Racialized administrative burdens and barriers to gender-affirming identity documents in Florida

States like Florida place a heavy administrative burden on transgender people who want to change their names. Applicants face a dozen pages of legal forms, fingerprinting, a background check, a $400 fee, and a court hearing – requirements which do not apply to most cisgender people. County clerks and judges impose additional barriers on some applicants but not others. In this community-engaged, collaborative study with two transgender advocacy organizations, we followed 61 transgender people in Florida who started the name change process in 2022 and 2023. 31 participants completed the process. Why did some people receive name changes relatively quickly, while others discontinued the process, faced barriers, or were denied name changes? We use the racialized and gendered administrative burdens framework to explain how apparently neutral rules for preventing fraud place significant burdens and costs on multiply marginalized applicants. We use survey data, participant observation, interviews, and administrative data to find that the people most likely to encounter additional barriers in our study are unhoused people and those with prior contact with the criminal justice system. These additional barriers fell disproportionately on Black transgender women, who were then more likely to leave the process without a name change.