In 2026, a photo ID is not just paperwork — it essentially grants you permission to exist in society. Last month, Kansas legislature passed a law categorically invalidating trans people’s driver’s licenses and IDs overnight, requiring them to obtain new IDs with incorrect gender markers. Now, with a slew of online “Age Verification” laws requiring online platforms to perform digital identity checks, tech policy experts warn that the inherent dangers are being expanded onto the internet, where biased automated systems threaten to expose and lock trans people out of websites, public services, and apps.
As of March 2026, over half of US states have passed an “Age Verification” and “Digital ID” law. These verification systems (sometimes called “age-gating”) add a new dimension to problems that trans people have been dealing with for decades.
“This is yet another step in requiring people to identify themselves everywhere, in physical and online spaces, as their so-called gender assigned at birth,” Dia Kayyali, an independent tech and human rights consultant, told The Verge.
As many have pointed out, having an ID that doesn’t match your appearance or lived reality is not a matter of pronouns or “validation,” but one of material consequence: it prevents trans people from freely moving about the world without risking constant harassment, violence, and discrimination. Advocates For Trans Equality notes in its guide on trans identity documents that “incorrect identification exposes people to a range of negative outcomes, from denial of employment, housing, and public benefits to harassment and physical violence.”
In January 2025, the administration issued a broad anti-trans executive order claiming the federal government would only recognize a person’s “immutable biological classification as either male or female,” defying the overwhelming consensus of medical science, which shows that sex is neither immutable nor purely biological. In November 2025, the Supreme Court overturned a court order that had temporarily stopped the Trump administration from blocking gender changes on US passports. While the executive order wasn’t legally binding, the Supreme Court and the Kansas Department of Revenue are both following the instruction to the letter — and it’s likely more federal and state agencies will follow suit.
Automated online ID checking systems add new potential dangers to having a mismatching ID. Research shows that the very design of online ID checking virtually guarantees that trans people — and people of color — are experiencing issues disproportionately.
“These systems are specifically designed to look for discrepancies, and they’re going to find them.”
Digital ID and age verification services generally fall into two categories. The systems typically used by government agencies to verify identity (like ID.me, which is used in some states to verify benefits like SNAP) compare an uploaded picture of a person’s ID against information stored in a government database. Others mandate biometric scans and AI “Facial Age Estimation,” an unproven computer vision technique that claims the ability to determine age by analyzing facial features. This technique is based on facial recognition, and is currently being used by platforms like Meta, OnlyFans, and Roblox, where it’s being outsmarted by teenagers and is generally a huge disaster.
“Both approaches have issues and disproportionate failure rates for trans people,” Os Keyes, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Massachusetts who researches algorithmic bias against trans people, told The Verge. Technical experts like Keyes have criticized these systems as inherently biased against trans people, whose identities don’t always fit neatly into government boxes, and whose facial features often change dramatically as a result of hormone replacement therapy (HRT).
“These systems are specifically designed to look for discrepancies, and they’re going to find them,” said Kayyali. “If you are a woman and anyone on the street would say ‘that’s a woman,’ but that’s not what your ID says, that’s a discrepancy.” The danger of these discrepancies extends not just to trans people, but to anyone else whose appearance doesn’t match normative gendered expectations.
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