For LGBTQ people… U.S. issues first passports marked with an ‘X’ that are neither female nor male

The first passports were issued in the United States with an ‘X’, which stands for a third gender, not male or female. It’s a State Department measure for LGBT people who don’t want to choose between men and women.

The U.S. State Department issued a statement in the name of spokesperson Ned Price on the 27th and issued the first passport marked with an ‘X’ (gender neutral, pictured in circle), and it will be applied to all applicants as soon as the upgrade of the relevant system is completed early next year. said he expects it. The Department of State allows individuals to apply for a passport of their own gender without having to prove this through medical records. Until now, if you wanted to enter a gender other than your birth certificate on your passport, you had to submit a certificate from a medical institution. The State Department announced in June a policy to revise the passport issuance procedure for LGBTI people.

Jessica Stern, Special Envoy for LGBTQ Human Rights and Diplomacy at the State Department, said, “This measure is a government document that shows that there is a wider range of gender characteristics than previous ‘male’ and ‘female’. When they get it, people live with greater respect.”

The State Department did not disclose to whom the ‘X’ passports were issued. According to the Associated Press, Dana Zym, 63, a LGBT rights activist living in Fort Collins, Colorado, said in a phone interview that she had been issued an “X passport”. He said, “I am not a troublemaker, I am just a human being. He has been asking the State Department to allow passports to be issued without revealing gender since 2015. When applying for a passport, he wrote ‘intersex’ in the space that was supposed to indicate whether he was male or female, and asked for a separate document to be able to indicate his gender with ‘X’. AFP reported that at least 11 countries, including Australia, New Zealand, Canada, Germany and Nepal, allowed the ‘X gender’ mark on passports before the United States. Washington = Correspondent Lee Jeong-eun lightee@donga.com Go to reporter page>