Rubio instructs staff to freeze passport applications with ‘X’ sex markers
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Secretary of state tells staff ‘sex is not changeable’ in email following Trump executive order on gender. The US state department has frozen all applications for passports with “X” sex markers and changes to gender identity on existing passports, following a new executive order signed by Donald Trump on his first day of office.
In an internal email shared with the Guardian, the secretary of state, Marco Rubio, instructed department staff on Thursday to implement the strict new guidelines for official documentation. “The policy of the United States is that an individual’s sex is not changeable,” the email read.
Rubio’s directive states that “sex, and not gender, shall be used” in official documents including passports and consular report of birth abroad documents. State department staff on Thursday were ordered to “suspend any application requesting an X sex marker” and to “suspend any application where the applicant is seeking to change their sex marker” from the definition provided in the executive order. The policy affects both current and future passport applications.
The executive order, titled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government”, mandates that government-issued identification documents exclusively use “an individual’s immutable biological classification as either male or female”.
The state department began issuing passports with the non-binary third gender identification “X” in April of 2022. Passports with the “X” identification are still valid, though issues will arise with renewals, the White House told the news site Notus. According to Rubio’s email, “guidance on existing passports containing an X sex marker will come via other channels”.
