United States issues its first passport with ‘X’ gender marker | Hacker News Reader

United States issues its first passport with ‘X’ gender marker

apnews.com

The passport X is not a problem to travel and leave the US. I think there might be problems in other countries upon entry where the computer systems at passport controls do not have a gender X to input. There was just a thread yesterday on how long names like Christopher do not fit into driver license ID systems in New Jersey and that led to many other complications.

Interesting bug. I wonder how a "Falsehoods people believe about other countries' passport systems" file would look like.

On a similar note, I remember reading about some Egyptian atheist's struggle to have no religion stated on his domestic identity card. It was quite a twisted story.

>On a similar note, I remember reading about some Egyptian atheist's struggle to have no religion stated on his domestic identity card. It was quite a twisted story.

Is this a falsehood people believe about other countries' identity cards or do people really have their religion on their identity card? That is scary, like genocide waiting to happen scary.

Egyptian national IDs contained a "religion" entry, with only "Christian", "Muslim" and "Jewish" being allowed. Atheists fought for the ability to add a fourth possible value, "-".

IDK what the situation is right now. Maybe some Egyptian HNer can tell us.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_identification_card_c...

>Egyptian national IDs contained a "religion" entry, with only "Christian", "Muslim" and "Jewish" being allowed. Atheists fought for the ability to add a fourth possible value, "-".

I'd expect people to fight to remove that entry entirely, whether one has a religion or not. That's creepy at best, perilous at worst.

We should count our blessings, and one of those blessings is living in a secular country.

Some countries which collect individual religious affiliation actually do so to enforce religious laws. For example, I think that a non-Muslim man cannot marry a Muslim woman according to traditional Islamic law, unless he converts to Islam first, and many countries actually enforce this prohibition until today.

Of course, to do so reliably, you need a population-wide database of religious affiliation first... Sigh.

There are different forms of "secularism." In Finland the government collects taxes on behalf of the Protestant church. The government in Germany does the same for different Christian denominations/religions but does not consider others a religion like the Church of Scientology and even targets and surveils them like a terrorist group. So I am not sure if I could call these countries secular.

https://www.dw.com/en/scientology-is-still-a-red-flag-in-ger...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Church_tax

I'm from a small island country in the south Atlantic, and I can tell you, ours will crash on scanning a passport with gender X, I know because I implemented the scanners' frontend. The real issue is that changes to the database schema were not possible at the time and the original designer implemented gender as 'male(bool)'.

True story.

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