Dana Zzyym fought to get the first nonbinary passport. Now Trump has taken them away
https://www.msn.com/en-us/travel/news/dana-zzyym-fought-to-get-the-first-nonbinary-passport-now-trump-has-taken-them-away/ar-AA1yigiH?ocid=windirect&cvid=94d2214384c44c10a6bc52603bad2fb3&ei=104
Story by Josh Marcus (2 Feb 2025)
In October 2021, Dana Zzyym became the first person to receive a passport with an "X" marked in the sex field, instead of male or female.
It wasn't without a fight. Zzyym, a Navy veteran who is nonbinary and intersex, spent six years battling the State Department in court to get a set of accurate travel documents. Four years later, Donald Trump put people like them in legal limbo on his first day in office.
On January 20, Trump signed a directive ordering the federal government to only recognize two immutable sexes, male and female...
Under the order, the State Department is no longer issuing new "X" passports and has suspended processing for those seeking to change the gender marker on their travel documents.
Gender-diverse people already face heightened scrutiny and searches during travel, and the order is only going to make things worse, according to Carl Charles, a senior attorney at Lambda Legal...
What's more, Charles argued, despite Trump claiming his stance is about avoiding ideology and "restoring biological truth to the federal government," the new policy is actually a partisan position far out of step with the modern scientific understanding of sex and gender.
"The sex and gender executive order is ideology," Charles told The Independent. "It's ideology is, 'Let's ignore science. Let's ignore the experts. Let's ignore people's lived experiences.'"
"It's more than a piece of paper," Zzyym wrote of getting their passport. "It's an official acknowledgement of a community that for far too long has been kept in the dark."