The US has made a huge milestone in the recognition of the rights of people who don’t identify as male or female: they’ve issued the first US passport with an ‘X’ gender designation.
It’s expected that the US will be able to offer the option more boadly starting next year – as reported by the US state department.
Jessica Stern, the US special diplomatic envoy for LGBTQ rights called the move ‘historic and celebratory,’ and added that they brought the government documents in line with the ‘lived reality’ in the US today.
“When a person obtains identity documents that reflect their true identity, they live with greater dignity and respect,” – she added.
Zzyym, who uses ‘they/them’ pronouns, first asked for the change while filling out their passport form in 2015, when the 63 year-old declared they were intersex and wrote ‘X’ on the form, instead of checking the M box for male or F box for female.
The passport has been issued to the 63-year-old Dana Zzyym, who uses them/they pronouns. Zzyym was identified as the recipient of the first X-gender passport by her law firm Lambda Legal.
They asked for the change when filling out their passport form back in 2015, and received the good news on Wednesday.
The momentous modification will become an option for all Americans applying for passports from early 2022.
It comes after the department announced in June that it was changing its gender requirements for the forms to be more inclusive of the LGBT community, after facing backlash from some of its members.
The modification will become an option for all Americans that apply for passports starting from 2022.
Zzyym is an intersex activist and a former sailor that decided to sue the US and the state department back in 2015, when they petitioned for a shift in the policy that would allow for US citizens to be able to have their gender specified in their passports, regardless if it’s out the existing male/female labellings.
The military veteran is the first one to seek for a non-binary passport in the US, and even though they were initially declined the ID during a renewal process, they finally received their non-binary passport in 2021.
The court documents read that Zzyym wrote ‘intersex’ above the M/F boxes and requested a new, ‘X’ gender marker to be added in the selection.
Source: Daily Mail
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