OAN Staff Sophia Flores
8:17 AM – Friday, January 24, 2025
Secretary of State Marco Rubio has required the U.S. state department to freeze passport applications that allow Americans to designate their gender identity as “X.”
On Thursday, in an email to state department staff, Rubio instructed employees to “suspend any application requesting an X sex marker” and to “suspend any application where the applicant is seeking to change their sex marker” from the definition provided in the executive order sign by President Trump on his first day in office.
“The policy of the United States is that an individual’s sex is not changeable,” the email read according to the Guardian.
The executive order signed by Trump requires that the federal government uses the term “sex” instead of “gender.”
Passports that were already issued to individuals that chose the “X” designation prior to the executive order will not be recalled. However, applicants will not be able to choose the “X” option when renewing their travel documents.
In April of 2022, the state department, under former President Joe Biden’s leadership allowed people who identify as non-binary to use the third-party gender identification of “X” on official state documents.
The Secretary of State at the time, Antony Blinken, called the move a “milestone.”
“The Department is setting a precedent as the first federal government agency to offer the X gender marker on an identity document,” Blinken stated.
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