In the political environment that followed the authoritarian New Order in Indonesia (approx. ’65-‘98), various minority groups assert that access to bureaucratic forms of citizenship can provide protection from harm. During fieldwork in 2014-15 with transgender women in the cities of Yogyakarta and Jakarta, I found that the Indonesian state-issued identity card (known as the “KTP”) was a surprisingly charged medium for engaging the terms of recognition offered by the state. This paper considers how engagement with the KTP as a semiotic object extends theoretical consideration of the meanings of “bureaucratic documentation” as tied to written forms of communication.