The milestone
The State Department announced Wednesday that the U.S. has issued its first “X” gender marker on passports, marking a step toward making passports available for non-binary, intersex and gender non-conforming people throughout the country.
Then what is the point of having sex markers on passports at all? If they’re going to have some that are meaningless why have any?
Passports don’t exist to give people tingly validation feelings. Passports have not until now been unavailable to non-binary, intersex and gender non-conforming people. Passports are official documents and they’re supposed to tell the truth about the people who have them; that’s pretty much their whole point.
“The Department of State is committed to promoting the freedom, dignity, and equality of all people – including LGBTQI+ persons,” Secretary of State Antony Blinken said in a statement announcing the move earlier this year.
So it’s issuing fake passports? How does that promote the freedom, dignity, and equality of anyone?
But also…how childish that sounds. How can a branch of government allow itself to sound like a fatuous teenager that way? It’s embarrassing.
The milestone is part of President Joe Biden’s plan to “advance LGBTQ+ equality in America and around the world.”
How does this nonsense advance equality?
It also means that the “M” or “F” in everyone else’s passport will henceforth be taken as a claim about what’s going on inside his/her head. Unless, that is, the entry for “Sex” is answering a completely different question for each person. If so, why can’t the entry for “height” in my passport refer to my age, say, or the entry for “Date of birth” refer to my weight?
I bet the passport office won’t even consider allowing my passport to reflect my True Otter Self. I demand to be recognized as an otter! Even in the picture on my passport!
iknklast, you raise a good point about the picture. If the point of the passport is not to identify the individual, but to validate zir identity, shouldn’t the photo reflect not how you look on the outside, but how you look on the inside? So Jonathan Yaniv’s passport photo should be of some random woman, like his profile pic on social media.
It’s shit like this that makes me imagine if it would be much worse if Trump had won (without stealing the election)… off the top of my head the “Give people another $1400” bill wouldn’t have passed and the US government wouldn’t be going after Texas on abortion. Guess the monuments would would still have been gutted for mining. Anything else really?
I didn’t vote a candidate I wasn’t enthused about into office to do this sort of nonsense. I wanted him to just make the last four years go away.
As a Trans-Chronological Person, I am fine with this as long as I can select any age or species I wish.
M and F are still there. I am trying to dislike the X, but in comparison to all the other gender nonsense that’s happened in the last couple of years, this is not too bad. Still, I can’t believe how pervasive and nonsensical all this gender identity ideology has become. It’s not helping and in the long run it’s not minimizing the suffering people thought it would minimize.
I wonder if other countries will recognize the “X” nonsense. I doubt the likes of Russia, North Korea or Saudi Arabia will.
Kevin, I agree that it’s not too bad, in the sense of too harmful and so on, but it’s just so absurd and stupid. That’s its own kind of bad.
I posted on the other thread about this. I agree wholeheartedly with Ophelia’s argument from the hatred of human stupidity but, like Kevin (and others), I’m not convinced that this will cause any great practical difficulties.
One thing I didn’t mention there is feature creep: if people perceive their passports as certifying their sex, then this could lead to all sorts of unpredictable nonsense further down the line.