Last Friday, Hunter Schafer, the trans actress who starred in the HBO series “Euphoria,” posted an eight-and-a-half-minute video on TikTok revealing that she had just received a new passport with a male marker — nearly a decade after changing her gender marker to female on identity documents.
“I was shocked,” Ms. Schafer said in the video. “I just didn’t think it was actually going to happen.”
President Trump signed an executive order on Jan. 20 that directed the federal government to recognize people only by the “immutable biological classification as either male or female” that they were assigned at birth. For trans, intersex and gender-nonconforming Americans applying for or renewing passports, that change has caused anxiety and confusion.
Since June 2021, the State Department had allowed trans people to declare their gender on U.S. passports without providing medical certification. The agency also recently said it would stop issuing passports with the gender-neutral X marker that had been available since April 2022.
The American Civil Liberties Union filed a suit on Feb. 7 against Mr. Trump and the State Department on behalf of seven transgender Americans. With that suit pending, here’s what we know about how the policy is affecting passport applications.
Who exactly is affected by the order?
It applies to anyone whose gender identity differs from the sex they were assigned at birth.
According to U.C.L.A.’s Williams Institute, there are about 1.6 million transgender people in the United States. Though there’s not a clear count of people who use X gender markers in America, there are about 5,200 people in New York State using the marker on IDs, and the California Department of Motor Vehicles recently told the TV station KCRA that there were 21,140 Californians using X markers on their state IDs. A report released by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services on Jan. 16 also estimates that the United States has more than five million intersex people, an umbrella term for people born with anatomic or genetic characteristics that don’t match the typical definition of male or female.