LGBTQ Agenda: US passport change highlights progress on gender issues
The big news that Americans will be able to self-select their gender identity on their passport beginning April 11 is just the latest salvo in an ongoing struggle for nonbinary and transgender folks be able to have their official identities match their lived identities.
Slowly, steadily, federal and many state governments are coming around to the idea that people should be allowed to identify themselves in a manner that best conforms with their gender identity rather than the sex to which they were assigned at birth.The effective date for the new gender marker on U.S.
passports was announced March 31 — Transgender Day of Visibility — and was one of several initiatives outlined by the Biden administration, as the Washington Blade reported.Less than a year after Secretary of State Antony Blinken committed the State Department to updating its procedures to allow passport applicants to self-select their gender as "M" or "F" or "X" without medical certification if their gender selection did not match other identity documents, the change is about to go full swing.
Although the State Department issued the first gender-neutral passport last October following a lawsuit filed in 2015 in which Coloradan Dana Zzyym sued the department after it denied their application for a passport with an "X" gender marker, the office will begin issuing gender-neutral passports to the general public next week.
