Many transgender people and the parents of trans youth are racing to “update birth certificates, passports and other legal documents to match their gender identity, rather than their sex assigned at birth, out of fear that such changes will be banned once President-elect Donald Trump, who has promised several immediate anti-trans actions, takes office in January,” according the The Boston Globe.
Reports the Globe:
Trump campaigned on promises to revoke all federal dollars for gender-affirming care and to go after doctors who provide it. He also said he would punish schools and teachers who suggest to a child that they may be transgender, ban transgender women from female sports, and ask Congress to pass a law that “the only genders recognized by the US government are male and female — and they are assigned at birth.”
People in the transgender community are worried that if federal agencies adopt such a policy, and they don’t update their passports and other documents before Trump takes office, they would be blocked from a number of activities, including traveling overseas.
“We are publicizing all the name-change clinics [that help with updating documents] because it is very much a real fear” that things will come to a screeching halt with federal bans, said Nina Selvaggio, executive director of Greater Boston PFLAG, an LGBTQ advocacy organization.
GLAD Law, a Boston legal and LGBTQ+ advocacy nonprofit, is fielding calls from people across New England seeking guidance on updating their legal documents. The number of requests it has received for help recently tripled, from 27 in October, to 79, just in the first three weeks of November. That’s in addition to the heavy traffic on GLAD Law’s Transgender ID webpage, which includes step-by-step directions for updating the documents on your own.
“People can have a lot of complications introduced into their life if they don’t have ID documents that match who they are,” said Jennifer Levi, senior director of transgender and queer rights at GLAD Law.
“You might wrongly be told that you can’t cash a check or can’t buy groceries,” she said. “If you have a passport and you’re traveling, and you present with an ID that’s inconsistent with who you are… it can cause very significant problems.”
What about people who have already successfully updated their passports? Could the federal government under Trump revoke passports based on a person’s gender identity not conforming to the sex they were identified with at birth?
“The US Constitution still stands as a bulwark against policy that reflects a bare desire to harm a small group of people,” Levi said. “And I would anticipate legal challenges to any such policies. We can’t, of course, rule that out.”
Read the complete Boston Globe story here.
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