During this discussion of gender markers on passports, one question lingers in the background: Why do US Passports have gender markers in the first place?
It makes sense that some legal documents would need a sex indicator, for medical purposes. There’s some argument to be had, although I find it questionable, that driver’s licenses and state IDs need that info for medical emergencies.
But how often do people have a US passport but no other photo ID? Many US citizens don’t bother with passports. For many of us, they’re not even needed for travel to Canada or Mexico. The common claim is that they’re needed as part of identity verification, but in that case, it makes more sense for the gender marker to match the person’s physical appearance.
I had been of the assumption that they’d been there in the first place. This is not true: For most of the 20th Century, US passports didn’t have a gender marker. Blake Andrews has a history of the US passport, which became commonly required in 1918.
Here’s Walt Disney’s passport from 1965, courtesy of the Blake Andrews blog. Actual details are scant: Name, date and place of birth, height, hair and eye color. A photo and a signature. No gender marker.
The blog also shows this passport, issued in 1988. Hair and eye color are gone, but the gender marker has been added.
So I went spelunking for when the gender marker was added, and while I couldn’t find a specific date, I managed to narrow it down to some time between March 29, 1976 and March 10, 1977. That would suggest that it was done under Gerald Ford’s administration.
This matches a 2018 document, referencing a 2017 US State Department document entitled “History of the Designation of Sex in U.S. Passports”, in which that Department states, with “the rise in the early 1970s of unisex attire and hairstyles, photographs had become a less reliable means for ascertaining a traveler’s sex” (Citation: United States District Court for the District of Colorado, 341 F. Supp. 3d 1248, Civil Action No. 15-cv-02362-RBJ, 2018-09-19).
This shift was not unique to the US. As quoted in The Daily Beast, in 1974, the UN’s ICAO Panel on Passport Cards recommended a sex marker because “first names do not always give a ready indication and appearances from the photograph may be misleading in this respect”.
In 1992, under G. H. W. Bush, the State Department first allowed transgender people who had completed medical transition to have their sex marker changed. So, for 16 years, transgender people were forced to have a marker that didn’t match their gender, regardless of their medical transitional status.
In 2010, under Obama, the requirement for medical transition was dropped. In 2022, under Biden, the X marker was added. Now, in 2025, the Trump Administration has rolled the policy back to 1991, a decision that has brought about lawsuits.
To be plain: Transgender people have been allowed to have a correct gender marker for twice as long as we haven’t, and gender markers were missing from US passports longer than they’ve been there.
And why are the markers there in the first place? If they’re to help with identification, then they absolutely ought to match the person’s physical appearance.
The gender marker came about because of fretting over gender identity. Prior to the 1960s, everyone was neatly categorizable, at least in the Western World: Men were men, women were women, and they could quickly be separated. But the Stonewall Riots and the Hippie Movement turned gender identifiers upside down, and the Starched Suits got far too preoccupied with what was inside our pants and skirts.
One of the most famous of the gender challengers was David Bowie, who as early as 1964 was interviewed questioning gender norms on hair length, and who appeared on a record jacket wearing a dress in 1971:
Women were also expected to toe the cultural line: Dresses were the expectation for working women into the 1980s:
Annie Lennox of the Eurythmics, known for wearing suits and having a buzzcut, was challenged over whether she was “really” a woman.
In short: The Old Guard saw that its time was fading, a seismic cultural shift was happening, and they sought to knuckle down on it. So passports became the culturally acceptable way to look in our Tightie Whiteys.
I feel like the current ultraconservative push against transgender people is part of the final death throes of a cultural expectation that everyone’s sex (defined by genitals, despite the smokescreen claims about gametes and chromosomes) be immediately evident and dictate actions.
In the 1970s, the main concern was over sexuality: The cultural shapes of the 1970s and 1980s were wrapped around gayness, with the tragedy of the AIDS epidemic helping tip public sentiment in the direction of empathy for gay men rather than disgust for them.
Even so, anxieties over gender presentation were also clearly evident, given the prevalence of “man in dress” humor (Klinger in M*A*S*H, Flip Wilson, Monty Python’s Flying Circus, Bosom Buddies, and so on).
The gender marker on passports began as part of this anxiety, and the current pushback is part of that same anxiety.
We don’t need it. Let’s just get rid of it.
But if we must have it, let people decide what best works for them. We can have restrictions such as a bar on changing the marker more often than once a decade, or something of that nature. But forcing a marker different than a person’s appearance creates danger for transgender people.