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For the past few years, Americans applying for a passport could choose male, female or X as their gender marker. But President Trump has taken that third option away, and Secretary of State Marco Rubio has now suspended all applications of Americans who did not pick male or female. It's a move that is likely to be challenged in court, as NPR's Michele Kelemen explains.
MICHELE KELEMEN, BYLINE: The offices of Lambda Legal have been getting lots of questions from trans and nonbinary people across the country worried about the status of their passports.
CARL CHARLES: Everything is just, like, being put to the side. And this is very disconcerting, to say the least, for people who have imminent international travel plans.
KELEMEN: That's Carl Charles, who's with Lambda Legal.
CHARLES: The State Department is not processing any requests for an X gender marker, nor are they processing any gender marker updates for binary markers - that is, for someone looking to change their gender marker from M to F or from F to M. Those are also not being processed.
KELEMEN: Charles predicts there will be legal challenges. Lambda Legal represented the first person to receive a gender X passport, Dana Zzyym, who's intersex. And that took years of litigation.
CHARLES: We had to litigate Dana's case for six years through the end of the Obama administration into the Trump 1 administration. And that was not even resolved until 2021, when Dana finally secured an X gender marker on their passport.
KELEMEN: In 2022, the Biden administration decided to allow Americans to choose how they identify when filling out their passport applications. Thousands of gender X passports are believed to be in circulation now, though the State Department won't give any numbers. Carl Risch was the head of consular affairs during the previous Trump administration and says he lobbied to get rid of the gender marker altogether, like it was before the 1980s.
CARL RISCH: And getting passport adjudicators out of the middle of being the gender police.
KELEMEN: Now a partner at a D.C. law firm, Risch says he doesn't think the Trump administration will want to do that because this issue plays well to Trump's base.
RISCH: And I think they find this to be politically useful, so I'm not certain they would be open to that kind of pragmatic compromise around resolving this once and for all so that we don't have to deal with the litigation and the fighting amongst ourselves about what kind of gender markers should be available on a passport.
KELEMEN: Charles of Lambda Legal thinks that's the point of this, to create fear among transgender and nonbinary Americans, who make up less than 1% of the population and a tiny fraction of passport holders. The State Department is now warning such travelers that many countries don't recognize the gender X markers, but Charles points out that other countries have had them for years.
CHARLES: Australia, Austria, Bangladesh, Canada, Germany, Iceland, India. Nationals from those countries are traveling all over the world with these documents, and there have not been issues.
KELEMEN: For now, existing U.S. gender X passports remain valid. But Trump's State Department is not answering many questions about this, raising concerns for those who are waiting on their travel documents. They might have to reapply and get a passport with a gender marker that is not accurate or does not reflect how they look, creating more troubles at international borders.
Michele Kelemen, NPR News, the State Department.
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