That said, something like 0.5% of humanity are hermaphrodites. It is odd that such people no longer officially exist.
I am also the sort of person who likes the confusion that conversation about gender causes people. Joel Spolsky popularized the term "leaky abstraction" in programming. It applies to most, if not all, of the categories we humans apply to the world.
I see the war against "nonbinary" sex codes as a war against sophisticated thinking. It will make Americans a little bit dumber.
But as a deeper question: why is gender even listed on a passport in the first place? Why does it matter for the thing a passport does, letting you pass through a port?
Picture: yes, is the person standing in front of me authorised to travel in general? Name: yes, is the person standing in front of me connected to this specific non-transferable ticket with a name on it?
Gender: who cares, it's not like planes and trains have separate male and female seating and toilets.
That is a very valid question. We already have face-scans and fingerprint IDs so we are all treated as criminals. There is indeed zero point to have a binary-toggle field where one has to identify as either male or female. I'd like to add here that I don't care about this field; or I would want to check that I am an epic supergender, the very best - 'A' for awesome. But they don't allow this, so I don't want to have to care about this weird grouping I disagree with.
You have observed that a thing is done, which was already observed. You have not explained in what way it has a rational purpose, or added to the conversation.
It's not important. It's merely treated as important, which we already knew, because that was the setting for the question in the first place.
You may not like or approve of these things, but they are part of the "purpose" you seek.
If I had to choose to be in a foxhole with a fit 20 year old woman or a flabby 35 year old man, I'm choosing the woman every time. (Even the new, stricter, US military fitness standards are not that hard to meet for either gender)
Yes we established that this is the norm in the opening question. You're answering "we do that because we do that"
For the latter, there's a lot of small differences you only even notice by moving across a border, because the "common sense" you grew up with conflicts with the "common sense" in the new home. My own experience moving to Germany from the UK had this, even: some countries (e.g. Germany) require everyone to have ID, but not all (e.g. UK); while I approve of it being as easy to move from Somalia to America* as from South Dakota to Arkansas, we're not actually ready for it yet. Would be a huge benefit to all of us if we were, and we should work towards it.
For the former, the absence of distinction on legal records doesn't mean people won't treat you differently anyway; consider how ginger and blonde hair have stereotypes, even though hair dye is trivial to get and use.
Thing is, there are even legit reasons to care about gender, unlike for hair — it's just… how do I put this… you know how you sometimes see people (IMO in bad faith) demanding to know what "the definition of a woman is"? In my experience, such people never like that all possible "definitions" are extremely domain-limited, and absolutely not universally applicable despite the correlation.
To give some common examples and why they aren't universal:
• If you're a surgeon, you'll care about the current actual anatomy, not the chromosomes — I can't get ovarian cancer if I don't have ovaries, doesn't matter if that congenital or from a oophorectomy.
• If you're a geneticist, you care about the chromosomes (of which there are many more than 2 groups even in humans), not the anatomy.
• If you're dating casually (and, at risk of me making the typical mind fallacy, if you're not bisexual like me), you care about the exterior bits. You do otherwise use contraceptives for sex while casually dating, right? So it doesn't matter if the bits outside are connected to anything functional inside, right?
• If you want to start a family with someone, you care if they're fertile… which not all cis people are, while some trans people are.
• If you're an animal biologist, you care about which has the biggest gamete… hence why in seahorses it's the males who get pregnant.
• If you're trying to keep sports interesting, you care about how much testosterone is floating around, and wouldn't you believe it, that's something you can take as a supplement even without being trans.
• You want to know how to address someone? Sure, in English polite forms have "Sir/Madam" variations, and many other languages have stronger variations between male and female forms in language (e.g. Pavlov/Pavlova), but that's why people list their pronouns now, and those don't have to have anything to do with gender anyway (I know several with the title Doctor, both men and women).
etc.
* Replace with your own country here, I'm picking on the USA just because it's where I think most HN readers are
I've got long hair but other than that you'd be hard pressed to mistake me for a woman. Yet 2 times recently I've been addressed as "madam" in stores. Both times they realized immediately, one person just didn't address me again. The other continued to call me madam and obviously didn't know what to do as I hadn't corrected. I was just thinking at the time it's odd how it makes you feel something even though it's just an innocuous word and I've got no reason to care.
Myself, I don't have a strong sense of gender identity, and I generally see myself as "Ben" rather than "Mr": while I have male bits, if I woke up one day to find they were everted, the only things I'd be worried about would be the implications of having been subject to non-consensual surgery, and the social danger due to endemic sexism:
A decade ago, I was opening my front door and overheard a kid who was clearly confused saying "mommy mommy is that a boy or a girl?" about me. It amused me at the time.
On the other hand, when I was a teen, someone got half way through a wolf-whistle before they saw my beard.
My passport doesn't ask for or display height or weight, and only gets hair/eye colour and race implicitly from the photograph.
I'd have a lot of trouble if my passport recorded hair colour in written form rather than a mediocre photo, given it changes naturally all by itself between black in winter and (dark, but definitely) brown in summer.
Also my eyes are on an awkward three-way boundary between blue, green, and grey.
> If someone had to identify your dead body, it would be critical to know your sex.
When, if ever, was that true? Teeth records, finger prints, and/or DNA.
> If there is really a need for it, add an intersex category
Intersex was added. As per the linked article:
Non-Binary Passport Designations: Passports issued with “X” or other non-binary markers will be rejected by CBP systems, requiring resubmission with valid documentation showing “M” or “F” designation.
1. Why?
2. Also, when you say "biological" sex, are you using the chromosomal definition, the anatomical definition, or "what you were assigned at birth" which a non-trivial number discover at puberty wasn't either of the other two?
I mean, hyperandrogenism is definitely a source of ambiguity as it induces somewhat masculine features like facial hair etc., and that affects about 5%(!) of women of reproductive age, and that's ambiguity without being trans: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hyperandrogenism
> The number of trans people who can pass is vanishingly small anyway.
Not from the ones I've met.
From what I've seen while people do the transition, transitioning is like a second puberty: during the period while your body changes in various ways, your voice sounds funny for a bit, it takes a while to develop a good sense of style for your new shape, and if you're turning into a woman rather than a man it takes ages to learn how much make up is the right amount and doesn't make you look like a clown — and transitioning also has those things.
The trans people who are noticed are those who fail to pass. People don't have a magic sense telling you objective truth, and the same lack of magic sense does also mean cis people sometimes don't pass as their own gender. Like the wife of the French president*, though I've also experienced similar with a butch cis former girlfriend. Heck, my pony tail has confused people from behind, and I keep a beard partially because without it I look really girly.
* One of the more harmless conspiracy theories going around at the moment, IMO
If you want to identify someone like that, you're after whether they have male/female/androgynous looks, not their sex. Otherwise it's just a convenient shortcut that works most of the time.
> identify your dead body, it would be critical to know your sex
Fresh? Again, you're likely interested in male/female presenting. Sex assigned at birth can also be confusing here. It's really not simple for some people.
> stipulate that you must actually be the biological sex that you register with
"Biological sex" isn't a well defined thing. You'd have to start from what does it even mean. The ratio that doesn't fit in either category may be tiny, but country-wide it still covers millions of people.
I will grant one thing. If people are actually getting surgery to change their genitals, then that could be a separate designation.
>Fresh? Again, you're likely interested in male/female presenting. Sex assigned at birth can also be confusing here. It's really not simple for some people.
There might be 1 in 1000 (or less) people for whom it is legitimately confusing to others. Also, DNA is much more accurate than that.
>"Biological sex" isn't a well defined thing. You'd have to start from what does it even mean. The ratio that doesn't fit in either category may be tiny, but country-wide it still covers millions of people.
Literally nobody is actually confused about what "biological sex" means. And no way the corner cases cover millions of people in the US or other countries where this mental breakdown is common. Virtually everyone has normal sex chromosomes and characteristics, even the trans people. If some burly dude with a giant ass pecker thinks that putting on a dress makes him a female, I'm not entertaining that madness.
Lots of people seem confused, assuming we have some kind of definition for this. Then they get surprised when they discover how common the exceptions are.
> Virtually everyone has normal sex chromosomes and characteristics
In the US alone, there's close to 200k people born with the most obvious case - ambiguous genitals.
Otherwise sports organisations in the US tried to do various sex identification tests (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_verification_in_sports) until they realised they're just uncovering more and more intersex people that didn't fall into either category and stopped. Karyotype - close to 1 in 250 births is not the "typical" XX / XY. That's over a million in the US.
Other ideas like testosterone testing is even worse: "16.5% of men had low testosterone levels, whereas 13.7% of women had high levels with complete overlap between the sexes." (doi:10.1111/cen.12445) That's... again lots of people.
If nobody is confused, why are we continuing to fail at finding the consistent difference? Why can't you point at a well researched definition?
There is a definition based on chromosomes, and another based on physical features. It's very clear.
>In the US alone, there's close to 200k people born with the most obvious case - ambiguous genitals.
That's like 5 in 10k people. How many of these have ambiguous chromosomes?
>Otherwise sports organisations in the US tried to do various sex identification tests (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sex_verification_in_sports) until they realised they're just uncovering more and more intersex people that didn't fall into either category and stopped.
These abnormal people deserve their own sports category. They should not be shoehorned into male/female sports. Your point is that they are different from normal right? So act like it.
>If nobody is confused, why are we continuing to fail at finding the consistent difference? Why can't you point at a well researched definition?
I told you already. There has been an extreme propaganda campaign to tell people that there is such an abundance of abnormal cases that we need to entertain any mentally ill person claiming any designation for themselves. I am not swayed by this.
>Other ideas like testosterone testing is even worse: "16.5% of men had low testosterone levels, whereas 13.7% of women had high levels with complete overlap between the sexes." (doi:10.1111/cen.12445) That's... again lots of people.
Different people have different hormone levels but that does not change their primary biological function.
I could apply much the same logic to the definition of anything biological. If you asked, "what is a human?" Nobody is confused by that, despite the myriad genetic and physical aberrant phenotypes and syndromes in the world. There really are only 3 categories that matter for biological sex. Male, female, and intersex. In the intersex case I don't really care what kind of mutant they are, it just needs to be recorded that they aren't typical. If you are a typical man in a dress or woman with a crew cut, you are not the other sex and not intersex, and pretending otherwise does a disservice to actually abnormal people trying to fit in.
If you really, honestly, define gender based on chromosomes, then you must agree that humans have about 15 genders.
If you categorise those 15 documented variations of the X and Y chromosomes into either "male" xor "female" (which is what happens in practice), then you're not defining gender based on chromosomes.
If you define based on physical features, there's overlap, which affects you two ways:
(1) what do you call someone in the middle of a transition from one to the other?
(2) what do you do for people born ambiguous? i.e. your own reaction to being told 200k in the USA are born with ambiguous your reaction is to ask about their chromosomes. Well, why did you reach for that? Clearly the chromosomes weren't all that important if people can't tell by looking.
> These abnormal people deserve their own sports category. They should not be shoehorned into male/female sports. Your point is that they are different from normal right? So act like it.
I've made this point myself back when people first started to realise this.
Issues:
1) the main difference for sports is testosterone, so there's multiple ways to resolve this, e.g. one entirely legit thing we can do is just let people take testosterone for sports, while another is to just categorise people by testosterone counts (the same way for wrestling we already do for body mass).
2) the only externally visible presentation is that you're better at sports and infertile, you actually have to do a genetic test to spot it, so you have to test everyone because the people themselves won't even known unless you do. As nobody does such a test for birth certificates and passports, there's no point putting this information on a passport for the sake of women's sports.
> I told you already. There has been an extreme propaganda campaign to tell people that there is such an abundance of abnormal cases that we need to entertain any mentally ill person claiming any designation for themselves. I am not swayed by this.
No, you.
You have listened to propaganda telling you that the exceptions are "mentally ill" and refused to listen to the evidence to the contrary.
The professionals working with these people do not regard being trans itself as being mental illness.
The medical community examines people for mental illness before allowing surgical transitions, because once you get to surgical interventions downstairs, functional reversal stops being possible.
> Different people have different hormone levels but that does not change their primary biological function.
"Primary" is putting the cart before the horse.
We have many biological functions.
Some of those functions are what worked in the ancestral environment (a community: humans barely function in isolation), where sex differentiation giving males big strong muscles and tough bones was actually important. For that, all that matters is the effect of the sex hormones. That environment barely exists any more, at least in the industrialised nations: sports and some parts of the military are most of the places where this extra strength matters, but again, what matters for that strength is exactly what you're ignoring: the hormones. And we have a lot more control over those hormones now than nature ever intended.
Others of those functions include reproduction. For reproduction, note that gay and ace people exist. Do they have no biological function, or are they a third (/fourth for ace) gender? If you look at historical discussions, there were absolutely people who classed being gay as being a kind of transgender.
> If you asked, "what is a human?" Nobody is confused by that, despite the myriad genetic and physical aberrant phenotypes and syndromes in the world.
Tell that to every genocide ever.
Going back in time, were neanderthals human? We got a lot of their DNA.
Categories like "gender" and "species" were made by us, for our convenience. They're the map, not the territory. The approximation that works until it doesn't.
Denouncing anyone who doesn't fit the categories you've constructed for them as "mentally ill" is a common human failing, but it is a failing. Happens a lot, in many categories, not just those under discussion in this thread.
> In the intersex case I don't really care what kind of mutant they are, it just needs to be recorded that they aren't typical.
Why does it need to be recorded?
Who needs to care?
To repeat: for sports, what matters is the hormones, not how you got them.
Are you going to add a third (/fourth) kind of bathroom for them (or force them to use the disabled ones), just so that the existing male and female toilets can't be made safe for everyone?
Statistically common physical information, sure. But how is it relevant in this context? For visual identification, you're not really using sex, however you'd define it. It normally means just "looks like a typical person identifying as X would look like" in those situations. (And you have a photo which gives you more information than that)
In other contexts it may be a useful generalisation for physical information, but again, at a country level you can't just ignore millions of people where this doesn't match. And there will always be exceptions - try a challenge and list something that's always true for a given sex, with no exceptions.
Ok, we're getting somewhere. Which genes? Specifically.
And does it mean you're proposing genetic testing before putting the sex on a document? What do you do about chimeras carrying different generics in different parts of the body? What about people with organs transplanted from other people? Which part of the body do we check? What does it mean for artificial changes in DNA, like crispr - would that qualify as changing sex? What about just blocking the specific gene expression?
"... The Humsafar Trust estimates there are between 5 and 6 million hijras in India."
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_recognition_of_non-binar...
And you probably had a different 'sex' in mind. But I'm not going to answer that, because not only I truly don't care, but also it's a great example how even one simple word has different meanings. Reality is complex.
The "relationship" here is "someone bought a ticket in this person's name, and they have appeared with the ticket in order to be conveyed to another location as specified on the ticket".
I mean, us passengers are (and on budget airlines you can feel it) just a fancy kind of livestock that can complain about itself being delivered incorrectly and where it's worth trying to upsell them with overpriced in-flight drinks.
[…]
> Whether a particular flight operator needs to know your sex is another question, and I am not competent enough to know for sure.
Saying "we need this information on documents like this because it's on documents like this is" is (1) circular reasoning, and (2) demonstrably false.
Other jurisdictions besides the USA expressly allow gender to be excluded from this specific document with the identifier "X" meaning "unspecified or other", and yet those legal records are now being rejected by the USA because the USA government doesn't like it.
Heck, the USA itself allowed X on passports until very recently.
It's obviously, provably, demonstrably, unnecessary to demand it be this way on documents for incoming travellers.
There are certain rights that are afforded only to people of certain sex, ranging from relatively insignificant to very serious e.g. special arrangements needed for women in times of war (they need to be interned separately, if not part of thei families). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Protected_persons#Women . Unless and until we dispense with sex-based rights, there is a need to accurately record person's sex in the identifying document.
Also, the physical differences which matter to some sports (again, why is this in a passport, my passport doesn't say if I'm qualified to drive race cars or if I am allowed to possess* a rifle for shooting competitions) relate not simply to what's between your legs, but to the hormones which are merely correlated with that. The effect of such hormones is also why some trans people ask for puberty blockers, and in any case there's a significant black market for oestrogen and testosterone boosters.
And if you do care specifically about what's between people's legs, because you want to know how many urinals to install or something, then it should be fine to change the document (but again, why a passport?) as soon as genital surgery has been completed even in the absence of any impact of hormonal changes.
Most extreme contradiction of the "protect women's sports" talking point I've seen? As muscled-up as Dwayne Johnson or Schwarzenegger, bald, beard, no dick, identified female at birth.
* Outside the USA, we don't have or want the 2nd A, so yes a gun would need a licence.
> but again, why a passport?
Passport isn't only for crossing the border, but to identify for the whole duration of the visit. Travellers don't have national ID documents by definition, and the passport serves this purpose.
E.g. I don't know about your country, but if someone is travelling to my country, he or she is required to keep the passport in the pocket at all times and present to authorities on demand if s/he is stopped on street[1].
So when accessing women-only spaces, like applying for international sports tournaments held in other countries, this will be the document checked.
If you'd like an example involving border crossing, again I don't know much about your country, but if one attempts to cross the border of mine, one of the results might be that you'd be interned in a facility for illegal migrants that for some reason won't be getting political asylum, but can't be deported to the home country either. It would then matter if the person is a man or a woman. Just asking the person is not sufficient, because we can't just allow men to identify themselves into women's wing, as that would violate rights of the women kept there and not free to go elsewhere.
[1] this is contrary to citizens, who aren't generally required to have any ID on oneself, and can just say the name and number if stopped)
If you're thinking ambiguous genitalia, the number is much lower. But other intersex characteristics are higher percentage.
It's not. It's a war against people who don't confirm to traditional gender roles, regardless of whether they are trans, gay, or just a square peg that doesn't fit in the round hole.
Think for a moment about what happens when a visibly trans person uses a washroom that matches their assigned-at-birth gender.
The exact same people who freak out over trans people using a bathroom that matches their transitioned-to gender, and who got those laws passed, lose their shit when they see a female-to-male trans person with a 5-o'clock shadow walking into the ladies' washroom.
Frankly, there isn't really a good reason that we should have a gender marker on our passports. The picture should be enough for any agent trying to visually identify us, and until and unless we can get to a world where every country is fully accepting of trans (and intersex) people, having a gender marker there forces them to make a choice between using a marker that does not match their gender identity (and thus may very well give them dysphoria), or using a marker that makes them a target for transphobic officials. (This is all true of drivers' licenses, too.)
I am not trans and not impacted by this in any way. Nonetheless, this worries me as trans people are just a small, convenient group to use to normalize state repression.
"First they came for the trans people and I didn't speak out, because I wasn't trans"
You don't label people and organizations terrorists, probably the worst designation the post-9/11 US state can give anyone, unless you have plans to do something about them. Even Obama droned Americans to death that the state deemed were terrorists without trial.
That, at the very least, should give you pause.
"Trump Is No Longer Denying Support for Project 2025" https://time.com/7323278/trump-project-2025-government-shutd...
https://travel.state.gov/content/travel/en/passports/passpor...
It is possible this decision triggers a debate that results in "gender on passports" being rethought.
Would be a silver lining.
This is fascism. They are restricting the movements of the demonized outgroup (in this case, non-binary and intersex people) using the state apparatus. This will get worse. They'll categorize more and more people into the outgroup, and the restrictions will grow.
Correct.
> sex field which means the biological sex
The idea that there's a binary "biological sex" is also wrong. There are many choices for what you can mean by that and for every one there will be outliers that classify as both/neither. (the points bounce up and down, but - feel free to post the specific criteria that you think avoid this issue instead)
This here has more to do with Trump pushing down a certain agenda. They also only focus on what they conveniently look as a "problem" while ignoring every other situation, such as genetic conditions.
Which, as others have pointed out, makes it a field of dubious utility on a document intended for unique identification.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/5%CE%B1-Reductase_2_deficiency
https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gesetz_%C3%BCber_die_Selbstbes...
I think the "gender" field is weird though. It reads "M" or "F". Why can't I say I don't care about this field? I feel as if the government is spying on me. They can autofill that field on their own. It's weird that passports specify that after all are already required to fingerprint here.