In the month since Trump signed an executive order declaring that the U.S. government only recognizes two unchangeable sexes, federal agencies have been falling alarmingly in line with transgender and nonbinary erasure. Last week, the National Park Service removed all references to trans and queer people from its website on the Stonewall uprising, scrubbing the T and Q from the LBGTQ+ initials, while the State Department announced that it’s suspending passport applications for people with the gender marker “X” and will “only issue passports with an M or F sex marker” that matches your sex assigned at birth. Unfortunately, it seems that policy isn’t just talk: On Friday, the actress Hunter Schafer, who is a trans woman, said that she has been issued a passport with a male gender marker.
In an eight-minute video posted to her TikTok, Schafer explained she was initially skeptical of the new passport policy. “Because our president is a lot of talk, I was like, I’ll believe it when I see it,” she said, holding her new passport open for the camera and pointing to the M marker. “And today, I saw it. Male.”
Schafer explained that her government-issued IDs have been female since she first changed her markers a decade ago. The Euphoria actress says she had to get an emergency passport after her old one was stolen from a car while she was filming a project in Barcelona last year. The emergency passport gendered her correctly, but she had to apply for a proper passport this week after returning to the States. “I filled everything out just like I normally would, I put female,” she said.
Adding that she doesn’t “give a fuck” that the agency put a male marker on her passport — “it doesn’t change anything about me or my transness” — Schafer anticipates it will make life “a little harder” while traveling, since she’ll have to out herself to border-patrol agents “more often than I would like to or is really necessary.” She emphasized that she’s not sharing the incident to “create drama” or “receive consolation” but to raise awareness about just how insidious this new regime really is. “It’s not just talk, this is real, and it’s happening, and no one, no matter their circumstance, no matter how wealthy or white or pretty or whatever, is excluded,” Schafer said. “Trans people are beautiful, we are never going to stop existing, I’m never going to stop being trans. A letter on a passport can’t change that, and fuck this administration.”