‘I don’t feel safe’: Trump’s passport gender policy sparks fear for trans travelers

For weeks, it was stuck in what Ebling described as “passport purgatory,” despite his payment for expedited service.

“They still have my passport, but even if I were to get it back, I’m not sure I could travel with it,” said Ebling, who works for the LGBTQ+ advocacy organization Lambda Legal, in an interview last month. “It’s basically like transgender folks have been put on an informal travel ban, unable to leave the country that so despises us."

Ebling’s concerns are shared across a larger community of travelers who are reconsidering wedding plans, family visits, medical appointments and other trips. For travelers caught up in the Trump administration’s new policy on passports, leaving the country has become difficult or impossible. Some Americans are in limbo, waiting for word on their passports’ statuses after applying for updates. Others are in shock after receiving passports that misgender them.

The upheaval started with the Jan. 20 executive order that declared the government would recognize only two genders, while rolling back transgender people’s rights. Policies that allowed people to easily change their gender marker or choose an X instead of male or female on their passport were gone within the week.

Trump leaned into anti-trans rhetoric before Americans headed to the polls in the fall. Since his inauguration, the administration has sought to cut funding for trans health services and research; stop trans athletes from competing in women’s and girls’ sports; end federal support for hospitals that provide gender transition care to trans youths; and remove openly transgender service members from the military. Many of the new policies are now being challenged in federal courts.

In an emailed response to questions about the process the State Department follows when changing an applicant’s gender marker, the agency said it does not comment on individual passport applications for privacy reasons. The department said the new policy requires applicants to note their “binary, biological sex at birth” - and if that is not sufficiently established, officials may request more information. Applicants who request an X or a gender marker different from that assigned at birth “may experience delays” getting their passport, and the new passport will be based on supporting documents and records about previous passports, according to the department’s website.

Seven transgender and nonbinary people have challenged the policy in federal court and asked a judge to grant the plaintiffs passports under the previous policy. The lawsuit claims that the Trump administration’s passport policy violates constitutional rights to equal protection, travel, privacy and speech. It also accuses Trump of illegally flouting the Administrative Procedure Act. A hearing is scheduled for March 25.

“For many of the people now barred from receiving a passport unless they accept one with the Trump Administration’s inaccurate sex designation, they are forced to ‘out’ themselves over and over again, harming them and imposing wrongful barriers to travel,” the complaint reads.

The State Department does not publish information on how many transgender people have passports that match their identity or how many Americans have chosen the gender-neutral X marker. The UCLA School of Law’s Williams Institute, which researches public policy and laws about gender identity and sexual orientation, has estimated the population of nonbinary LGBTQ adults in the United States at 1.2 million and transgender adults at 1.3 million. A 2022 estimate from the research center said 16,700 nonbinary LGBTQ people might ask for passports with an X every year.

People with passports that reflect their gender identity are still allowed to use them until they expire. But new or renewed passports will reflect sex as assigned at birth. This applies even for people who transitioned long ago and held passports that matched their gender for years.

Madi-Lily Jontiff, a 29-year-old trans woman who lives in New York City, said she applied to switch her passport’s gender marker from X to female in early January after having facial feminization surgery the previous fall.

When she got the book back in early February, it bore an M, the content creator said in TikTok and Instagram posts.

“I am not surprised that this happened,” she said on social media, where she posts under the name Lily Powers. “... But I’m frustrated - like really, I just have no words.”

In an interview, Jontiff said she has not legally changed her name, though she plans to do so within the year. For now, she has a passport with a current photo but a male gender marker and her birth name. The Washington Post is identifying her by the name she uses.

“My face presents as female. And my picture presents as female,” Jontiff said. “My gender marker doesn’t match that. My name doesn’t match that. It just immediately indicates that I’m trans.”

She said having documents that don’t match her gender identity would make her feel vulnerable even in “safe” countries, because she would have to use the passport repeatedly, each time running the risk of showing it to someone who is hostile to trans people.

Jontiff said she had hoped to go to Canada in the spring but plans to stay put for now.

“I don’t feel safe traveling with this passport,” she said.

Late last month, actress Hunter Schafer, 26, posted in a lengthy TikTok that she had been given a passport that identified her as male. The “Euphoria” star said her passport - which had a female gender designation and was supposed to last into her 30s - had been stolen while she was filming in Barcelona. She secured a temporary passport but then needed a permanent replacement.

Schafer’s case made headlines around the world and drew fresh attention to the issue.

“I was shocked because, I don’t know, I just didn’t think it was actually going to happen,” she said in the video.

Schafer said in her post that she has had female gender markers on her driver’s license and passport since she was a teenager, though she did not update her birth certificate. Her representatives did not respond to requests for an interview.

Parker, a 31-year-old government worker who spoke on the condition that he be identified only by his first name to protect his safety and employment, didn’t even want to read about Schafer’s story when his fiancée sent it to him. A trans man, he updated his passport to have an M gender marker 10 years ago. All his other documents reflect his identity. He submitted his passport renewal application in February, ahead of its expiration in October.

“I was a little wary, but I was also optimistic that it’s been this way for 10 years,” he said. “I’m surrendering an old passport that already has the gender marker as M on it, so I just didn’t think it would be an issue.”

Parker, who lives in the D.C. area, said he was nervous when he got his passport back in late February. He knew something was wrong when he saw a slip of paper saying information on his application had been changed with the words “name” and “sex” circled in red. The reason, according to the paper, was to match documents he submitted and to “correct your information” to show the sex he was assigned at birth. The new passport says female. The only document he submitted showed that he was male.

“I panicked and looked at the new passport and thought they had also changed my name back to my birth name, but they did not,” he said.

Parker and his fiancée planned to visit Spain this fall to look at wedding venues for a ceremony that would be next year. Now, he’s not sure when he’ll travel abroad.

“If it became a situation where I couldn’t access hormone treatment or I felt that my life was at risk due to my gender identity, then I think I would try to use it and get out,” he said.

Ash Lazarus Orr, an activist in West Virginia and press relations manager for a trans-led organization, helped hundreds of people update their passports and other documents before Trump’s inauguration. He sent his own application in mid-January. He said he paid for an expedited passport, a process that is supposed to take two to three weeks, knowing he had travel for a medical appointment in Ireland coming up.

Orr, 34, one of the American Civil Liberties Union plaintiffs, still has no passport. Instead, he said, he got a form from the State Department requesting proof of his assigned sex at birth within 90 days. His current passport, birth certificate and marriage certificate remain with the State Department.

His trip? Canceled.

“There is no way for me to leave the country whatsoever at this moment in time,” he said.

Orr has hiked to the top of a volcano in Iceland and has visited Ireland, Scotland, Switzerland and Germany with his spouse. He said the couple love to experience different cultures and places together.

“And it’s been taken away from me because I exist as a trans person,” he said. “And that is what is so terrifying.”

Aditi Fruitwala, one of the ACLU lawyers representing the plaintiffs, said the group has received more than 2,000 requests for legal assistance with passport issues since the new policy kicked in. Lambda Legal has fielded more than 800 passport-related inquiries.

Americans have been able to request a gender marker change on their passport since the early 1990s with proof of gender-affirming surgery, Fruitwala said. That process became less onerous in 2010, when applicants needed to provide a doctor’s note that they had received gender-affirming care; surgery was no longer a prerequisite. The Biden administration announced in 2021 that people could simply select the gender that matched their identity, and the following year it added an X gender marker for those who did not want to choose male or female.

The lawsuit brought by the ACLU, which names Trump as a defendant, lays out the danger of using identification that doesn’t match a traveler’s appearance.

“The results may be catastrophic, including causing serious psychological harm, denial of the ability to enter or leave a country, physical violence from people who despise transgender people, and even the passport holder being arrested and imprisoned by border control agents in foreign countries,” the complaint states.

Carl Charles, a senior attorney with Lambda Legal, said the group is not aware of people with valid, unexpired documents encountering harassment, disruptions or problems traveling since the new policy went into effect. But the legal organization suggests that people who are trans, gender-nonconforming, nonbinary or intersex consider waiting to make changes or renewals if they have a passport that does not expire this year.

Charles said discrimination has been an issue for “a long time” for these groups of travelers, not just since the new passport policy kicked in. Some travelers have complained of invasive searches at airport security; one plaintiff in the ACLU lawsuit described being put in a holding area and strip-searched at a U.S. airport.

Orr has run into problems traveling with mismatched documents. He said his spouse had to email a copy of their marriage license in the middle of the night when Orr traveled to Iceland. He has almost missed flights when the Transportation Security Administration flagged discrepancies between his driver’s license, which has a male gender marker, and his passport.

“It has taken me being pulled aside and having to be searched multiple times and having to again express I am a trans man, this is the situation, this is why my documents do not align,” Orr said.

Regardless of the outcome with his passport, Orr said he would feel like he had a target on his back if he left the country.

“As a trans American, that fear of watching what our government is actively doing to me and other trans people has me afraid to still travel,” he said.

While people in Orr’s situation are experiencing the fallout of the Trump administration’s policy now, many others are expected to join them when it comes time for them to renew their passports.

Reid Solomon-Lane, 36, a trans man and father of three who lives in Massachusetts, still has a few years before his passport expires. Despite living as a man for nearly 20 years and updating his gender marker in 2013, his passport will revert to female when he renews it under the current policy.

“I thought that I had the ultimate sort of identification that … no pun intended, would trump everything else,” said Solomon-Lane, a flight coordinator for a volunteer pilot organization. He is one of the plaintiffs in the ACLU lawsuit.

Solomon-Lane said he has been looking forward to more trips with his family. But he said if he were to get a passport with a female gender marker, it would probably “significantly restrict” the family’s international travel.

Ebling, whose passport had been in limbo, finally got an update early Wednesday morning. After describing his application status as “in process” for weeks, the State Department’s website showed that it had shipped.

Now, he is waiting to see what gender marker the passport shows.