Last October, the prospect of Donald Trump winning the presidency loomed large in the mind of one transgender Louisville resident. They knew they had to set plans in motion, and fast.
Political instability revived a plan on the backburner. They married their partner and made contingency plans to protect their assets and draft a will.
“I was looking at other places we could potentially move to if the situation were to come to that, looking at what we're able to get in order in terms of our house and finances that would allow us to be able to leave,” they said.
LPM News is not naming the man to protect their privacy.
Getting a new passport was a part of the plan. In December, they contacted the Fairness Campaign, an LGBTQ+ advocacy nonprofit based in Louisville. The Fairness Campaign helped with their passport application, which they submitted shortly before Trump took office in January. They asked for an “M” marker in the sex field.
But on his first day in office, Trump signed an executive order stating that only two sexes, male and female, were recognized by the federal government. It directed the State Department to eliminate the ‘X’ gender as an option and no longer allowed transgender, intersex and nonbinary people to update the gender marker in the sex field on their passports.
When the Louisville man received their passport in mid-February, the document had “F” in the sex field. That made their passport inconsistent with some of their other identity documents – their birth certificate has no sex marker, their marriage certificate says “M” and they’re waiting to get a letter from their doctor to get an “M” gender marker on their Kentucky driver’s license.
Since 2010, the State Department gave applicants the choice to change the sex field on their passport from male to female or vice versa, as long as a medical professional certified that they were actively being treated for gender transition.
Those regulations eased up in 2021, when the State Department waived the need for a doctor’s certification to make changes to the sex field on the passport. It also allowed an “X” or third gender marker on their passport.
Having the option to change gender markers or use an “X” on an official document can prove helpful for many transgender, nonbinary and intersex people.While gender is not the same thing as sex, many official documents only list sex, which can create issues for people who don’t identify with the gender they were assigned at birth.
The Louisville man said they’re nervous about the risks and dangers the inconsistencies in their documents could pose for them. They fear they would be vulnerable to accusations of identity fraud if traveling abroad. Plus, every time they use their passport as an ID, they say it could potentially out them as transgender and put them in a dangerous situation.
“You know how easy it is in the era of technology that we're in to filter and search things. When you have documents that can be scanned and they pull up information about you, there is targeting and they could restrict travel outside and inside the country,” they said.
They see it as a tactic by the government to exhaust transgender, nonbinary and intersex people.
“When you start messing with people's passports, then you put fear in them that they're trapped. And so I'm trying to remember that this is part of that psychological manipulation that happens, and I don't want to succumb to it. I also want to be realistic and do what I can to protect myself and people I care about,” they said.
In February, The American Civil Liberties Union filed a federal lawsuit arguing the Trump administration’s passport policy is unconstitutional and “unmoored from scientific and medical reality.”
The Fairness Campaign’s executive director Chris Hartman said he’s heard of a few Kentuckians getting passports with incorrect gender markers under this Trump administration. Hartman said anecdotally, he heard that a few people haven’t gotten back their documents or passports at all.
“Now, there's a question amongst the community about how safe it will be to even have that [X] gender marker on an identity document,” he said.
Hartman said targeting transgender people is just “political red meat” for conservatives and far-right groups.
“None of these were even proposed five years ago, but it's because the far right needed a new political wedge issue, and they landed on the trans community because it's so small that it's easy to create untruths and lies,” he said.
Hartman said he is showing up at Frankfort this legislative session to protest anti-LGBTQ+ bills moving through the Kentucky General Assembly. One is Senate Bill 116, under which schools and government agencies collecting data related to sex would only be allowed to list a person as male or female, as classified at birth.
“We're in a moment of almost complete erasure at the policy level of our trans, nonbinary folks and intersex individuals who are being forced into one gender option or the other that doesn't match who they are and who they've always been,” he said.
Hartman said transgender people have a long fight ahead, battling both state bills and federal policies that he said will “create fear and misunderstanding about the trans community.”
