Transgender people can easily change their sex marker or replace it with an unspecified “X” gender on a growing number of government documents with few questions asked, causing concern from conservatives.
U.S. passports allow a gender change or a non-gender designation of X with no supporting documentation needed, and applicants for a Social Security card can change their gender at will, according to government agencies.
On the state level, driver’s licenses in 22 states and Washington allow an X designation for gender, while 16 states and Washington now allow an X on birth certificates, according to the think-tank Movement Advancement Project.
Roger Severino, vice president of Domestic Policy for the Heritage Foundation, a conservative think-tank, warns that changing identification documents to reflect ideology instead of biology poses problems for national security and law enforcement.
“Identification documents aren’t designed as a platform for subjective self-expression. That’s not why they exist,” he told The Epoch Times.
“It’s a clear security risk. If somebody can take somebody else’s passport and say, I identify as female, therefore I am female, and get on a plane, we have serious problems,” he said.
Transgender people believe they can reject their chromosomes and choose to be nonbinary or become the opposite sex through surgeries or hormones. Some believe they are androgynous or neither male nor female.
Changing identification documents at will led federal and state GOP lawmakers to propose new laws to eliminate gender ideology on government identification and records.
A U.S. passport cover. AP Photo/Eileen Putman
Thirteen GOP House members, led by Rep. Lisa McClain (R-Michigan), sent a scathing letter to Secretary of State Antony Blinken, slamming his move allowing an X gender on passports in 2022.
“First, for an administration that claims to follow the science, it is interesting to see which aspects of science you choose to ignore,” the letter stated.
“Men are men, and women are women. That is a biological fact. And you do not need to be a biologist to figure that out,” it continued.
Equity Necessity
The changes to federal identification documents were part of President Joe Biden’s belief that racial minorities and “underserved” communities such as LGBT needed a leg up to overcome a system rigged against them.“Affirmatively advancing equity, civil rights, racial justice, and equal opportunity is the responsibility of the whole of our Government,” according to Biden’s Executive Order 13985, “Advancing Racial Equity and Support for Underserved Communities Through the Federal Government.”
The executive order, signed on President Biden’s first day in office, triggered the creation of Equity Action Plans across 90 government agencies to serve as roadmaps to address “discrimination,” according to a White House release.
But putting equity above security could have serious consequences, said Mr. Severino, who served as director of Health and Human Services Department, Office for Civil Rights from 2017–21.
“This opens up a Pandora’s box,” he said. “Because it’s based on purely subjective identification.”
Loosening restrictions to accommodate an ideology has obvious problems, he said. One is that a Transportation Safety Administration agent screening people at security checkpoints may feel disempowered to rigorously screen passengers who say they are transgender.
The State Department issued its first X passport in October 2021, making it the first federal government agency to offer an ambiguous gender marker on an identity document. Only a handful of other countries offer the X marker for passports.
HHS Office of Civil Rights Director Roger Severino speaks at a news conference at the Department of Health and Human Services in Washington, on Jan. 18, 2018. Aaron P. Bernstein/Getty Images
The following year, the department announced its forms were updated. It replaced the term sex with gender and allowed all U.S. passport applicants to use X as a gender marker as part of the Biden administration’s Equity Action Plans mandated for government agencies.
The State Department said that even if a transgender individual’s gender choice differs from other citizenship or identity documents, the person can still change the gender marker.
“The gender you select does not need to match the gender on your supporting documentation such as a birth certificate, previous passport, or state ID. We no longer require medical documentation to change the gender marker on your U.S. passport,” according to the State Department website.
The Williams Institute, part of UCLA’s law school, released a 2022 study showing 16,700 “nonbinary” LGBT people may request the designation of X on passports annually.
The institute said X gender markers on passports would allow nonbinary people, who reject male or female labels, to have identity documents that more accurately reflect their gender or lack of.
Having a passport to match their preference will make it easier for transgender people to navigate public spaces such as TSA checkpoints and “may reduce instances of harassment and discrimination,” according to the website.
Delta airplanes sit on the tarmac at John F. Kennedy Airport (JFK) in New York City, on Jan. 31, 2020. Spencer Platt/Getty Images
At airports, the Transportation Security Administration adjusted its screening process in 2022 to be “less invasive” for transgender passengers who trigger body scanners, according to its website.
The department said it was also updating its screening technology to be “gender-neutral.”
Likewise, the Social Security Administration is working on its own X designation. Meanwhile, records can be changed to male or female in the name of equity without any medical or legal proof.
“The Social Security Administration’s Equity Action Plan includes a commitment to decrease administrative burdens and ensure people who identify as gender diverse or transgender have options in the Social Security number card application process,” Acting Commissioner Kilolo Kijakazi said in a 2022 release.
“This new policy allows people to self-select their sex in our records without needing to provide documentation of their sex designation.”
Reality Over Ideology
On Capitol Hill, conservative lawmakers have introduced bills to designate the sex on passports as male or female, minus the X.U.S. Sen. J.D. Vance (R-Ohio) introduced the “Passport Sanity Act” companion bill on Oct. 4 to one presented in the House, prohibiting the secretary of state from allowing an X to be used on passports or a consular report of birth abroad.
“The last thing the State Department should be doing is wasting its time and your tax dollars pushing far-left gender ideology,” Mr. Vance said in a statement. “There are only two genders; passports issued by the United States government should recognize that simple fact.”
Likewise, U.S. House member Chip Roy (R-Texas) introduced the same bill this June in the House, where it has a better chance of passing.
But with the Oval Office and Senate controlled by Democrats, neither bill will likely become law anytime soon.
Some conservative states, such as Kansas, will no longer change the birth certificates of transgender people to reflect their gender identities.
The change was based on a new Kansas law, Senate Bill 180, which became law this year. It prevents the state from recognizing gender changes on identification documents. It stipulated that birth certificates and driver’s licenses must reflect sex at birth and cannot be changed to suit identity.
Sen. JD Vance (R-Ohio) speaks at the Heritage Foundation's Leadership Summit in National Harbor, Md., on Apr. 20, 2023. Terri Wu/The Epoch Times
The new law conflicted with a previous federal consent judgment under U.S. District Judge Daniel Crabtree, allowing transgender people to change their birth certificates and driver’s licenses to reflect the desired gender.
Kansas Republican Attorney General Kris Kobach filed a request in June with the same federal judge, asking him to lift the judgment because it conflicted with the new state law. The judge granted the proposal, saying Kansas courts must now determine how the law must be enforced.
“The trans-activists, in this case, attempted to nullify state law,” Mr. Kobach said in an August statement.
“The legislature decided that birth certificates must reflect biological reality, and they were quite clear in how they wrote the law,” he said.
Kobach and other conservatives argued that a birth certificate is a record of a historical event and, therefore, shouldn’t change because someone wishes to do so.
A Matter of History
Mr. Severino agrees that birth certificates are records of fact. “Changing a person’s birth certificate is falsifying history,” he said. “You’re born male or female.”Surgery or hormones don’t change XX chromosomes, which are female, or XY chromosomes, which are male, he said.
Mr. Severino said rare conditions, such as intersex, that left-wing activists rely on to justify transgenderism as genuine don’t mean that sex can be changed.
“You can’t use the existence of disorders of sexual development to deny the human sexual binary,” he said.
The new Kansas law followed a wave of legislation to counter transgender ideology in Republican-controlled statehouses nationwide. Montana, North Dakota, Oklahoma, and Tennessee don’t allow transgender people to change their birth certificates, and Montana and Tennessee are among those that don’t allow driver’s license changes.
Investigators with the Washington State Crime Lab collect evidence at Tanglewilde Terrace in Lacey, Wash., on Sept. 3, 2020. Caitlin Ochs/Reuters
But, overall, it’s a mixed bag when it comes to state-identifying documents, according to MAP.
Some conservative states, such as Utah, require proof of sex change surgery to change a birth certificate.
But Florida does not require sex reassignment surgery nor a court order to change birth certificates. Getting gender changed on a driver’s license is a little more complicated, requiring medical certification in what Map described as a burdensome process.
Texas requires a court order to change gender on a birth certificate, while changing a driver’s license requires proof of sex-change surgery, a court order, or an amended birth certificate.
A proliferation of driver’s licenses with gender changes could also make law enforcement’s job much more difficult, Mr. Severino said.
Imagine finding DNA at a crime scene identifying the perpetrator as a male. If the perpetrator changed his driver’s license to female, then it would reduce the likelihood of him being caught, Mr. Severino said.
“It’s hard to be deemed a suspect because [the driver’s license] is not serving the purpose of the ID,” he said.
The Associated Press contributed to this story.
