Trump Order Causing Document Troubles for Trans People

President Donald Trump’s first two and a half weeks in office threw the lives of transgender people in the US into chaos.

Through executive orders, he’s moved to ban trans women and girls from sports, ban federal support of gender-affirming care for people age 19 and younger, and set the stage for a trans military ban under the Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth. But no order has likely affected more trans people than the first he signed on Day 1 of his presidency, or “Defending Women From Gender Ideology and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.”

The order is a federal redefinition of sex—scrubbing all mention of trans people and trans-friendly policy from federal websites, directing federal prisons to remove trans people from the facilities that don’t align with their birth sex, banning the use of federal funds for gender-affirming care (a directive to effectively detransition those same federal prisoners who can’t get hormones any other place) and forcing trans people on Medicaid to pay for pricey drugs out of pocket.

At some point, the Office of Personnel Management and Homeland Security will implement changes that require “government-issued identification documents, including passports, visas, and Global Entry cards to accurately reflect the holder’s sex.”

Legal challenges are already filed, including a lawsuit from the American Civil Liberties Union challenging the state department’s “refusal to issue accurate sex designations”—these are not laws, they’re directives, and likely unconstitutional power grabs from the executive branch—but so are changes to federal policy. As we wrote last week, trans people can no longer update the gender marker on their passport or the one on file with the Social Security Administration, because, based on this redefinition, we don’t exactly have “gender markers” anymore.

Instead, Trump replaced them with sex markers. His administration believes sex is locked at conception. Technically speaking, we’re nothing. We’re sexless. But the complexities, and come to think of it, simplicities, of biology, the prevalence of intersex conditions visible and invisible to the naked eye, and the demonstrable reality of gender variance in daily life, across cultures, and throughout time, is just hooey, they say. Woke, meaningless, irrelevant nonsense that must be snuffed out.

We’re starting to see this ideology in practice, and it’s creating real, practical problems for trans people. Secretary of State Marco Rubio has frozen applications from people who’ve requested “X” markers or a binary change of gender, according to Denise Diskin a volunteer attorney with the LGBTQ legal advocacy organization QLaw. It now appears the only one in the business of changing gender markers is Trump: Trans people who have secured emergency replacement passports have had them returned with their gender assigned at birth. To renew a passport, applicants must send in their current one, meaning that many now find themselves without a passport and no clear timeline for when they’ll get one back. In a Friday press release, The ACLU said that 1,500 transgender people or their families had contacted the organization, reporting suspended or pending passport applications.

Along with switching gender to sex on federal forms and documents, Trump’s order revoked the option for a gender neutral “X” marker on passports for non-binary people, intersex people, or anyone else who didn’t want a sex identification on their travel document.

For Camins Bretts, a  bald trans man with a beard and taste for expensive menswear, an “X” marker is practical. His appearance has confused border patrol agents since the 1980s. When he appeared to be a butch woman, agents saw a man fraudulently using a woman’s passport. He had the same problem after he transitioned, and really was a man using a woman’s passport.   Bretts recalled all the times he’d been detained at reentry for “false documents” and laughed.

“I mean, it’s a story every trans person tells me,” he says. “That’s not unique.”

How he’s gendered often depends on who’s looking. The “X” marker  could’ve at least  put an end to consistent border troubles. On January 22, Bretts applied for an emergency passport with an “X” marker, and scheduled an appointment to pick it up on the 27th, hoping to make some last minute travel plans with friends. A few hours after Rubio reportedly sent a memo to state department employees ending the use of X markers and halting gender marker changes, Bretts’ passport momentarily disappeared in the tracking system and then reappeared three days later. At the appointment, a woman told Bretts their passport was on hold. When Bretts asked for written documentation of that, she said there was none, and no appeals process, either. Looking distressed, the woman told Bretts to print out the executive order as documentation. A supervisor nodded his head behind her.

Bretts was unable to apply for a new passport under their assigned gender at birth because the Department had previously issued Bretts passports with both male and female markers. He walked away from the appointment with nothing, and no recourse, so he contacted their congressperson Pramila Jayapal and several legal organizations. On Tuesday, the Seattle passport office called to reaffirm they were not processing “X” passports. Bretts asked if that was a denial of their application, but the office couldn’t say. He’s since received notifications that their application was complete.

“Called [passport] helpline,” they texted. “Still Schrodinger’s passport—‘getting ready to manufacture book and card’ according to [the] agent … They could/would not answer my q’s about when it will be ready and what gender is in it.”

Evan Reding, a 24-year-old trans masculine person who passes as a cis man in daily life, says having an “F” on his passport is more of a safety concern than anything else. He hadn’t updated any of his documents prior to election day last year, but legally changed his name in December and sent in an application for a new, expedited passport on January 10th, expecting it back by at least January 31. A tracker on the State Department website shows his passport as “processing.” He checks it at least twice a day. He expects to receive a passport with an “F,” but scraping together the $600 he needed to update everything before Trump took office wasn’t easy. Reding says he wouldn’t have been able to do it without his mom’s help.

The other trans people, and parents of trans children, who spoke with The Stranger asked us to use their first name or pseudonyms to protect their identities.

Bailey, a trans woman also waiting for her passport, says she can afford to lose the $270 she spent, but it’s not why she went through this process. The thought that her passport may return with an “M” marker, adds to her prevailing feeling that the people in charge of this country hate her and people like her.

In the months before  Trump’s inauguration, 24-year-old Shiloh updated all their documents with a new name and gender marker, except the one on file with the Social Security Administration. Biggest face palm of his life, he says. It’d slipped his mind while recovering from top surgery; it’s also easy to forget. Social Security cards don’t have gender markers. They’re only visible from a SSA database called NUMIDENT, or Numerical Identification System.

Shiloh evidently got lucky, or at least secured a just in time appointment with the office. They changed their marker more than a week after Trump’s order went into effect. Four days later, the SSA sent workers an “emergency message” telling them not to process gender marker changes, and to tell applicants they were “not able to accept or process a sex field change,” according to reporting from independent journalist Chris Geidner. The policy is now posted on the agency’s website.

James’ daughter is trans, and they’re having trouble getting her a new passport from the State Department. They wanted to update her “X” passport to an “F,” but it’s lost in the government ether now.

The family has to decide by Thursday whether or not to cancel an upcoming vacation overseas. James estimates the non-refundable hotel stay and plane tickets will be in the $10,000 range. She’s suggested staying with her grandparents if they can’t work it out in time. But money is just money, he says. But James wonders what would happen if she really needed to leave, and that passport was locked in some kind of bureaucratic morass.

James has texted us regular updates about the family’s troubles. On Tuesday, they discovered Social Security processed the name change they’d submitted, but left the gender marker as “M.” That morning, he’d tried talking his way into a passport at a local office—hers was currently listed as “X.” James tried handing the employees his daughter’s updated Washington birth certificate, but says they had a record of the M on her previous passport.

“They have no guidance on how to issue one otherwise since X doesn’t exist anymore,” he wrote. “I think having a passport, regardless of gender is better than no passport and being stuck.”

The employees were compassionate, and heard him out even though he did not have an appointment, but there was nothing they could do but escalate his problem to their supervisor, who told him to come back with his daughter on Wednesday and submit a new application with an “M” marker. While waiting, he says he overheard employees tell a trans woman that the process had changed, and they’d mail her a passport. She flew in from Alaska, he says.

James returned with his daughter on Wednesday, they were told the legal department would have to review her application. He had to write a letter explaining their situation. “I have to go back Friday and either there will be a passport or a letter from legal denying it.”

James got neither. The passport office called Friday and explained they were still waiting for guidance, meaning his daughter’s passport would remain in limbo. James cancelled the first leg of the family vacation. If things change, they’ll rebook. If they don’t, well, he isn’t so sure.

Liz’s trans son came out shortly after the family moved from Seattle to rural Washington. She joked that he should have come out when they lived someplace with resources. But they’ve managed. “Surprisingly,” she said, he’s not the only trans kid. There’s a small community of families like theirs. He’s out at school. His identity is not a secret. Anyone who knows him knows he’s trans, which didn’t stop his civics teacher from polling his class on whether broad acceptance of trans people would be very bad for society. Eighty percent of them said “very bad.”

Liz submitted a passport application for her son with an “M” marker on December 23, and arrived a week later on January 1. Liz paid for expedited service, and says the online tracker showed it would arrive in two to three weeks. Five weeks later, it still hasn’t. The tracker shows it is “in process.”

Liz thinks her son’s delayed passport has been overwhelming for him, but his main concern is missing out on a trip to Asia this spring. He doesn’t understand the gravity of the situation in the way she does.

No one around her seems to. She says it’s as if people almost expect trans people to be discriminated against. They don’t see these orders as extreme as they should.

“The thought of an American citizen being denied this and that being okay with people—not just my son, but all trans and non-binary kids and adults,” she says. “To oppress a whole group of people on a federal level. That’s what scares me.”