why does the passport even need a placeholder for gender? surely that parameter serves no purpose for inter-country travel?
It’s a factor of identity verification. Like if you’ve stolen a passport from someone with a name that’s not generally considered masculine or feminine, it helps raise a flag when it doesn’t seem to match the person holding it.
Making fraudulent passports used to be easier. You see old movies with people replacing the photos. If you do that on a passport for Michael Smith, male, but you’re apparently a woman, it’s a lot harder to argue than just saying “yeah my parents gave me a boy’s name”.
but that is based on a flawed premise: that there exists a hard line between masculine names and feminine names.
how does it work with cultures where the distinction between tradtional masculine and feminine names isn’t that well defined?
what if the name is one of these examples: Abidemi Lubanzi, Onyekachi Olamide, Firdaus Khan, Jasleen Singh, Shakti Gupta?
how will this gender flag work there?
Probably for the same stupid, “medical emergency professionals” propaganda that maga is always pushing. Fucking facsitatties!
Holy shit that’s actually kinda huge. I know several people who had renewed their passports, and the government had reverted their gender to their birth sex, so the passports were essentially useless - or at the very least, extremely troublesome to use
They can’t, but they will anyway.
I’m worried because I need to renew mine soon from outside the US. I fully expect that SCROTUS will reverse this and codify it before I’m eligible to renew.
How soon? The guidelines for renewal are a year before it expires, but I think they might have still counted mine as a year when it was like, 1 year and 350 days or something like that. Rounding down, basically.
