Since spring 2022 the U.S. State Department has been allowing Americans who do not identify as either male or female to select the gender marker X when applying for a passport.
The move followed pressure from various LGBTQ+ groups to recognize nonbinary, intersex and gender-nonconforming people. It followed similar efforts from countries such as Canada, which created this option on its passports in 2017. Australian national Alex MacFarlane received the country's first passport with the gender marker X back in 2003.
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Trump executive order on the sexes affects passport issuance
For two years the U.S. State Department has been issuing passports with the X gender marker to those who have a letter from a doctor showing medical evidence of struggling with gender identity.
Now the agency has halted the option after President Donald Trump started out his presidency with an executive order stating that the U.S. government will recognize only male and female as sexes.
"Gender identify reflects a fully internal and subjective sense of self, disconnected from biological reality and sex and existing on an infinite continuum, that does not provide a meaningful basis for identification and cannot be recognized as a replacement for sex," the executive order says. It states that the administration will recognize only sex rather than gender identity.
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The executive order was signed on the night of Jan. 20, just after Trump was inaugurated. The State Department has already stopped processing and issuing passports for those who selected X as their gender category, upon a directive from Secretary of State Marco Rubio.
'In agency documents, sex and not gender shall be used'
"In agency documents 'sex' and not 'gender' shall be used," the memo that Rubio sent to State Department officials, first reported by NBC, reads. "Further, it is specified that the policy of the United States is that an individual's sex is not changeable."
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The memo says "government-issued identification documents shall refer to an individual’s immutable biological classification as either male or female."
While less than 0.1% of people applying for passports in the past two years requested the X marker, Trump has made rolling back protections for nonbinary individuals a key point of the campaign leading up to both his presidencies.
For passports that are already being processed, State Department workers have been instructed "not take any further action [...] pending additional guidance from the Department."
No guidance on existing passports has been issued, so at least for now nonbinary Americans who managed to get passports with the X marker in the past two years will be able to continue to travel and use them to prove identity.
LGBTQ+ advocacy groups have been advising those who hold passports with the X marker to hold on to them for as long as possible.
"PSA: If you are trans, do NOT mail in your passport to attempt to change your gender marker," Media Matters for America LGBTQ Program Director Ari Drennen wrote on social media platform X.
"The State Department is currently collecting them unchanged and will not give a public timeline for returning them. You could be without a passport indefinitely."
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