Is It Happening, What We Feared?

We knew that the Trump administration was undoing everything that President Obama did, especially anything LGBT.

Trump State Department Just Made an Ominous Passport Change for Transgender Americans
Overnight, close observers spotted what many feared was coming: The Trump administration gave the first sign it’s eyeing up a big step backward in U.S. ‘sex designation’ policy.
The Daily Beast
By Samantha Allen
September 13, 2018

All the while that the Trump administration has been attacking transgender rights, rescinding school-restroom guidance and trying to kick people out of the military, LGBT advocates have been nervously watching a certain State Department website.

That page—now only accessible via an internet archive—showed transgender Americans how to update the gender markers on their U.S. passports. In 2010, under Secretary Hillary Clinton, the State Department began allowing transgender people to change an “M” to an “F” or vice versa without undergoing sex-reassignment surgery, provided they had a letter from a physician stating they had undergone “appropriate clinical treatment for gender transition.”

It seemed the Trump administration, with its growing track record of anti-LGBT actions, would eventually notice that website—and indeed, late Wednesday night, the National Center for Transgender Equality noticed the URL was now dead.

In its place is a new website—entitled “Sex Designation Change”—that uses the outmoded term “sex change” rather than “gender transition,” goes out of its way to highlight the exclusion of non-binary people, and removes links to major medical associations that support transition-related health care.

Is this the beginning of the repeal of the policy of changing the requirements for changing the gender on passports?

Today, under that same heading, the State Department has added a paragraph that seems to preclude the possibility of the agency acknowledging non-binary genders: “A U.S. passport does not list the bearer’s gender identity. The sex marker on your U.S. passport is based on your evidence of U.S. citizenship and identity, including a medical certification of sex change. The sex marker may not match the gender in which you identify.”

Is this a warning of things to come?

The NCTE press release says…

State Department Alters Passport Gender Marker Website
The procedure for changing gender markers on U.S. passports has not changed.

Though the current passport gender marker policy remains unchanged, language concerning the process for changing gender markers on U.S. passports was altered or removed from the State Department’s website earlier this week.

The longstanding page regarding “Gender Designation” policies—in place since 2010—has been removed, and a new but similar page concerning what they now call “Sex Designation” has been put in its place with significant changes. However, the underlying policy remains unchanged.

These changes to the website are likely to cause confusion about the actual policy for changing gender markers. That policy can still be found in the Department’s Foreign Affairs Manual here.

An archived version of the page from Sept. 10 may be viewed here, while the revised page may be viewed here. Notable changes to the website include:

• Links to resources from the American Medical Association and the World Professional Association of Transgender Health (WPATH) have been removed.
• A new paragraph highlights burdensome provisions of the 2010 policy, specifically for two-year provisional passports for people who submit letters stating they are “in the process” of transition.
• A needless paragraph has been added to the website stating, "A U.S. passport does not list the bearer's gender identity. The sex marker on your U.S. passport is based on your evidence of U.S. citizenship and identity, including a medical certification of sex change. The sex marker may not match the gender in which you identify." Though this language is undesirable and uninformed, it does not change the requirements of the policy.
• Most mentions of the word “gender” have been replaced with the word “sex.”

These changes mirror similar alterations by the Trump administration hiding LGBTQ resources on the websites of the Department of Health & Human Services, the Department of Housing and Urban Development, and the Small Business Administration.

Mara Keisling, executive director of the National Center for Transgender Equality, condemned the changes by the State Department:

“While ultimately pointless, this move seems designed to frighten, confuse, and keep transgender people from exercising their full rights under the current policy—the same policy we fought for and won in 2010. Transgender people can and absolutely should continue to update and renew their passports. That is our right and that should always be our right.”

To learn more about the requirements for updating the gender marker on a U.S. passport, please visit NCTE’s ID Documents Center. Anyone who has trouble updating the gender marker on their passport under the existing policy should contact Arli Christian at achristian@transequality.org.

Is this the proverbial hand writing on the wall?

I would suggest that if you are planning on getting a passport get it as fast as you can because tomorrow you might not be able to change your gender marker.