By Mark J. Warshawsky

Starting last week, you can now select the gender marker printed on your US passport. The gender selected does not need to match the gender on the supporting documentation. Further, the State Department no longer requires medical documentation to change the gender marker on the US passport. One can select male (M), female (F), or unspecified or another gender identity (X) as the gender marker. Recently, the Social Security Administration (SSA) has made or announced plans for similar changes. The agency now accepts evidence documents containing non-binary identifiers (X) for original and replacement Social Security number cards and records. It allows people to self-select their gender on their record, with no medical or legal proof required. The SSA has also stated it is exploring policy and systems updates to support an X gender designation.

Focusing on the SSA, how should we think about these changes? We should evaluate them in terms of the legitimate needs of the public and the agency, and not the broader social agenda of the Biden Administration. SSA does not need to know gender in order to administer its programs, because the parameters of the program—for example, the amount of a person’s retirement benefits or eligibility for disability benefits—are entirely gender neutral. In the past, the agency might have needed to know gender as a permanent personal marker to help confirm identification to provide service or get benefits from the agency. But if gender information is now even partly self-attested, with no medical documentation, how can it serve that purpose? Moreover, visual identification is becoming less common as more and more business with SSA is conducted over the internet, and less in the field offices. And adding controversial choices to data requests makes it less likely that people will reply truthfully or at all. It is basic to know, as data for policy development purposes and research, the gender characteristics of the beneficiary and taxpaying population. But there are alternative ways for the government to conduct those types of analyses, that is, by matching administrative records with survey information. Indeed, SSA’s experience with racial and ethnic identification shows that the matching is done successfully.

In certain circumstances, when interacting with SSA, the
agency asks, on a voluntary basis, for the person’s racial and ethnic identity.
Originally, like for gender, this was for personal identification and policy
research purposes. Long ago, SSA stopped using race for personal identity
purposes. Moreover, as the response rate to this question from SSA declined
significantly over time, the agency decided several years ago to discontinue
use of this data in its research, as inaccurate, and instead relies on various
surveys to match with administrative data. Since that decision, the response
rate has dropped further. Indeed, the only reason SSA still makes this query is
because the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) has requested it to
continue to do so for some of its health policy research, although HHS has not
paid SSA for this service. The inconsistency in approaches of the two agencies
with regard to this data accuracy is indeed an outstanding and perplexing issue.

In summary, there seems no real reason for SSA to enter the culture wars to fulfill its mission and spend taxpayer resources. It should simply stop asking for gender and racial identification, and focus on other ways to maintain and improve the accuracy of its data for policy and research purposes.

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