
1900s ID Cards That Kept Trans People Safe from Harassment - lowlifesante
https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/trans-id-passes-weimar-germany-marcus-hirschfeld
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heterodoxia
I created an account to comment here on the topicalness of this.

Given many of us on HN work in the field of online identity, this is supremely
relevant topic.

As someone who has had acquaintances who transitioned, (one operation, one
"asterixed" as another commenter described) and worked with a more than a few
non-binary people, identity as experienced, and how it gets implemented by
bureaucracies, companies, and the state, is an area where engineering runs up
against basic philosophical problems.

One example was a mental health intake assessment that needed to handle
patients who would present at different service providers as male or female
separately. Given they may or may not provide govt ID that specified a gender,
and different drugs and protocols for serving them would apply based on both
their eligibility, history and the identity they were last treated under,
providing identity to people with dynamic identities is requires non-trivial
solutions, with life altering impacts.

Prior art from pre-digital culture for handling dynamic identities is a really
big deal. Even as someone of a decidedly unsympathetic political stripe, one
would be missing a lot of facts to believe what we now call non-binary gender
identities are merely a modern thing.

The association of a changed identity with criminality is more a peculiarity
of very recent mentalities than trans identities. I have worked on a variety
state identity schemes and candidates for them, mainly steering them away from
being used as a way to oppress people.

In non-health environments, the trans case was not a significant use case
because we worked on the credentials, treating the legitimacy of identity as
something for the customer to decide, but the trans identity use case would
actually serve as a useful limit on how deterministic an identity credential
or document is.

I get that there is a lot of political stuff around this topic, and talking
about it is difficult because of the political consequences for wrongthink,
but HN is probably one of the most relevant places to talk about the
significance of dynamic identity.

~~~
Pixeleen
I do not want to make political noise. I have nothing to do with non-binary
identities. I do not have much sympathy for those who oscillate between
genders. Doing that in the context of medication seems like asking for
trouble. Doing that in everyday life is disrespectful to regular people who
are just trying their best. My F marker on my ID matches my genitals. I just
want to live my quiet life, after being successfully treated for a serious
disorder, but those damn old records keep coming up.

~~~
heterodoxia
One of the things I fought (using PIAs) was automated warrantless police
access to certain records because the data would get shared with foreign
border agencies as part of data agreements, causing the very headaches you
imply.

I got shared role accounts banned across a sector, and per-user database
lookup transaction logs added to a solution so that at least the breadcrumbs
would exist. It cost a lot, including my own renewal on the contract, but a
couple years later it caught some pretty bad actors.

The challenge is that the bad stuff happens to the square pegs first, and tech
creates a lot of square pegs. If nobody resists, they apply it generally.
Nobody is obligated to be a poster child, and that sucks you have to put up
with it.

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Pixeleen
There is a field in state IDs and US passport files for previous names. It is
ostensibly there for maiden names or fraudsters. Countless times it has outed
me as a transsexual, and causes me to face harassment from cops or ICE agents.

~~~
irrational
I'm curious, what are you doing that cops are looking up your information so
often? Is this from being pulled over for traffic violations? I'm struggling
to think of the last time I had any interaction with someone who wanted to see
an ID from me. Maybe I just don't get out often enough ;-)

~~~
Pixeleen
Actually, it was only once with a cop in recent memory, and yes it was for a
traffic violation.

I am a frequent international traveller as well.

In neither circumstance should what the computer has about my previous
genitals come into play. I write that I am a transsexual here for simplicity,
but I am not "trans". That is not who I am. I am a woman, not a woman with an
asterisk.

~~~
ythn
> I am a woman, not a woman with an asterisk.

I think the information the asterisk conveys is important. For example, I
don't think trans women should be allowed to compete against cis women in
sports on even terms since it is physiologically unfair.

~~~
da_chicken
It's really only important in the long term for medical reasons. There some
some diseases which have genetic factors which your doctor needs to be aware
of. Similar to knowing that an adopted child is not natural born from the
parents. An inaccurate or incomplete genetic history of a patient can result
in misdiagnosis.

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pjc50
How do you deal with the arbitary actions of authority figures against you for
being different? Get a piece of paper from a different authority figure that
says actually this is fine.

~~~
Lazare
It's somehow seems to be a very German solution, really.

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Odenwaelder
There is a great art exhibition on the era of the Weimar Republic in
Frankfurt:
[http://www.schirn.de/en/exhibitions/2017/splendor_and_misery...](http://www.schirn.de/en/exhibitions/2017/splendor_and_misery_in_the_weimar_republic/)

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rangersanger
Kept people safe from Harassment *until 1933 when they provided a very
convenient list for the Nazis to "harass."

