Exclusive: Social Security "immediately" stopped making sex identification changes on Friday

"Effective immediately, we can no longer process changes to the sex field."

The Social Security Administration has stopped allowing people to make changes to their sex identification with the federal agency, an “emergency” change that was issued on Friday and went into effect “immediately.”

The move is explained as a direct result of one of President Donald Trump’s anti-transgender orders since retaking the presidency.

It is also a dramatic, instant reversal of more than a decade of changes that made changing your gender marker with the SSA easier and easier.

Although the Social Security Administration (SSA) took down the page on how to change your sex identification days into the Trump administration, there were anecdotal reports of changes still being allowed in the time since.

On Friday, however, an “emergency message” was issued internally stating, in part, “Effective immediately, we can no longer process changes to the sex field on the NUMIDENT.”

NUMIDENT, or Numerical Identification System, contains all of the information provided to obtain a Social Security number and includes a listing of a person’s sex.

The acting commissioner of the SSA, Michelle King, was appointed by President Donald Trump on his first day in office, when he also signed the first of now several anti-transgender executive orders.

That day-one order is the cause of Friday’s “emergency message,” titled, “Enumeration: Updated Instructions for Requests to Change Sex Field Data on the NUMIDENT.”

In the “background” section of the instructions, it states, “An individual's sex data is male (M) or female (F). In accordance with the recent Presidential Actions under Executive Order, Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to The Federal Government, sex field data changes on the NUMIDENT (e.g., M to F or F to M) must not be accepted or processed.”

That was the anti-trans executive order Trump issued on January 20. It also was the order that prompted the January 29 memorandum from the Office of Personnel Management ordering government-wide, anti-trans censorship that went into effect on Friday.

In Friday’s SSA emergency message, field offices are told, “Effective with the publication of this EM, explain to individuals requesting a change to the sex field on their NUMIDENT, that we cannot change or process their request.”

There is also a directive regarding the National 800# Call Center: “If an individual contacts the national 800# call center to inquire about changing the sex field on the NUMIDENT, advise the caller we are not able to accept or process a sex field change.”

According to the emergency message, the originating office for the change was the Office of Income Security Programs (OISP) within the Office of Retirement and Disability Policy (ORDP).

Per the latest org chart available, Stephen Evangelista, a 20-plus-year SSA employee is the acting head of ORDP, and Jessica Burns MacBride is leading OISP.

Evangelista was working for the agency then, when in 2013, the SSA during the Obama administration eliminated the requirement that a person needed to have had gender-affirming surgery in order to have their sex identification changed with the SSA. At that point, the agency made clear that “a certification from a physician confirming that the individual has had appropriate clinical treatment for gender transition” was sufficient.

Then, in 2022, the SSA during the Biden administration made the process far easier still, allowing people to self-select their gender without medical documentation.

Now, with Friday’s emergency message, none of those standards — pre-2013, post-2013, or post-2022 — will be sufficient.

Nothing will.

Per Friday’s order: “SSA is unable to process changes to the sex field.“

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Update, 1:10 p.m.: Before publishing overnight, I had looked for pre-2013 information on SSA sex identification changes and nothing was readily available, even in stories discussing the 2013 change.

Today, however, I was able to get this information in a working paper from the Census Bureau’s Center for Administrative Records Research and Applications (CARRA) Working Papers Series about earlier availability for sex identification changes — which is notable and instructive.

From the 2015 paper by Benjamin Cerf Harris:

Attaining original documentation on historic policies about the requirements for sex-coding changes for transgender individuals was very difficult, however the SSA’s History Museum and Archives proved to be helpful in this regard. Originally, individuals could apply for, obtain, and update the information associated with a Social Security card by allegation alone. Indeed, Puckett (2009) points out that at the beginning of the SSA, the information on a person’s record was based exclusively on what that person asserted to be true. During the 1970s, policies were developed to tighten security and limit fraud, however, the first written policy for changing sex information associated with a person’s account appeared in November, 1980. This policy required “...clinical or medical records, or other combination of documents showing the sex change, or any medical record showing the sex-change surgery has been started” (Richard Gabryszewski, personal communication, 4 December 2014). This policy did not change until October 2002, when the SSA adopted the stricter requirement that the surgery needed to be completed prior to the application (Spade, 2008). Less than a year later, in August 2003, the SSA further required that a surgeon or attending physician provide a letter verifying the surgery had been completed (Richard Gabryszewski, personal communication, 4 December 2014). This was the policy in place during the 2010 Census, although the SSA recently updated the policy and no longer requires surgery (SSA, 2013).

The working paper was previously available in the Census Bureau’s library:

It is gone now, likely following Friday’s government-wide censorship purge.

Worse still, as of Saturday afternoon, the entire CARRA Working Papers Series is gone.