Summary
Hunter Schafer shared that her newly issued passport incorrectly lists her gender as male, a result of Trump’s executive order requiring federal documents to use sex assigned at birth.
Despite selecting female and having her gender marker changed years ago, the new policy was applied to her application.
Schafer said she wanted to raise awareness rather than cause alarm, emphasizing that trans people will continue to exist regardless of government policies.
“A letter and a passport can’t change that,” she said.
After hearing she was still issued a passport at all? Yes, actually. There are quite a few (trans) people who probably feel a little bit safer than they did yesterday when they thought they were trapped in the country.
A passport does not guarantee travel. Especially not a passport that has an erroneously-indicated gender. The purpose of any ID document is to prove who you are and what you look like; contradictions with that document are going to cause problems when traveling.
Not as many problems as traveling without one.
Having traveled before with someone in that exact situation, yes, there will be harassment and TSA may very well intentionally force you miss your flight and end up waiting to fly standby on the next one. But as of now, you generally do get through, which cannot be said for traveling internationally without any passport at all.
Will that change? Highly likely. Soon? Probably.
But there are a not insignificant number of people who only recently decided it’s no longer safe, applied for passports, made plans to leave, and saw recent stories about passports not being issued. This type of scare mongering does not help them, and can be actively harmful to their mental health and well-being.
Edit: Obviously the longer they stay, the higher the chance this changes.
How does having the wrong gender on your passport mean you aren’t trapped in the country?
Because they did issue a fully authorized passport… Even with the wrong information, the government has issues it for them to be able to travel
And because the information is inaccurate, it’s pretty likely to not work as a passport.
See my comment to the other reply here
So you were in this exact scenario, TSA prevented the person from flying like we’ve been saying, but then didn’t prevent them from flying on a standby on the next flight?
Colour me skeptical.
Trans rights are under attack, maybe let someone be happy if the found something to be happy about, why can’t you let them enjoy it?
And if you think that’s not something to be happy about maybe you need to get a look at what’s going on and reasess how bad it is
I mean cool appeal to emotion but that isn’t what we were talking about. The government is attacking the rights of people who are trans, including their passports, and pretending they aren’t isn’t helping anyone. When people were under threat from the Nazi’s in the 30’s would it have helped to tell people to just ‘let them be happy’ when the Nazi’s weren’t yet able to put them in camps?