Your identity can complicate informality (I’m not afraid of getting a person of the same gender drunk, but very afraid of the opposite) but identity politics tends to center the formal which is a rigged game where victory as most partial as the formal route preclude recourse to the informal.

The informal route is dangerous but at least you have interesting stories to tell in the end. If your co-worker feel like they are being treated unfairly at the expense of a nepo baby, for instance, the adults will likely have too much guile for it to be worth talking to them. Befriend the nepo baby, however, and you might get a huge amount of insider information about what’s going on. I was lucky to have some mentors that didn’t teach me the secrets of informality in certain tribes but rather certain principles of informal politics that my not be universal but that are widespread, such as an Asian woman sysadmin who taught me tactics for getting good customer service from unreliable vendors —- tactics, funny enough, that quit working when central IT at my Uni got more reliable but then I didn’t need them.