Hunter Schafer’s Passport Gender Changed After Anti-Trans Trump Order: ‘F-ck This Administration’
Hunter Schafer lost her passport while filming in Barcelona last year when her bag was stolen in a car break-in. She took all of the right steps to obtain an emergency passport for the time being and visited the Los Angeles Passport Agency this week to have it properly replaced. The process was no different from the last time she went through it — except the information on the passport itself wasn’t the same. “I filled everything out just like I normally would,” the actress shared in an eight-minute video posted on social media. “I put female, and when it was picked up today, and I opened it up, they had changed the marker to male.”
Schafer was aware of the executive order Donald Trump signed on his first day in office declaring that state agencies only recognize male and female genders as assigned at birth. The order also required the Bureau of Consular Affairs to freeze passport applications requesting a gender marker change and renewals or new applications with a gender marker different from the applicant’s gender assigned at birth. Her initial thought, she shared in the TikTok Story post, was: “I’ll believe it when I see it.” Now, she has.
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Schafer’s gender markers have read female since she first obtained her driver’s license as a teenager. But she never updated her birth certificate. “This has led me to believe that, I think, the agencies who are in charge of passports and this sort of thing are now required to cross reference certificates,” she continued. “I don’t know exactly what changed, as far as the processing goes, but this is the first time this has happened to me since I changed my gender marker. We’re coming up on a decade now or something, and I do believe it is a direct result of the administration our country is currently operating under.”
The 26-year-old clarified that the goal of sharing her experience is not to “fear monger, or create drama, or receive consolation,” but to make note of the realities trans people in America are now facing — especially those, she says, who don’t check the boxes of being a “celebrity trans woman who is white and thin and can adhere to contemporary beauty standards.”
Earlier this month, the ACLU sued Trump, the State Department, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, and the United States of America in a class action complaint raising several claims of unconstitutionality. The complaint calls the change in policy “abrupt, discriminatory, and dangerous.” The policy change, just one of many targeting trans and nonbinary people, has left both communities feeling afraid and unsafe.
“I’m just sort of scared of the way this stuff slowly gets implemented, because things just sort of start happening as we’ve seen in historical rises of fascism and everything that this new administration kind of represents,” Schafer added. “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 and no one, no matter their circumstance — no matter how wealthy or white or pretty or whatever — is excluded. This is real.”
Schafer hasn’t yet had to use her new passport, but is anticipating having to “out myself to border patrol agents and that whole gig much more often than I would like to, or is really necessary,” when she begins traveling abroad again in the coming weeks. That experience, and the new reality trans people will face under this order, are the tangible reflections of what may seem to others to be a mere letter on a page.
“I also want to say I don’t give a fuck that they put an M on my passport. It doesn’t change really anything about me or my transness. However, it does make life a little harder,” Schafer said. “And thinking about other trans women who this might also be happening to, or other trans people, the list only gets longer, as far as the intricacies that come along with the difficulty that this brings into real life shit.”
She concluded: “Trans people are beautiful. We are never going to stop existing. I’m never going to stop being trans. A letter on a passport can’t change that. Fuck this administration. I don’t really have an answer on what to do about this, but I feel it was important to share. This is real.”
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