The New Yorker:

The executive order banning Americans from self-identifying on their passports—which is part of a larger crackdown on bodily autonomy—has made it harder for trans people to travel, or to get passports at all.

By Grace Byron

When I first changed the gender marker on all my documents in the spring of 2022, it was during a brief, shimmering moment of legal recognition for trans people across the United States. A year earlier, the Biden Administration had announced that people would finally be allowed to self-select their gender on their passports. Now there would also be an option for nonbinary people to mark their sex as “X.” The move was a fascinating display of liberal tolerance, even if it did not go so far as to enshrine the right to trans health care. The option to self-identify on federal paperwork stood in stark contrast to the numerous states around the country that were starting to crack down on the ability of trans people to change their sex on driver’s licenses and birth certificates. As someone born in Indiana, a red state home to former Vice-President Mike Pence, I was worried about being able to update my birth certificate. I was ultimately able to do so, but only after getting a court order. Other states, like Arkansas and North Carolina, are more draconian, requiring proof of a so-called sex change. Of course, what qualifies as this kind of operation is a moving target. Now it’s a moot point. Donald Trump has issued an executive order, “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” declaring, among other things, that government-issued I.D.s must reflect one’s sex assigned at conception.

Some have snarkily noted that everyone is female at conception. It is not until later in the fertilization process that male chromosomes may reveal themselves. But such jokes, which take aim at Trump’s misunderstanding of biology, ignore the fact that he simply does not care about biology, aside from using it as a signifier for his various “anti-woke” positions. The executive order banning trans and gender-neutral passports is only one of the anti-trans pronouncements that Trump has made during his first few months in office. This evisceration of long-fought-for civil rights marks a ruthless changing of the guard. For years, the U.S. government has used “sex” and “gender” interchangeably. Today, gender is considered a dangerous ideology that seeks to eradicate the immutability of sex. As Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently stated in an e-mail to department staff, “The policy of the United States is that an individual’s sex is not changeable.”

Go to link