Document Type
Article
Publication
Washington University Law Review
Year
2025
Citation Information
Scott Skinner-Thompson, Transgender Disenfranchisement, 102 Wash. U. L. Rev. 1997 (2025), available at https://scholar.law.colorado.edu/faculty-articles/1752.
Abstract
Transgender and gender variant people are excluded from formal democratic participation at the polls through a variety of legal mechanisms. Such barriers include purportedly neutral voter identification laws, which may prevent transgender people from voting given the obstacles to achieving accurate identification documents in many states, and felon disenfranchisement laws, which exclude the disproportionate number of trans people ensnared in the carceral system.
But, as this Article explains, transgender people are also deterred from public space and participation more broadly through laws and customs specifically policing gender identity. Such laws include so-called bathroom bills that prevent people from accessing facilities in government buildings, drag bans that prohibit the expression of any sort of public gender nonconformity, laws that erase queer people from public school curriculum, and laws that sanction employment discrimination against trans people, ensuring that transgender lives remain in the shadows.
As these examples suggest, voter disenfranchisement of transgender people is part of a broader political and economic disenfranchisement that seeks to erase trans people from public life and ensure that they are economically subordinate. Only by appreciating voter disenfranchisement as part of the systemic erasure of gender variance can the voter disenfranchisement laws be understood—and challenged—in their most comprehensive light. Put differently, in much the same way that racist voting regulations were just a part of the economic and political subjugation of Jim Crow, formal voting exclusion of transgender people is part of a calculated effort to segregate and erase queerness from the public square.
The extent of this political and economic disenfranchisement is brought into even sharper relief given that trans lives are literally on the ballot. In capitals around the country and in recent ballot initiatives, voters and their representatives are debating trans existence in contexts ranging from medical care to athletic participation to bathroom access, with trans lives used as a political cudgel. To comprehensively capture the harms of transgender estrangement, scholars and activists must also underscore that trans people are being foreclosed from discussion of their own lives.
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