On January 24, The Guardian reported that according to a leaked memo, Secretary of State Marco Rubio has instructed staff to “suspend” any passport applications seeking a gender marker change, in response to Trump’s executive order defining sex as binary, unchangeable, and beginning at conception.
It remains to be seen what will happen for trans people with pending passport applications. Will their passports be issued or renewed, but without the requested gender marker change? Will their applications be canceled entirely? For people applying for renewals (especially in cases where the original was not expired), will the Department of State return their previous passports, or hold them indefinitely? Rumors are flying that previous passports and other documentation might be confiscated by the Department of State rather than returned to the applicants; although the veracity of these rumors has not been confirmed, stress is high among trans people and their loved ones.
The most obvious impact of the new directive is on trans people with upcoming international travel. But passports are identity documents used for a variety of purposes, including I-9 verification, which confirms that job seekers are eligible to work in the United States. While eligibility can be verified without a passport, the other methods for people without Native American tribal affiliation require either a birth certificate or other federal documents — federal documents that could also be impacted by the executive order in the near future. Birth certificates are issued at the state level, so while people in some states are able to change their gender markers on their birth certificates — and thereby can have correct documentation for employment verification regardless of federal document law — there are six states in which birth certificate gender markers cannot be amended under any circumstances, and eleven more that require proof of surgery. In contrast, in 2020 only two states banned birth certificate updates under any circumstances. This shift reflects the significant increase in anti-trans legislation that has been passed in the last five years, championed by Republicans as a fearmongering wedge issue and strongly influenced by a nationwide working group of anti-trans activists and Republican politicians exposed by Mother Jones in 2023.
The new policy will make it more difficult for people to align their documents with both their correct gender identity and with other documents — especially for people who have already changed some documents but not others. Consider the situation of someone who has changed their name and gender marker at the state level and has a correct state ID (such as a driver’s license) but was born in a state that does not allow birth certificate changes, who now can no longer change their federal documentation. While many people were able to get their federal documents processed before Trump took power, others have not; and more people who have not yet begun the process of changing their name, gender marker, and documentation may choose not to begin that process. People with mismatched documents may be able to navigate bureaucratic processes by including copies of name and gender change court orders as supporting documentation, but this forces trans people to out themselves and adds extra steps, thereby introducing more opportunities for something to go wrong. All of this makes it more challenging for trans people to work and study under their chosen names, and more subject to the whims of whether their employers and coworkers will honor their names and gender identities at work; unsupportive work environments have been shown to negatively impact physical and mental health outcomes.
Trans workers are already twice as likely to be unemployed compared to the general population, likely due to hiring discrimination, and 44 percent of trans workers are considered underemployed (not working enough hours or working jobs for which they are overqualified), compared to 33 percent of the general population. Every additional social and legal barrier to employment, and employment in well-paying jobs, further cements the structural inequalities trans people face; low income for trans people then also leads to disparities in housing security and medical care.
The new State Department policy does not just force trans U.S. citizens to book their airline tickets under a name they no longer use; it creates real material barriers for trans people in a number of areas of society and will expand an underclass of effectively undocumented and semi-documented trans people who will face bureaucratic barriers to basic forms of participation in society, such as being employed. Off-the-books employment makes workers ineligible for benefits like unemployment and social security, which require records of previous income. Document discrepancies could also potentially present problems in the event of an ICE I-9 audit of a workplace. While such an audit would be initiated with the goal of targeting undocumented immigrants, workers whose names and gender markers don’t align with their I-9 documentation on file could potentially also face additional challenges, even if they are eventually found to be eligible to work.
In this regard, the oppressive new policies being implemented against trans people are connected to the attacks on immigrants and people targeted by anti-homeless raids. “Undocumented immigrants” replaced “illegal immigrants” in progressive discourse in part because lack of documents creates hardships even for people who are entitled to receive such documents. Trump’s executive order abolishing birthright citizenship — which is currently blocked by a judge — would prohibit citizenship documents from being issued to people who don’t fit the order’s definition of citizenship, just as the police throwing away an unhoused person’s papers during a sweep makes it significantly harder for that person to become employed in the future, because even though they are eligible to work, they aren’t able to prove it.
Oppression, under capitalism, functions to divide the working class and facilitate our exploitation. Trans rights, immigrant rights, and the rights of the unhoused are all linked together, not only in that some people belong to two or more of these groups, but in that the same mechanisms of the state are used to oppress all of them and deepen capitalist exploitation for the entire working class. It is important to resist the urge to treat these issues as competing with each other for the time, energy, attention, and resources of activists; the struggle of our trans, undocumented, and unhoused siblings is a fight for us all. Workers and students must join together to defend all oppressed groups with one fist.
