By Alex Nash
On Jan. 23, Secretary of State Marco Rubio ordered State Department staff to freeze all applications to change gender markers on passports, in compliance with a Jan. 20 executive order that declared “an individual’s immutable biological classification as either male or female.” Rubio’s email was obtained by the Guardian and published on Jan. 24. Existing passports are not affected, though anyone reapplying will have to select between the “male” and “female” markers, removing the third “X” option introduced by the Biden administration in April 2022.
The State Department’s passport freeze is not just stupid and performative — though it is both of those things — it sets a terrifying precedent for how the Trump administration can interpret the documents of people it wants to erase.
The executive order’s definition of gender identity as “gender extremism” is bad enough, but its conflation of sex and gender is seen in successive orders. This includes the Jan. 28 ban on all federal funding to gender-affirming care to trans people under 19, as well as the one issued on Jan. 29 that threatens to revoke federal funding to schools whose teachers acknowledge transgender students’ self-identification.
The Office of Personnel Management, a federal agency that manages the budgets and staffing of federal agencies, issued a memo on Jan. 29 that, among other things, features a federal anti-trans bathroom ban and requires federal agencies to terminate programs that “promote or inculcate gender ideology” by 5 p.m. on Jan. 31. This is not an executive order, but is still portentous of how much the administration hates trans people.
This is not just cosmetic. The removal of the ability to change gender markers at all, including to the “X” marker, is a demonstration of how petty the federal government is. The erasure of official recognition of trans and gender-nonconforming people in official documentation is dehumanizing.
This executive order and the resulting departmental memos send a clear message: that trans identities are officially not acceptable. Officials can now claim that people who do not fit the gender binary have committed forgery to obtain a passport. Doing so is a felony under 18 U.S. Code § 1543, punishable by a $250,000 fine, up to ten years in federal prison or both. This is a criminalization of trans people.
The State Department website that used to have safety guidelines for LGBTQIA+ travelers has reduced the acronym to “LGB.” A similar effort was made on Friday, Jan. 31 to remove all “outward-facing media (websites, social media accounts, etc.) of DEIA offices,” CBS reported, and people are still scrambling to assess how much data was lost. Later that day, an “emergency message” within the Social Security administration declared that “sex field data changes on the NUMIDENT (e.g., M to F or F to M) must not be accepted or processed,” independent legal newsletter LawDork reported.
The government deciding what acceptable expression is hurts everyone. What can you do about it? Get off social media and get involved. If you are from Portland, call Oregon senators Wyden and Merkley at (202) 224-5244 and (202) 224-3753, as well as representative Bynum at 202-255-5711. If you are not from Portland, use www.commoncause.org and enter your registered address. National organizations like the Trevor Project and the Trans Lifeline are worth your time (GLAAD also has a resource index), as are pridenorthwest, Qcenter, and Portland’s Human Rights Campaign branch.
This information is provided here for people to use because it is so important that people act on it. It is worth the effort. Everyone is.
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