Hunter Schafer’s Passport Casualty in Culture Wars
Following a day one proclamation invalidating transgender identities at the federal level, Hunter Schafer reports on TikTok that her reissued passport has the wrong gender marker on it.
by Alyssa Steinsiek
The Trump administration has made good on their promise to restrict transgender Americans’ ability to change their identifying documents in a very high profile way.
Hunter Schafer, a successful openly transgender actress who found fame portraying one of the two main characters in HBO’s teen drama Euphoria, uploaded a video to social media platform TikTok on Saturday explaining that her recently reissued passport listed her gender as male.
“I had a bit of a harsh reality check today,” Schafer began, stating that her bag and passport had been stolen while she was filming in Barcelona, necessitating that she acquire an emergency passport to use while she was abroad. Upon returning to the United States and receiving a new passport, she realized that her gender marker had been changed from female to male.
“I’ve had to do this one time before. No part of the process was different, I filled everything out just like I normally would, I put female, and when it was picked up today … they had changed the marker to male.”
Though Schafer has had female markers on all her identification since her teens, she says, she never amended her birth certificate’s listed gender. She suspects that when she filed for a new passport with the Los Angeles Passport Agency, they may have cross-referenced her birth certificate and then amended her gender marker as a result.
These changes are being made in the wake of an executive order issued by President Trump, the word salad order named, “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” issued on January 20th, Trump’s very first day in office. Among other things, the executive order says that the United States only acknowledges two genders, male and female, and that they are assigned at birth and cannot be changed.
The order also made clear that government agencies would be forced to “implement changes to require that government-issued identification documents, including passports, visas, and Global Entry cards, accurately reflect the holder’s sex, as defined [at birth].”
Federal ID altered to accurately reflect a trans person’s gender transition, or non-binary gender identity, is expected to remain unchanged until renewed or reissued. For anybody who loses or has to renew federal ID, this means a change in listed gender that may expose them to danger while traveling abroad, forcing them to expose themselves as transgender to anybody they must show their documents to.
“I don't give a fuck that they put an M on my passport,” Schafer said. “It doesn't change anything about me or my transness, however, it does make life a little harder. I'm pretty sure it's gonna come along with having to out myself to border patrol agents much more often than I would like to or is really necessary."
Schafer made it clear, however, that she isn’t seeking anybody’s pity. She acknowledged that she has the privilege of celebrity and the ability to conform to cisnormative white beauty standards. The purpose of the video, she says, is to show that this sort of targeted bigotry can happen to any of us, regardless of our life circumstances.
“I’m just sort of scared of the way this stuff slowly gets implemented,” she said, musing on how fascist governments come to power. “There's a lot of talk, and then things start happening, and we start to normalize the circumstances we're under, and I just feel like it's important to share that it's not just talk, that this is real, and it's happening. No one, no matter their circumstance, no matter how wealthy or white or pretty, is excluded. This is real.”
She’s right. Fascism has been on the rise for years now, and Trump’s second administration hit the ground running with a bullet point playbook on how to dismantle whatever democratic systems America had left. It’s a scary time to be an American who doesn’t fit their desired qualities of cisgendered heterosexuality and whiteness… but it’s not all doom and gloom.
“Trans people are beautiful, we’re never going to stop existing,” Schafer insisted, closing out her video. “I’m never gonna stop being trans, a letter on a passport can’t change that… and fuck this administration.”
Alyssa Steinsiek is a trans woman journalist who reports on news relevant to the queer community and occasionally posts on BlueSky.
