"It Feels like a Less Dire Hostage Situation": How Transgender Adults Interpret Street-Level Bias and Discretion

The administrative burden literature has paid increasing attention to the psychological costs of citizen state interactions (e.g. Lasky-Fink and Linos 2023). As Gilad and Assoline (2024) point out, recent findings include that "those who are most in need of state support are the most likely to relinquish their rights (Christensen et. al 2020; Chudnovsky and Peeters 2020)." Additionally, citizens’ interpretations of bureaucratic interactions may influence future claims behavior and how they view the state (Barnes and Henly 2018). This qualitative study of 43 transgender adults who applied for or considered applying for social insurance programs investigates how trans people interpret bureaucratic power and discretion. Specifically, I sought to answer three questions: “What are the psychological costs of citizen-state interactions for trans/nonbinary people when applying to application-based social insurance programs?;” “How do trans/nonbinary people view their interactions with street-level bureaucrats during the application process?”, and “Given the racialized nature of burdens, what are the differences for trans people of color versus white trans people?”

For this study, I interviewed 43 US-based transgender and nonbinary adults. I selected interview participants from a larger group of survey respondents (n = 465) who consented for follow up. Using a grounded theory approach, I first open coded all 43 interviews, settling on the parent code of “feelings about bureaucrats/bureaucracy.” Upon conducting a second round of coding, I found that participants often discussed bureaucrats as “gatekeepers” who made decisions based on whether or not they “heard what they wanted to hear.” At the same time, participants who “passed” as a binary gender (regardless of whether it was their actual gender identity) often had more positive experiences with bureaucrats, and viewed them neutrally as people, “just doing their jobs.”

The findings of this study show that participants often see bureaucrats as subjective gatekeepers to services, who make decisions based on their views of client deservingness. Many participants see bureaucrats as extensions of State surveillance systems that need to be appeased to avoid service denial, stigma, and harassment. Additionally, I find that participants see a causal link between concealing their identity and receiving benefits -- implying that psychological costs for trans adults may be diametrically different from their cisgender peers, particularly for those who do not fit into cisnormative ideals of gender or “pass”. The results offer important implications for gender inclusive poverty policies and practices. My findings highlight specific moments of gender-based bias and discrimination in the process of frontline public benefits casework in which to intervene to improve equity in outcomes.