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 isn’t legally binding outside the federal government, states rely on the executive order to justify laws like SB 244 that invalidated licenses in Kansas.

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.

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.

“A lot of age estimation systems are built on a combination of anthropological sex markers and skin texture. This means they fall over and provide inaccurate results when faced with people whose markers and skin texture, well, don’t match,” explains Keyes. For example, one of the most prominent markers algorithms measure to determine sex is the brow ridge. “Suppose you have a trans man on HRT and a trans woman on HRT, the former with low brow ridges and rougher skin, the latter with high ridges and softer skin,” Keyes explains. “The former is likely to have their age overestimated; the latter, underestimated.”

Making this even more Kafkaesque is the fact that many of these systems are black boxes, and lack even a basic method of redress where automated decisions can be appealed — mostly because the age verification laws don’t specifically require them. Many of the laws, including in Kansas, incorporate language that only requires platforms to conduct age verification through “a commercially available database” or “any other commercially reasonable method” — to say nothing about the transparency or accuracy of the systems.

Kendra Albert, a technology lawyer and Partner at Albert Sellars, LLP, says that the open-ended language of the bills allows companies to avoid legal liability as long as they implement some kind of age-verification solution, regardless of its effectiveness or whether it has a way to appeal algorithmic decisions. 

“In a lot of cases, it’s not saying you have to, it’s just saying you may be liable if you don’t,” Albert said. “That makes it harder to hold anyone accountable for the decisions to implement these tools, which are gonna have negative effects on particular populations of folks.”

This leaves many platforms seeking to remove legal liability by relying on third-party age verification vendors like Yoti and k-ID  — many of which, Albert notes, usually disclaim liability for algorithmic decision-making as part of their Terms of Service. Smaller platforms that can’t afford these vendors, meanwhile, will either implement their own forms of verification (which also means they become responsible for securely storing extremely sensitive user data), or simply shut down to avoid the legal risk.

Using third-party vendors also means that companies may or may not be securely storing private data, or selling user information to other companies or the government. Last month, Discord, a platform hugely popular among LGBTQ+ gamers, ended its partnership with Persona, a Peter Thiel-backed identity verification company, after hackers claimed the system was sending the private data it collected to federal agencies and comparing photos and biometric data against government watch lists. Persona CEO disputed these claims, posting on X that Persona does “not work with any federal agency” but it is “competing for government contracts.” The Trump administration has shown it has no qualms about using such lists to label and target activists and anyone it deems an enemy. Last year, Trump signed NSPM-7, an executive order that describes a wide range of political views as “domestic terrorism” to be targeted by law enforcement — specifically including “radical gender ideology,” the administration’s shorthand for anything acknowledging the fact that trans people exist.

Needless to say, using platforms that require you to submit your ID and biometric data to a third-party company may not be an appealing option for many trans people, who already face disproportionate risk of doxxing and targeted violence. Last year, it was reported that Texas was making a list of trans people from the names of those who had requested to change the gender marker on their state ID. 

Speaking of Kansas, Albert said that “in a lot of these circumstances, [the government’s] power comes from the ability to weaponize this information against individual people.”

And then there’s the types of content that digital ID checks are restricting. While the stated goal of most of these laws is blocking minors from accessing porn, advocates have warned the definitions of content “harmful to children” are flexible enough to encompass all sorts of supposedly “harmful” materials, from online LGBTQ+ communities to information on birth control. For example, the controversial Kids Online Safety Act (KOSA) has proposed an online censorship regime under a “duty of care” that requires platforms to avoid showing content that is “harmful to minors,” and designates the Trump-appointed Federal Trade Commission (FTC) as the entity that would determine what kinds of material meet that description. (A companion bill, called the Kids Internet and Digital Safety Act, has also advanced in the House of Representatives, though it has notably removed language describing the duty of care.)

“I think it’s fair to say that if you look at the history of obscenity in the US and what’s considered explicit material, stuff with queer and trans material is much more likely to be considered sexually explicit even though it’s not,” said Albert. “You may be in a circumstance where sites with more content about queer and trans people are more likely to face repercussions for not implementing appropriate age-gating or being tagged as explicit.”

For trans people, many of whom discovered community and acceptance for the first time online, this is a major shift. In combination, anti-trans ID and age-gating laws will be blocking access and destroying invaluable resources — leaving few alternatives. 

 “If you can’t afford a VPN, you’re going to use a free VPN that steals your data, or just not access that site at all,” said Kayyali.

Faced with onerous systems that weren’t designed with them in mind, experts worry that LGBTQ+ site operators and many trans folks attempting to access age-gated websites may decide that it isn’t worth the risk.

Correction: Previous version of this article stated that the Kansas Department of Revenue is following the instructions of the January 2025 executive order. KDOR was following SB 244; the state uses the executive order to justify the law.

Update: Clarified Persona’s claims and added comment from Persona CEO Rick Song.

In the early 1970s, long before social media and more than a decade before the earliest internet forums, a woman named Peggie Ames became a human rolodex for trans women in New York state.

Born in Buffalo, Ames spent years working for gay rights organizations in the rural and suburban areas of Western New York. In the days before the internet, it wasn’t easy to meet other trans folks outside the densely populated boroughs of New York City. But Ames had built an extensive social network of trans women and cis allies through her work with the Erickson Educational Foundation, which funded research on trans medical care, and the Mattachine Society of the Niagara Frontier, a local offshoot of the pre-Stonewall-era gay rights group of the same name.

After she was forcibly outed in 1973, Ames became one of the relatively few openly transsexual women with a public profile at the time. In the pre-internet days, this made her someone that trans women turned to in the hopes of reaching others like them. By the end of the decade, Ames estimated that she knew around 100 other trans people in the Western New York area alone. As a public figure, she saw it as her responsibility to help connect the scattered members of her community.

Ames was one of several trans women who ran underground trans social networks like this in the ’70s and ’80s. It worked like this: A well-connected and more publicly visible trans woman would receive letters from other trans people from around the country. She would then dig through her little black book and write back to the sender, including contact information for other trans people she had previously connected with. At a time when many trans people were still closeted and isolated, these ad hoc pen pal networks were a lifeline.

This model of trans activism seems quaint compared to the Extremely Online communities of today. Even the terms trans people use to refer to themselves have changed — first adopting “transgender,” with some more recently reclaiming “transsexual” to emphasize the material conditions of living in a trans body. 

This intentional use of “transsexual” is, in part, a rejection of the utopian, assimilationist identity politics that dominated the latter half of the previous decade. With an explosion of online social media, policy wins, and glossy magazine covers featuring stars like Laverne Cox, the 2010s saw trans identity and visibility become the political spearhead of a supposedly inevitable progressive shift for LGBTQ rights, promising an end to the centuries of discrimination and closeted shame that had preceded it.

Of course, we all know what happened next.

The obsessive campaign to blame trans people for the killing of Charlie Kirk is just the latest and most extreme chapter of the anti-trans backlash that has been intensifying for years — creeping from the fixations of D-list celebrities and doxxing forums like Kiwi Farms to a mainstream fascist movement supported by the highest levels of government. In just a few short decades, trans people went from living in relative obscurity to a scapegoat of the reactionary right, absurdly blamed for gun violence they’re statistically unlikely to commit and subjected to bad-faith media “debates” and discriminatory laws challenging their right to exist in public. For many, it’s an impossible situation: once believing the arc of history to be bending in their favor, countless trans people now live out their lives publicly online at the very moment that an unhinged authoritarian surveillance state has declared them public enemies and targeted them for elimination.

At the same time, social media — once hailed as the tool of 21st-century revolutionaries — has been transformed into a weapon of surveillance and distraction. Instead of organizing and building political power in our communities, many of us find ourselves doomscrolling through hot takes on algorithmic hamster wheels owned by billionaire reprobates like Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg.

AI-powered social media surveillance has been supercharged under Donald Trump, and given his administration’s crusade against trans people, it’s not hard to do the math. According to public records, the Trump administration has contracted with at least four different AI-driven surveillance companies that analyze social media posts and claim the ability to perform “sentiment & emotion analysis” for federal agencies like ICE. Even offline, the rise of facial recognition combined with transphobic policing of public spaces like bathrooms creates new risks for trans people and anyone else whose appearance doesn’t conform to gendered norms. And of course, any trans person posting or merely existing online always risks breaking containment and drawing the attention of the right-wing Griftosphere, resulting in doxxing or worse.

Still, I don’t see this as a moment to despair — it’s merely a sign to change tactics.

The more I read about people like Peggie Ames, the more I think it’s time for us to ask whether the public internet has outlived its usefulness as our primary tool for political activism — trans or otherwise. I don’t mean that we should all throw away our phones and go back into the closet, but rather reconsider the logic that so much of our lives needs to unfold over public networks. If queer and trans folks are going to survive, we’ll need to once again embrace the underground, and learn when to be visible and when to shut the fuck up.

In Going Stealth: Transgender Politics and U.S. Surveillance Practices, Toby Beauchamp outlines the long history of state surveillance as a tool for policing the bodies of trans and gender-nonconforming people. The term “going stealth” is the long-standing practice of trans people selectively obscuring their transsexual status — not as a form of deception but in order to regain some level of control over their lives and safety, knowing that perfect obscurity is usually impossible. Beauchamp illustrates this practice as a response to a society where suspicion and guilt are often preemptively assigned to people whose bodies are perceived as disabled, non-white, or gender-transgressive. (He recalls how in the immediate aftermath of the Virginia Tech shooting, for example, police were called to investigate a “suspicious” person on a school campus near Detroit, Michigan, who was described as a man wearing a blonde wig and makeup.) More recently, the Trump administration ramped up its efforts to nullify gender marker changes on IDs like passports, making it so the information on a person’s documents doesn’t match up with their appearance. The goal of this is crystal clear: to make a person’s transsexual status legible, and thus subject to discrimination by agents of state violence in airports, bathrooms, and anywhere else policing is present. 

These are just a few examples of why trans people often construct their entire lives around navigating the state’s gaze. And it shouldn’t be surprising, given this reality, that more trans people are now choosing to take back control and embrace lifestyles that deprioritize online visibility in favor of personal safety.

This approach doesn’t have to be all or nothing. In a recent essay, trans author Margaret Killjoy coins the term “demiground” to describe what a post-internet hybrid activism might look like. The idea of this paradigm is to compartmentalize your online / offline life into multiple discrete boxes, all with varying degrees of visibility and measured risk. Your “A” life includes all your social media with your most “palatable” / non-spicy persona, providing cover for your “B” and “C” lives, which prioritize in-person communication and unfold with different levels of public obscurity (and sometimes legality).

The goal isn’t to retreat from online spaces and give fascists what they want, but to create a more disciplined level of control over your digital footprint. “In order to populate the demiground, we need to make it as inviting as possible,” Killjoy writes. “It needs to be clear that not only is there political value in being obscure to the state, but that it is also a better and more fulfilling way to live.”

This idea is not new, and has been widely practiced by people who live in a precarious relation to state violence, like sex workers. I’ve seen this “hybrid” approach manifesting in my own queer and trans social circles as an insistence on moving more discussions to end-to-end encrypted platforms like Signal (or for less risky chats, server-based platforms like Discord, which can be subject to court subpoenas). But more important than the tools themselves is the mindset that determines how and when they’re used. It might be a good idea to regularly check in with your people via encrypted group chats, Discord calls, or even Bluesky. But we can’t always let them fill in for time spent organizing face-to-face with neighbors. 

In other words, we should be thinking of online tools as a means of facilitating — and not replacing — the kind of connection and local organizing that help queer and trans people survive.

While talking about any specific efforts in detail would violate the aforementioned golden rule (Shut The Fuck Up), suffice it to say that the dicier the political situation gets for trans people and other marginalized folks, the more survival work will need to be carried out in the underground. Localized networks that help trans people access medical care, combat discrimination, and relocate away from states hostile to their lives already exist. By taking an “if you need to know, you know” approach to these activities — especially when they exist in gray areas of the law, like abortion — we can create social buffers that resist the gaze of the state and the insatiable viral hunger of corporate internet platforms.

The essential activism being done in the underground and its various levels of online / offline community is not meant to be glamorous. It’s not “content” to be shared by influencers as a slickly edited TikTok, or an edgy tweet, or an Instagram slide deck. It’s the un-monetizeable and deeply unsexy work done by people like Peggie Ames, who saw it as her responsibility to help people like her connect and organize outside of the spaces that scorned and rejected them. As a trans lesbian, Peggie had struggled to be accepted by many cis feminists, and was expelled from several lesbian groups in the Buffalo area, where her mannerisms and more “traditional” style of feminine dress were ruthlessly scrutinized as “evidence” that she was really a man. At the same time, her personal connections and long history of activism made her a kind of local celebrity in the LGBTQ community, giving her a unique opportunity to help unite the disparate trans community in the days before the internet.

This is not to understate the role that online communities — and social media in particular — played in uniting many trans people. Once isolated and confused, the rise of the internet empowered trans youth and adults to name and explain long-suppressed feelings by talking to others like them. While right-wing reactionaries manufactured moral panics about a “social contagion” turning our kids trans, it wasn’t the number of trans people that had grown — it was the reach of light-speed communication networks that can show them they’re not alone. 

Even still, online social networks are just a tool, and tools need to be constantly reevaluated to make sure they’re still serving our needs. The ad hoc networks created by trans women like Peggie Ames may not be a blueprint for trans liberation in 2025. But they are a reminder that queer and trans people have always found ways to survive in the underground — and the various shades of gray that exist in between.