The State Department is reportedly halting all passport applications from people requesting an “X” legal sex marker or a different marker than the one on their previous passport, according to an email Secretary of State Marco Rubio sent to his staff on Thursday.
In the email, first reported by The Guardian, Rubio directed his staff to “suspend any application requesting an X sex marker” and to “suspend any application where the applicant is seeking to change their sex marker.”
The new policy on passports comes just days after President Donald Trump signed a sweeping executive order that declared there are only “two sexes, male and female.” The order was directed at the State Department and the Department of Homeland Security, and requires federal documents including passports, visas, and Global Entry cards to “accurately reflect the holder’s sex.” The order uses a narrow definition of sex that is at odds with how biology experts understand the term and would broadly force trans people to use the sex markers assigned to them at birth, regardless of their gender identity or presentation.
Rubio’s directive ordered that “sex, and not gender, shall be used” on federal documents.
“The policy of the United States is that an individual’s sex is not changeable,” the email read.
Further guidance on current passports containing an X marker will come “via other channels,” Rubio wrote.
In 2022, the State Department began issuing passports with X markers, the result of a long legal battle by Dana Zzyym, a nonbinary and intersex U.S. Navy veteran who filed a 2015 lawsuit after being denied a passport with a gender-neutral marker.
Since then, applicants have been able to self-select their sex marker. Passports with an X marker that have already been issued are still valid, but the White House told NOTUS this week that people will not be able to renew documents with X markers; the department has not clarified how people with X markers, or who have already changed their markers, will denote their sex in future applications.
It is unclear how many people will be affected by these changes, but already the executive order has caused widespread confusion and panic within trans communities.
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On a press call Tuesday, lawyers from the ACLU and Lambda Legal noted that they are monitoring State Department policies and what happens to pending applications.
“The fact that the State Department took down the instructions from the website about how to update the sex designation on a passport indicates that there is probably some action already in motion to prevent further updates to those documents, but it will depend exactly on who is denied and how they’re denied,” Chase Strangio, a senior attorney at the ACLU, told reporters.
As of Thursday, the application page on the State Department’s website still lists the X marker. The State Department did not immediately respond to HuffPost’s requests for comment.