Applying and going through the process of securing any government document is quite hectic more so when you are speaking about one of the most powerful documents in the world, the US passport. If applying for a passport might be this hectic, the changes of information in your passport has the potential to hassle you for a long time. Further when we are speaking about changing of an important information regarding you, stuff like your gender markers etc. used to be quite difficult as one needed to provide the department with official proof like a proof of transgender surgery which used to work as the official document in order to help people change their gender in their respective passports.
Then came the change in regulation in 2010 when the US State Department decided that one doesn’t need to provide the documents like the proof of operation and all stuff. Instead a proof regarding the appropriate clinical treatment would suffice the need. It can be even a letter from a physician regarding the issues in hand and that would be sufficient enough to make one eligible for change in gender on the passport. Then this was not the only problem in hand for the transgender people desiring to have a passport or a change in the passport for that matter. Then there were people who were in the process of gender change when they required a passport. Here we are speaking about the people who were on the process of non-surgical treatments for transition of gender. The State Department further decided that for the people spoken about in the above part of the literature, a temporary passport would be issued and it would be valid for 2 years. But surely these 2 year validity passports would be provided only for people in the process of transition.
Slowly but surely the states have started to abide by these regulations. The latest update regarding this issue is that only 12 states in America still require a proof of surgery, a court order or an amended birth certificate in order to change the gender in the passport. The rest have managed to implement the newer process which saves a lot of time as well as headaches for the people. But the negative point still stays that till date as per the stats provided nearly 68 percent of transgender people still do not possess a passport with the name and the gender they prefer.
