Government IDs are weirdly intrusive. This is a hill that I’m willing to die on. The government’s insistence on continuing to use genital — sorry, I mean gender — markers on IDs is especially frustrating. But things are slowly improving. Starting next month, you’ll be able to choose an X gender marker on your passport, in a move that will hopefully make travel a little less stressful for trans and gender non-conforming people.
In July, the Biden administration announced its plans to add an X gender marker to passports. At the time, Secretary of State Antony Blinken noted that the “process of adding a gender marker for non-binary, intersex, and gender non-conforming persons to these documents is technologically complex and will take time for extensive systems updates.”
