In line with the “lived reality”
Another version of the X on passports news:
The US has issued its first passport with an “X” gender designation – a milestone in the recognition of the rights of people who don’t identify as male or female – and expects to be able to offer the option more broadly next year, the state department said on Wednesday.
What rights? What are the “rights” of people who don’t identify as male or female that are different from the rights of anyone else? Spell them out and explain why only people who don’t identify as male or female have them. Is there a “right” to be called neither male nor female? What kind of right would that be? What would it be based on?
And even if it is a right (which I obviously don’t think it is, at least not without further explanation), how is the right squared with the need for passports to do what passports exist to do? How is the right squared with the need for accuracy on official documents?
It’s funny how seldom any of this is even mentioned, let alone discussed. It seems quite obvious that passports with meaningless fake details about ID are less useful than passports that are accurate (because why else do we have to go to all that trouble to get them?), yet we mostly politely don’t mention it in the news accounts.
The US special diplomatic envoy for LGBTQ rights, Jessica Stern, called the moves historic and celebratory, saying they brought the government documents in line with the “lived reality” that there is a wider spectrum of human sex characteristics than is reflected in the previous two designations.
No there isn’t. She means gender characteristics, and passports don’t record those. Passports aren’t about personality or clothes, they’re about a very short list of documented facts. Which of two sexes one is is one of those facts.
“When a person obtains identity documents that reflect their true identity, they live with greater dignity and respect,” Stern said.
Except that in the real world it’s their false identity, however much they feel it reflects the True Ineffable They. Again, for those in the back, passports don’t exist to reflect people’s “true” (i.e. fictional) identities, they exist to record their plain factual ones, for the inspection of officials at airports and border crossings. This is the real world, it’s not fucking high school.
Is Saudi Arabia or say, Ethiopia obliged to accept these passports as valid? I mean, I’m sure Iran probably would within certain conditions, but isn’t this an actual obstacle to using the document?
I don’t know why sex or gender is required on passports, etc. If your photo and signature are not sufficient, I don’t see how dropping your dacks will help.
Perhaps it is time to remove all sex / gender markers from documents where that is not crucial information. Just done a quick check, my passport has M, my driver licence does not.
I am a Child of the Universe and a Citizen of the World.
I want my passport to reflect that I don’t need a passport. Open it up, there’s a gold star, glitter, and an expired coupon.
Yes I dug mine out and had a look and was surprised to see that’s all there is – no height & weight & stuff. Why have it at all?
Fantasy is the exact opposite of ” lived reality.” It’s “escapist fantasy.”. It’s neither lived — only pretended — nor reality — it’s pure fakery.
Words. What do they mean?
Eh, I think it should have sex and height. Weight is pretty useless, because people get passports only once every ten years (at least in the US). It’s easy to play tricks in photographs (probably even within the restrictions of passport photos), so knowing sex and height can be useful.
Passports serve a number of purposes. The first is certification of identity by the relevant authority. The government is certifying that the person applying for the passport has supplied sufficient evidence that they are who they say they are. What evidence and processes are involved in this certification might vary from place to place, but this is where details such as sex and date of birth and other identifying characteristics come in. In the UK, applicants need to submit their birth or adoption certificate and any documents relating to the immigration status of their parents, any other passports they hold and so on.
The actual details of the birth certificate are not relevant to the certification (unless there’s an irregularity or an immigration issue). The passport isn’t validating that information, it’s just certifying that the documentation exists and was (apparently) issued by the appropriate authority. So sex is irrelevant to this process; it’s just a field that happens to be on the birth certificate. The passport just certifies what’s written on that document.
The second main purpose of a passport is to provide evidence that the person presenting the passport is the certified person. This is why they have a photograph and whatever other details they have (such as biometrics). Again, it’s hard to see why sex would be relevant. It’s the photograph and the facial biometrics which are used to determine whether the presenter is the certified owner. There’s certainly a lot of guesswork done at passport control because people’s faces can change significantly in ten years. Knowing a person’s sex might conceivably help them with tricky identifications (gait analysis, for example).
But I’m not sure the case for that is very strong. Certainly, facial biometrics are a better way of matching face to passport than visual assessment by a bored, underpaid, under-trained passport official.
TL;DR, sex is only important on passports if it’s a useful way to identify whether the person presenting the passport is its actual owner, and I don’t think there’s a strong case for that. A passport certainly doesn’t certify anything about a person’s sex, other than to repeat what was written on whatever document was used to obtain it.
So from the point of view of security and daily use of passports, I don’t care much if people get to lie about their sex. From the point of view of deploring human stupidity, I have more to say about it than I’ll write here. I’d rather sex was not recorded on passports at all, if people are going to be idiots about it.
But it’s worth noting that there are other uses for passports. One is governments and organisations such as Interpol tracking our movements for the purposes of law enforcement (and just general mass surveillance because they can and just really really want to). For law enforcement at least, we know that sex is highly significant. The same goes for counter-terrorism. I can only guess whether recording sex on passports is relevant or useful for these purposes, though.
Another use is tracking movement of people in aggregate. Would it be useful to know the sex ratio of people leaving Afghanistan right now, for instance? Would we lose some ability to make predictions or policies if significant numbers of people chose X for their sex on passports? I don’t know.
Sastra, what do you mean, expired coupon? All coupons are valid!