March 31, 2022 – On this fourteenth International Transgender Day of Visibility (TDOV), we are delighted to celebrate today’s breaking news that the U.S. State Department is making passports with nonbinary gender markers available to all U.S. citizens. The White House also announced long-awaited new security screening and other measures to safeguard transgender, nonbinary and all other Americans traveling within the United States and abroad.
This follows the issuance of the first U.S. passport with an X gender marker last October. As Jessica Stern, the U.S. Special Envoy to Advance the Human Rights of LGBTQI+ Persons, noted at the time, “When a person obtains identity documents that reflect their true identity, they live with greater dignity and respect.” This also builds on earlier decisions by the State Department to affirm transgender Americans by recognizing the right of transgender citizens to self-select a male or female gender marker on their U.S. passport based on their own self-determined identity.
As we celebrate TDOV today, we want to take this moment to note that self-determined gender is a cornerstone on a person’s identity and that legal gender recognition is fundamental to ensuring that transgender and other gender-diverse people enjoy the full rights of citizenship. As such, states have an obligation to provide access to gender recognition in a manner consistent with the rights to freedom from discrimination, freedom of expression, equal protection of the law, privacy, and identity.
As the United Nations Independent Expert on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity has noted, “the lack of access to gender recognition negates the identity of a person to such an extent that it provokes a fundamental rupture of State obligations.”
Legal gender recognition includes those laws, policies, and administrative processes and procedures which set out how trans and gender-diverse people can update their sex/gender markers and names on official identity documents, including passports, birth certificates, and driver’s licenses.
As the Open Society Foundations have noted,
When these documents don’t reflect the gender that a trans person lives — one’s affirmed gender—these documents are often rejected as proof of identity and prevents trans people from participating in fundamental activities like enrolling in school, accessing health care, getting a job, opening a bank account, traveling, or voting. Incorrect identification can also lead to being “outed” as trans — resulting in discrimination and abuse, or the distress of having one’s affirmed gender rejected.
Given this, the UN Independent has further called on states to ensure that legal gender recognition is available to all persons everywhere. Furthermore, the process of should be based on self-determination by the person seeking legal gender recognition; be accessible, administratively simple and, when possible, cost-free; open to minors; inclusive of nonbinary identities; and not require abusive medical or legal requirements (e.g., medical certification, surgery, sterilization, or divorce).
The F&M Global Barometer of Transgender Rights evaluates the state of trans rights based on 17 factors, starting with legal gender recognition as the #1 criterion. In the 2019 edition of the GBTR, seven countries earned As, as “Protecting” countries, with another 22 countries earning Bs as “Tolerant” countries. Three countries — Denmark, Norway, and Uruguay — received perfect scores for upholding transgender rights.
In the December 2021 Summit for Democracy LGBTQI Report Cards prepared by the Council for Global Equality, in collaboration with F&M Global Barometers, Malta was the only country out of the 110 Summit participants to receive a perfect score for its commitment to basic human rights, protection from violence, and socio-economic rights for LGBTQI persons. Malta’s score, in part, reflects its pioneering 2015 gender recognition law that has since become a role model for other countries drafting such legislation.
While Western Europe is home to some of the best gender recognition laws in the world — six of the seven perfect “Protecting” countries listed in the 2019 GBTR are in that region — Latin America has seen some remarkable progress for trans and intersex rights in recent years, with Uruguay and Argentina leading the way.
Just last month, a court in Mexico’s Guanajuato state issued a native of the state a new birth certificate with a third gender; three weeks ago, Colombia’s constitutional court went even further, issuing a ruling making the country the first in Latin America to offer a nonbinary gender marker across the nation. Additionally, activists in the Czech Republic, Moldova, Montenegro, South Africa, and Thailand, to name just a few, are advocating to secure new gender identity laws.
In a landmark ruling last year, the Inter-American Court of Human Rights found the government of Honduras violated the rights to life and personal integrity of a transgender woman murdered in 2009 in San Pedro Sula. The Court’s orders – including that Honduras implement legal gender recognition procedures, improve data collection on cases of anti-LGBTQ bias, and train security forces to properly investigate anti-LGBTQI violence – set an importance precedent for the whole region.
The United States, which scored perhaps surprisingly poorly on the LGBTQI Report Cards, lacks federal legislation prohibiting discrimination based on gender identity, sexual orientation, or sex characteristics. However, above and beyond the State Department’s passport policies, including today’s announcement regarding nonbinary gender markers for U.S. passports, individual states have taken positive steps, such as last year’s passage of the New York State Gender Recognition Act. The White House also is taking important steps to protect transgender youth from state-based legal attacks.
It is equally important to recognize that transgender visibility, including legal cases to recognize transgender identities and rights, paved the way for broader legal protections for LGBTQI communities in many countries. India recognized the constitutional rights of its gender-nonconforming citizens, including Indians who identify with a nonbinary third gender, as a legal step along the road to striking down the country’s colonial-era sodomy law. Botswana, too, paved the way for decriminalization of same-sex relationships with initial legal cases to secure gender identity recognition for transgender citizens. Here in the United States, fearless transgender activists who refused to remain invisible led the Stonewall revolution for equality.
The urgency of legal gender recognition may be nowhere more obvious right now than in Ukraine, where some trans people are reporting being stopped at the border fleeing the Russian invasion because their affirmed gender is not accurately represented on their passports or other identification documents. For transgender people in Central Europe, this crisis is further exacerbated by regional backsliding, such as Hungary’s 2020 law prohibiting trans and intersex people from legal changing their gender.
Nor does observing and celebrating TDOV does not ignore the other profound challenges facing trans and nonbinary people in the U.S. and around the world, whether we’re considering setbacks such as the ongoing epidemic of anti-trans violence in the U.S. and around the world; the coordinated surge of anti-trans legislation in U.S. states; COVID-related economic hardship facing trans people and LGBTQI+ more broadly; or even Vladimir Putin’s cynical “defense” of J.K. Rowling’s anti-transgender statements.
But with all the work to do to promote and defend transgender rights, it is well worth taking a moment to celebrate trans visibility and the victories that day by day, take us closer to a world where all people, of all gender identities and expressions, are celebrated, included, and accorded the full rights of citizenship.
Global Equality Today 
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