Passports

Australia has changed their rules on gender markers on passport and they seem to have jumped ahead of the world in diversity. The Australians added a third option for gender for those who apply for passports, they now can chose a “X” for indeterminate.

Australians have third option for gender on passports
Globe and Mail
By Zosia Bielski
Published Thursday, Sep. 15, 2011

The arrival of a new gender category beyond male and female on Australian passports has revealed an emerging battleground in gender rights: the indeterminate or X category.

Under guidelines released Thursday, Australian passports will now give citizens three gender options – male, female and indeterminate – in an effort to curb discrimination against transgender and intersex Australians as they travel.

Intersex individuals, those who do not identify as completely male or female biologically, can now legally list their gender as “X.” Transgender people, those whose biological gender doesn’t fit the way they see themselves, will not be allowed to tick “X,” but will be able to choose whether they are male or female, as long as they have a doctor's statement that they are transitioning.

Activists in Australia forced the government to reconsider their passport requirement for changing gender markers on their passport,

Passport victory for diverse Australians
The Canberra Times
BY STEPHANIE SMART
18 Sep, 2011 12:00 AM

A transsexual Canberra woman has forced the Australian Passport Office into an embarrassing backdown, after the office admitted guidelines it relied on to reject her application to change her passport didn't exist.

Required to travel overseas for work, Marcelle, who asked not to have her surname published, applied to the Australian Passport Office for a female adult passport in November last year.

She was refused on the grounds that her birth certificate said she was male and that she did not meet humanitarian guidelines.

However, the Australians are not the only country considering to change their passport regulations…

The gender-free British passport: UK travellers may no longer have to declare their sex, to spare feelings of 'transgender people'
Daily Mail
By James Slack
19th September 2011

Britain is preparing to rip up centuries-old rules by introducing passports which do not contain details of the holder’s sex.

The move, following pressure from the Lib Dems, is designed to spare transgender people and those who have both male and female sexual organs from having to tick ‘male’ or ‘female’ on their travel papers.

Currently, everybody must identify themselves as a man or woman, even when they are undergoing a sex-change operation or if they are considered ‘intersex’.
[…]
To satisfy international laws, the passport would still list a category titled ‘sex’, but would then contain a simple ‘X’ for everybody.

Supporters say it will solve the problem of embarrassing situations at border controls, where people whose sex appears to differ from that in their passport are grilled for long periods by guards.
[…]
One backbench MP, Julian Huppert, said: ‘There does not seem to be a need for identity documents of any kind to have gender information. It is not a very good biometric; it is roughly a 50:50 split.

Military ID, such as the MOD90, which obviously can have quite a high security clearance, contains no gender information. That might be what we should look at.’

Three cheers for the Brits…Hip, hip, hooray! Finally some sanity! Why do you need gender markers on passports? You have a picture to look at, how do you know what they got under their clothes?

What is the US State Department regulations on passport for gender?

In June 2010, the Obama Administration announced a new policy for updating gender markers on passports and CRBAs. For the first time, the June policy enabled transgender people to a passport that reflects their current gender without providing details of specific medical or surgical procedures. Instead, applicants could provide certification from a physician that they had received “appropriate clinical treatment” for gender transition. This policy was the result of years of advocacy, and represented a significant advance in providing safe, humane and dignified treatment of transgender people.
NCTE