Southern Queer Newsroom
Opinion: What Age Identification Laws Get Wrong
In recent weeks, multiple state and international laws have taken effect, requiring websites to institute age verification systems to "protect the children," the favorite siren song of authoritarianism. In the U.K., age verification requirements have risen to the point of His Majesty's government, led by Labour Premier Kier Starmer, potentially banning Wikipedia from being accessed. State-level laws in Mississippi and Georgia have taken effect, although the Georgia law is currently being blocked in court because of a lawsuit by online privacy advocates.
There are multiple aspects to this push worth delving into, and the overlap is both strong and intentional. It is a concerted effort to remove all knowledge of queer and transgender history and community from those who most need it so that the old order can continue to be enforced.
First is access to this information in the first place. The U.K. has been going through a large and persistent wave of bigotry pushed by right-wing extremists who call themselves feminists and then pal around with neo-Nazis. Readers will already be familiar with the Cass Report, the Labour Party's retreat from civil liberties, and the "TERF Island" jokes. It has been a source of constant anxiety for trans Brits and their friends and loved ones.
Using the Online Safety Act to ban access to Wikipedia would rip a wealth of information out of people's hands. This would mean fewer young trans and queer people learn the vocabulary to describe themselves, learn they aren't broken, and learn about pillars of transgender activism like Marsha P. Johnson. Speaking more broadly, blocking students from going to Wikipedia to learn about subjects that interest them is a massive hindrance to their growth. While Wikipedia is rife with errors, it is generally good and has been an enormous benefit to the entirety of humanity. Blocking access is just needlessly cruel for every child, not just queer and transgender kids.
Second is enforcement. There is currently a fight over whether app stores or platforms have a responsibility to verify users' ages, and both sides have merit. For each platform to perform redundant age verification work is a waste of resources, even if the industry does settle on an open source implementation to shove into their pipelines. Centralizing the verification would make things simpler, but it also doesn't cover accessing webpages from a web browser instead of an app from an app store, meaning there will be blindspots and workarounds.
All of which is worthless arguing because the entire idea is ill-informed and about as smart as sticking a fork into an AWS server rack.
Even deciding who enforces age verification is a nightmare. Presumably, every website or platform would have to implement it. ISPs can't keep track of multi-user devices based on IP address, and app stores are going to miss devices that don't use apps. It could alternatively be a browser implementation, but it would still be a giant security hazard.
Considering the average security implementation of a single app is bad, having every website or app require users to upload government IDs or scans of their face to a potentially completely unsecured database is a horrible decision. I am not a web developer despite building this website by hand instead of using WordPress, but security certainly seems like an afterthought to the industry.
Databases aren't the only concern either: EFF opposes age verification because companies running these platforms have only been incentivized to sell users' personal information in the past, and selling images of government IDs is a giant privacy hazard, not to mention being misgendered by government documents trans people have not updated. In a world where online privacy is getting more important in the face of fascism, losing this would be a nightmare scenario for the queer community at large.
Third, this recent push is part of a larger fight to smear all queer history, publicity, and existence as inappropriate (harmful) to children. This has been the explicit goal of anti-trans advocacy for years. Michael Knowles openly said "transgenderism must be eradicated" in 2023. Back when drag queens were the scariest thing since the Soviet war machine, the entire queer rights movement was derided as a grooming cult, and still is. Multiple anti-trans bills were pushed through the Georgia Senate and House on the basis of "protecting kids," whether from trans students playing sports or from supposedly predatory doctors prescribing sex surgeries for little girls (something that has never once been backed up with evidence).
Most recently, groups like Collective Shout put pressure on payment processors Visa and MasterCard to stop processing payments for adult and queer games on itch.io. Mira Lazine from Trans News Network has covered the fallout from this decision, and the damage is harrowing. Multiple trans people had their entire game libraries deindexed or completely removed, severely damaging their livelihoods. The concurrent strains of a bad job market and being trans push many of us to the fringes for work, and many have found artistic creation – whether it be games, books, or visual arts – to be a way to make some money. Losing that is devastating, even life-threatening with how difficult being unhoused is.
The world feels like it's closing in and pressing on us from within and without, but it has not been taken laying down. Intense activism from the queer community against Visa, MasterCard, and Stripe have gotten real results in restoring payments to some queer content, and Itch has reindexed free NSFW content, but there is still much further to go there. Advocacy in and out of state capitols will continue to be a major part of the community's fight for our rights, because at the end of the day, we deserve to exist in this world as equals, not scavengers or outcasts.