Hunter Schafer: ‘I Am Never Going to Stop Being Trans. Fuck This Administration’
Schafer posted a TikTok video revealing that, following Donald Trump’s executive order recognizing only two genders, her new passport now lists her gender as male.
There is no hell hot enough for this administration. On Friday, actress Hunter Schafer posted an eight-minute TikTok explaining what happened with her new passport after President Trump’s day one executive order recognizing only two genders. The new passport lists Schafer’s gender as male.
In the video, Schafer details the impacts of Trump’s executive order for trans people. The Bureau of Consular Affairs has frozen passport applications for gender marker changes or any applications with a gender marker that differs from the applicant’s gender assigned at birth. Schafer admitted she was unsure, at first, what this would look like in practice, since “our president is a lot of talk.” But “today, I saw it on my new passport: male.”
Schafer says her “gender markers were first changed in my teens” and this “hasn’t really been a problem.” Her old passport was set to last until her thirties. But it was recently stolen from a car while she was filming a movie in Barcelona. She got an emergency passport to return to the U.S. and went to the Federal Passport Agency in Los Angeles on Friday to get a new one. “I’ve had to do this one time before, no part of the process was different. I filled everything out just like I normally would,” Schafer said. “I put female, and when it was picked up today and I opened it up, they had changed the marker to male.”
Hunter Schafer reveals that her new passport now lists her sex as male instead of female, following Trump’s instatement:
“I’m not making this post to fear-monger, or to create drama, or receive consolation, I don’t need it. But I do think it’s worth posting to sort of note the… pic.twitter.com/C9DDJEtf4u
In sharing her experience, Schafer says she doesn’t want to “create drama or receive consolation,” but is doing so because this is “the reality of the situation, in that it is actually happening. And I was shocked, because I don’t know, I just didn’t think it was actually going to happen.” Schafer further theorized that, since she hasn’t changed her birth certificate, agencies like the FPA could be cross-referencing birth certificates. “I don’t know exactly what changed as far as the processing goes… I do believe it is a direct result of the administration our country is currently operating under. And I guess I’m just sort of scared of the way this stuff slowly gets implemented.”
“I don’t give a fuck that they put a ‘M’ on my passport. It doesn’t change really anything about me or my transness, however, it does make life a little harder,” she continued. But she expressed concern that this change to her passport will force her to “out myself to, like, border patrol agents… much more often than I would like to or is really necessary.”
Schafer ultimately dedicated her video message to queer and trans people in the midst of this administration’s vile attempts to erase their existence. “Trans people are beautiful,” she said. “We are never going to stop existing, I am never going to stop being trans, a letter on a passport can’t change that. And 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.”
Within days of taking office, Trump signed numerous anti-trans executive orders, issuing policies to ban gender-affirming care for people under 19 in 90 days, ban trans people from the military, ban trans people from sports, and reassigning trans incarcerated women to men’s prisons, which could be a death sentence for trans women. All of these orders are being challenged in court, with some blocked or temporarily blocked. At the same time, the Trump administration has been working to remove recognition of trans people from federal webpages. This, too, is being challenged in court. It goes without saying that parading about as the party of small government while dictating individuals’ gender expressions is flaming hot bullshit.
But to Schafer’s point: Trans people are beautiful and are never going to stop existing.
