By Vanguard Staff
LOS ANGELES — People perceived by police as transgender are significantly more likely to be searched and arrested during law enforcement encounters in California, even though officers discover contraband at nearly identical rates across perceived gender groups, according to new research from the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law and the University of California, Irvine.
The findings raise concerns about disparities in how police exercise discretion during millions of pedestrian and vehicle stops across California, with researchers finding substantially higher rates of searches and arrests involving people officers perceived as transgender.
Researchers Jordan Grasso of the Williams Institute and Caro A. Mooney of UC Irvine analyzed data collected under California’s Racial and Identity Profiling Act, which requires law enforcement officers to record their subjective perceptions of people they stop, including perceived gender.
The researchers examined 4.6 million pedestrian and vehicle stops of adults reported by California law enforcement agencies in 2023. Of those encounters, 17,916 — less than 0.5% — involved people officers perceived as transgender or gender nonconforming.
Despite representing a small share of the overall stops, people perceived as transgender were searched at substantially higher rates.
About 24% of people perceived as transgender men or women were searched, compared with 14% of people perceived as cisgender men and 8% of those perceived as cisgender women. About 11% of people perceived as gender nonconforming were searched.
The disparity remained notable because searches produced contraband at almost the same rate regardless of officers’ perceptions of a person’s gender.
Among 576,735 searches conducted in 2023, contraband was discovered in approximately 27% of encounters involving people perceived as transgender, gender nonconforming or cisgender men. Contraband was found in about 26% of searches involving people perceived as cisgender women.
Researchers also identified substantial disparities in arrest rates.
About 19% of people perceived as transgender men and 20% of people perceived as transgender women were arrested during police stops. By comparison, officers arrested 10% of those perceived as cisgender men, 7% of those perceived as cisgender women and 9% of people perceived as gender nonconforming.
The researchers controlled for race and age while examining the relationship between officers’ perceptions of gender and the outcomes of police encounters.
Grasso, a research data analyst at the Williams Institute, said the findings illustrate the consequences of the discretion officers exercise during encounters with members of the public.
“Policing is fundamentally discretionary, and officers’ perceptions of the people they encounter shape all decisions, from whom they stop and search to whether a stop escalates to the use of force or an arrest,” Grasso said.
“Police often enforce normative gender expectations, subjecting anyone who is perceived to disrupt these norms—regardless of their actual gender identity—to heightened surveillance and punishment,” Grasso added.
The study focuses specifically on officers’ perceptions rather than the actual gender identities of the people stopped. Because the Racial and Identity Profiling Act requires officers to record their subjective perceptions, researchers cannot determine from the data whether people perceived by police as transgender or gender nonconforming actually identify that way.
California enacted the Racial and Identity Profiling Act in 2015 as part of an effort to identify and address racial and identity-based disparities in policing. The law requires law enforcement agencies to report detailed information about pedestrian and vehicle stops to the California Department of Justice.
The latest research is among the first studies to examine how officers’ perceptions of gender can influence what happens after a police encounter begins.
The findings also follow previous research documenting disproportionate law enforcement contact experienced by LGBTQ people.
A 2024 American Civil Liberties Union report cited by LGBTQ Nation found that 30.7% of transgender respondents nationally reported having been arrested and 26.8% reported experiencing physical force by police. Among non-LGBTQ respondents, 13.6% reported having been arrested.
The Williams Institute has similarly reported that LGBTQ people are more likely than non-LGBTQ people to experience police stops, searches, arrests and detention over the course of their lives.
The new California findings indicate that disparities emerge not simply in who encounters police but in what officers do during those encounters.
Despite essentially equivalent rates of contraband discovery, people perceived as transgender faced search rates substantially higher than cisgender people and arrest rates approximately twice those experienced by people perceived as cisgender women.
The researchers said the results demonstrate how an officer’s perception of gender can affect the trajectory of an encounter, potentially subjecting people perceived as violating conventional gender expectations to greater scrutiny and more punitive outcomes.
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