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

22 pointsgmays16 comments

I feel that if you recognize that gender need not necessarily match physical characteristics why not simply take it off the passport altogether, because in that case it doesn't really play a role in identification to begin with.

I feel this would probably be an issue when traveling to certain countries that force you to choose male or female when feeling out there entry records. And as you probs know, some countries are extremely closed minded in stuff like this. I wonder if this X would make it harder for some folks when traveling abroad.

Along the same thought, this could cause more problems than it's worth unless this becomes a more universally accepted way to treat the passport going forward. Imagine being held up in customs for 3 hours due to mismatched documents (ID & passport)

Gender non-conforming persons are still a small minority. I think in the vast majority of cases, gender will still be tied to appearance.

It’s not really about physical characteristics that match the letter as much as having another identity marker to differentiate people who may have the same name, and to track them across systems. We could theoretically give everyone a random letter of the alphabet and probably be just as good. We’ve had gender nonconformity for ages. In the Middle East, men without beards are feminine. In the 60s US, men started wearing their hair long like women. This is just an extension for that

Does your passport state sex or gender? I have two on hand and both state sex.

"if all things are special than nothing is special."

In this article, the person featured is intersex, not transgender. This is made clear in the following sentence:

> Zzyym was born with ambiguous physical sexual characteristics but was raised as a boy and had several surgeries that failed to make Zzyym appear fully male, according to court filings.

I support having an "Other" or "X" for the rare few individuals in the intersex category, but the underlying policy change and this article itself group up or conflate intersex with nonbinary and transgender, which makes me think this is more about pushing progressive gender identity politics rather than serving a utilitarian purpose. I don't think nonbinary or transgender people should be declared as "X". The passport specifically has a field labeled "sex". "Sex" means biological sex, and to most people on the planet, even "gender" is the same as "sex". This line on the passport is not meant to be a place to feature "gender identity". It is meant to be immutable to serve as identification. Sex is immutable, whereas "gender identity" is something more like personality, given that there are many that claim they are gender fluid and can have a gender identity that is different day to day, and given that a large proportion of people who feel they might be transgender in their youth end up actually being gay or lesbian.

The passport is not really meant to be a biological document. More a civil one. For example they don't measure you before writing down the height field, it's probably inflated for many people.

They could also have both info in there.

Does this accommodation provide any utilitarian value? Why would anyone that would need to process a passport care about what you identify as. It's something that exists in your head and cannot be verified.

Now you have the problem of if every TSA worker and other officials will believe your document with an X is not forged

Do they look at the document in any detail to see that to find forgeries at scale or is it looking at certain watermarks and such intended to detect forgeries?

They just scan it and and see what computer says. It's no harder than a cashier at a supermarket.

Does TSA check your docs at all or is it up to immigration clarks?

Seems like you just invented this problem so you can say "Dem LGBTQ just making problems..". Do you think a forger would be dumb enough to make an otherwise perfect-looking forgery but put X where F and M is the value for almost 100% of the currently issued passport?

I took it more as a comment on the sheer ineptitude and uselessness of TSA as anything beyond security theater.

I have no qualms about the change and think it's about damn time they made even this tiny modicum of effort to support non-binary people, but I'm almost certain that anyone with an X will be questioned about it regardless. Hell, even perfectly legit passports get questioned all the time.

Story time!

A buddy of mine flies with his US passport at all times, even for domestic flights, because he's of Arab decent and constantly gets hassled for it. One time we were flying together with a student group (we were in college at the time), he gets pulled aside by a couple of TSA agents as part of a "random inspection", out of a line of 20-30 people all mostly white or light complected.

He starts getting grilled about everything from destination, reason for the flight, bags, etc. Then they ask to see his ID and boarding pass. He hands over his passport and boarding pass and they start going off on him as to why he's got his passport for a domestic flight, how that looks suspicious and such.

He responds with "I get stopped for looking Arab every time I fly, so this just proves I'm a US citizen and is a federal ID." They stop and finally realize they've got everyone looking at them, hand back his passport and ticket and walk away.

Did everyone clap?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com