Submitted to the Department of State, which is requesting comments on a proposed change which would align US passport gender markers with executive order 14168.

Executive order 14168 is biologically incoherent and socially cruel. All passport applicants should be allowed to select whatever gender markers they feel best fit, including M, F, or X.

In humans, neither sex nor gender is binary at any level. There are several possible arrangements of sex chromosomes: X, XX, XY, XXY, XYY, XXX, tetrasomies, pentasomies, etc. A single person can contain a mosaic of cells with different genetics: some XX, some XYY. Chromosomes may not align with genitalia: people with XY chromosomes may have a vulva and internal testes. People with XY chromosomes and a small penis may be surgically and socially reassigned female at birth—and never told what happened. None of these biological dimensions necessarily align with one’s internal concept of gender, or one’s social presentation.

The executive order has no idea how biology works. It defines “female” as “a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell”. Zygotes do not produce reproductive cells at all: under this order none of us have a sex. Oogenesis doesn’t start until over a month into embryo development. Even if people were karyotyping their zygotes immediately after conception so they could tell what “legal” sex they were going to be, they could be wrong: which gametes we produce depends on the formation of the genital ridge.

All this is to say that if people fill out these forms using this definition of sex, they’re guessing at a question which is both impossible to answer and socially irrelevant. You might be one of the roughly two percent of humans born with an uncommon sexual development and not even know it. Moreover, the proposed change fundamentally asks the wrong question: gender markers on passports are used by border control agents, and are expected to align with how those agents read the passport holder’s gender. A mismatch will create needless intimidation and hardship for travelers.

Of course most of us will not have our identities challenged under this order. That animus is reserved for trans people, for gender-non-conforming people, for anyone whose genetics, body, dress, voice, or mannerisms don’t quite fit the mold. Those are the people who will suffer under this order. That cruelty should be resisted.