US government U-turns on threat to invalidate passports that don’t match ‘biological sex’

The US government has rolled back a policy that threatened to invalidate passports showing trans people’s correct gender identity.

Less than a week after the change was discovered, a section of the State Department’s website was modified to remove the threat that trans people’s passports would be invalidated if the document did not detail their “biological sex”.

An update on the website’s page regarding passport sex markers, originally discovered by Transitics reporter Aleksandra last Thursday (13 November), said it no longer issued passports or other documents with a gender-neutral “X” marker or markers that did not match a person’s “biological sex at birth”.

However, that policy has now been axed, according to Transitics, who reported the website was updated again to clarify that all passports “remain valid for travel until their expiration date”.

Several parts of the “FAQ” section have also reportedly been modified. One question on whether passports with X markers would remain valid originally contained the answer: “A passport is valid for travel until its date of expiration, until you replace it, or until we invalidate it under federal regulations.”

The latest information says: “All passports will remain valid for travel until their expiration date, under International Civil Aviation Organization policy.”

It comes after the Supreme Court allowed the government to enforce Donald Trump’s executive order that prohibited changes to gender markers on official documents. The ruling overturned a preliminary injunction on the president’s proposals.

Passport ban ‘pointless but painful’

The changes made to the State Department’s website marked one of the first major enactments of the order in the wake of the ruling, which dissenting associate justice Ketanji Brown Jackson described as a “pointless but painful perversion”.

Aleksandra noted that the rollback could be the result of “intensive labour” challenges posed by implementing such a policy, adding that the administration would “heavily burden itself both logistically and financially”.

The White House has yet to comment on the apparent reversal of the policy.

In October, before the Supreme Court ruling was published, US airlines were told to ignore “X” gender markers on passports under Customs and Border Protection policy. The move, the administration said, would not invalidate previously issued passports, but if government-issued IDs needed to be renewed, they had to reflect the holder’s biological sex at birth.

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