLA L. REV. 1075, 1090-95 (2001) (explaining that race-based suspect descrip- tions have not triggered equal protection scrutiny because "the prevailing approach [is to assume]
that suspect description reliance should never be viewed as a racial classification"). Even if this were not the case, suspect descriptions might survive the test of strict scrutiny, as narrowly tailored to achieve a compelling state interest. See id. at 1119.
328 See WoLF Letter, supra note 213, at 4.
329 See id. (citing FBI statistics that men committed 88% of murders in 2015). The Williams Institute estimates that 0.58% of adults in the United States identify as transgender. FLORES ET AL., supra note 21, at 3.
Recognition of an X designation may have law enforcement benefits.
Some nonbinary people do not consistently appear to others as men or women.330 A third designation might better match how they are per- ceived. Providing an X designation might avoid friction from police, customs, or TSA officers who would otherwise question a person whose gender identity does not appear to match the designation on their docu- ments.33 1 This type of friction is administratively costly for law enforce- ment, leading to unnecessary delays and even wrongful arrests and detentions. More importantly, it harms nonbinary people and their fam- ilies, who are forced to reargue their gender identities with officials on a regular basis.332
As many have argued, the fact that official documents include sex designations at all is offensive to the values of self-determination and privacy, and it reinforces state authority over sex and gender in a trou- bling way.33 3 An X designation has the potential drawback of allowing those who would harm nonbinary people to identify targets for violence and abuse, although I am unaware of any examples in which identity documents have been used for this purpose.334 At present, there are good reasons to prefer a recognition model to a neutrality one. Recog- nition is more politically palatable, it allows the limited collection of sex- differentiated statistics to continue, and identity documents that reflect a person's gender identity offer that person a measure of security and legitimacy. A partial solution is to make sex designators on identifica- tion documents optional, giving people the choice to leave them blank, as New York City does with its identification cards.335
330 See JAMES ET AL., supra note 2, at 48; supra p. 9o8.
331 See JAMES ET AL., supra note 2, at 89 (reporting that 1o% of nonbinary respondents to the 2015 USTS had been denied services or benefits when the name or gender on their identification documents did not match their gender presentation).
332 Cal. Assemb. Transp. Hearing, supra note 86 (statement of Jonathan Clay) (discussing how a nonbinary child's incorrect ID "always opens us up to all sorts of questions going through security and other places .... Which is very difficult for my wife and I, because it puts [us] in a role where we are now having conversations with people, whether it's security, doctors, other folks. Having this conversation in a venue that we don't control, and unfortunately, it typically happens in front of our child which is also very difficult. Because that identity is very important to them").
333 See, e.g., Spade, supra note 28, at 738 ("Why is gender identification taken for granted as a legitimate domain of governance?"); Wipfler, supra note 28, at 492 ("Ultimately,... so long as such documents include a sex designation field, new and seemingly progressive government policies of gender inclusivity harmfully reify sex classification.").
334 This concern was initially raised in litigation over the X designation on U.K. passports, but dropped when evidence failed to substantiate it. R (on the application of Elan-Cane) v. Sec'y of State for the Home Dep't [2o08] EWHC (Admin) 1530 [i6], [82], 2018 WL 03093374. The U.K.
court nonetheless refused to require an X designation on passports pending a "comprehensive re- view" of the implications of such a change by U.K. authorities. Id. at [124].
335 Wipfler, supra note 28, at 526 (discussing this approach, which has been adopted by a number of municipalities, but arguing it "still runs the risk of outing those who choose not to include a sex designation as abnormal if the majority of bearers opt to display their gender"). Another idea would
One reason the drafters of California's Gender Recognition Act opted for the recognition model was because it had been used by the District of Columbia, Oregon, and countries outside of the United States without problems.336 Additionally, federal regulations implementing the REAL ID Act require "gender" designations on identity documents, giv- ing states discretion to define that term.331
Moreover, the federal government uses birth certificate sex data, just as it uses data on race, for purposes of collecting public health statis- tics.338 Although this is an argument for continuing to collect the data, it does not suggest that the data must be displayed on the face of the certificate.33 9 Collection of information on intersex infants and nonbi- nary gender identities might improve this data by allowing researchers to study the health of these populations.3 4 0
Additionally, identity documents with gender designations can act as shields against discrimination and sources of validation for transgender people, whether those designations are M, F, or X. Designations that better match a person's self-presentation may help avoid difficult and dangerous conflicts with law enforcement.34 1 Transgender men and
be to design application forms that leave the gender designation blank by default, requiring indi- viduals who wish to have gender designations to affirmatively select them.
336 Cal. Assemb. Transp. Hearing, supra note 86 (statement of Sen. Toni Atkins) (responding to the question, "why even have gender or sex on an ID card, or on a driver's license specifically" with the answer: "We could go the other route, but we really would then be further out of compliance with what other countries and states are doing").
337 6 C.F.R. § 37.17 (201-8) ("To be accepted by a Federal agency for official purposes, REAL ID driver's licenses and identification cards must include on the front of the card (unless otherwise specified below) the following information: ... (c) Gender, as determined by the State.").
338 Wipfler, supra note 28, at 539.
339 One scholar has proposed a partial neutrality approach: that the birth certificate provided to parents not include sex information on its face, but that data about the baby's phenotypical sex at birth be collected and sent to the National Center for Health Statistics, to be treated like data on race and kept confidential. See Elizabeth Reilly, Radical Tweak - Relocating the Power to Assign Sex, 12 CARDOZO J.L. & GENDER 297, 318 (2005) (proposing that the "sex" field on the birth certificate be moved from the section on identifying data to the one on "information for medical and health purposes only").
340 How sex or gender should be defined depends on the aims of the research. Canada offers one model. See, e.g., Gender of Person, STAT. CAN. (Jan. 25, 2oi8), http://www23.statcan.gc.ca/imdb/
p3Var.pl?Function=DEC&Id=410445 [https:Hperma.cc/CR2J-XNDM] (urging that users of statis- tics exercise caution in comparing indicators for sex and gender, as "[s]ex and gender refer to two different concepts"); Classification of Gender, STAT. CAN. (Jan. 25, 2oi8), http://www23.statcan.
gc.ca/imdb/p3VD.pl?Function=getVD&TVD=467245 [https:Hperma.cc/Q4SK-EMY8] (providing options for gender including "Male gender," "Female gender," and "Gender diverse").
341 See Cal. Assemb. Transp. Hearing, supra note 86 (statement of Cecilia Aguiar-Curry, Member, Assemb. Standing Comm. on Transp.) ("In emergency services, and if someone were to come upon an automobile accident or something along that, be able to look at someone's identification and know that they're special and may need special handling, that would be really important to me as a family member."). Documents alone cannot always overcome prejudice. See DAVIS, supra note 288, at 55 (discussing an incident in which a bouncer harassed a transgender woman in the women's restroom, and when she showed him an ID demonstrating she was a woman, he said: "Your ID is
women may need readily available documentation to prove they are not trespassing in sex-segregated spaces like restrooms.342 This may be a particularly acute concern "[flor low-income trans women of color," for whom an "'accurate' ID is essential to avoiding harassment or violence, being turned away for public assistance, or being placed in dangerous sex-segregated environments in detention facilities and/or homeless shelters. 343
Identity documents such as passports, driver's licenses, and birth certificates can also play a meaningful role in a person's conception of self.344 The documentary formalities that recognize nonbinary gender can legitimate an individual's claim to that status.345 In recognizing nonbinary gender, state and local governments express its moral equiv- alence to male and female gender identities, which may undermine dis- crimination by delegitimizing arguments that nonbinary identity is not real or valid.