When I first changed the gender marker on all my documents in the spring of 2022, it was during a brief, shimmering moment of legal recognition for trans people across the United States. A year earlier, the Biden Administration had announced that people would finally be allowed to self-select their gender on their passports. Now there would also be an option for nonbinary people to mark their sex as “X.” The move was a fascinating display of liberal tolerance, even if it did not go so far as to enshrine the right to trans health care. The option to self-identify on federal paperwork stood in stark contrast to the numerous states around the country that were starting to crack down on the ability of trans people to change their sex on driver’s licenses and birth certificates. As someone born in Indiana, a red state home to former Vice-President Mike Pence, I was worried about being able to update my birth certificate. I was ultimately able to do so, but only after getting a court order. Other states, like Arkansas and North Carolina, are more draconian, requiring proof of a so-called sex change. Of course, what qualifies as this kind of operation is a moving target. Now it’s a moot point. Donald Trump has issued an executive order, “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” declaring, among other things, that government-issued I.D.s must reflect one’s sex assigned at conception.

Some have snarkily noted that everyone is female at conception. It is not until later in the fertilization process that male chromosomes may reveal themselves. But such jokes, which take aim at Trump’s misunderstanding of biology, ignore the fact that he simply does not care about biology, aside from using it as a signifier for his various “anti-woke” positions. The executive order banning trans and gender-neutral passports is only one of the anti-trans pronouncements that Trump has made during his first few months in office. This evisceration of long-fought-for civil rights marks a ruthless changing of the guard. For years, the U.S. government has used “sex” and “gender” interchangeably. Today, gender is considered a dangerous ideology that seeks to eradicate the immutability of sex. As Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently stated in an e-mail to department staff, “The policy of the United States is that an individual’s sex is not changeable.”

The executive order’s text is even more damning: “The erasure of sex in language and policy has a corrosive impact not just on women but on the validity of the entire American system.” Validity, of course, is not a political measurement. It’s a social one. The war that Trump is waging is cultural, based not on complex legal jargon but on feelings. Transphobia is generally a form of extreme discomfort weaponized as systematic dehumanization. “They don’t want any trans person to feel validated,” a twenty-two-year-old named Zaya Perysian recently told NBC. “They want it to go back to how it used to be where we were seen as like these creatures . . . like night stalkers.”

Identity documents are essential to public movement and travel. There are currently fourteen countries that allow applicants to self-attest their gender on passports and sixteen that allow “X” gender markers. When trans people don’t have any I.D. that matches their visual presentation, they are often held under heightened scrutiny by T.S.A. agents, police officers, and other representatives of the state who may think that these individuals are committing identity fraud. (The U.S. State Department first established gender markers on passports in 1977, when androgyny was all the rage, citing the rise of unisex fashion and hair styles as the justification for the shift.) For trans people who pass, it’s a logistical nightmare to have to explain why they appear to be one gender while their documents tell a different story. These are intentional Kafkaesque problems that the Trump Administration is creating.

The executive order currently just applies to new passports, affecting people who are either getting their passports for the first time or who are attempting to renew their outdated documents. Many trans Americans rushed to change or extend their old passports before the executive order was officially signed—only to find that passport office workers weren’t so eager to accommodate their pleas. Some had their applications suspended indefinitely. Those who have tried to amend their documents after the executive order have had their documents returned with their biological sex reinstated on their passports as a “correction.” This is what happened to Hunter Schafer, the trans actress best known for her role in the HBO series “Euphoria”: she applied for a new passport after her original one had been stolen, and received a new document stamped with a male gender marker. “I had a bit of a harsh reality check,” she said in an eight-minute TikTok. Schafer explained that she thought the executive order was a lot of “talk” until she received her updated passport. She went on to recite her laundry list of privileges: not only is she famous but she is a white trans person who passes—allowing her greater leeway under more liberal administrations. What’s to come of trans people if even the most upwardly mobile, beautiful movie stars aren’t safe?

The case of Mary Fox has also sparked immense fear and debate among members of the trans community. Fox went to a passport office in Los Angeles in order to apply for a passport. Given that her visit was after Trump had issued his executive order, Fox had come to terms with the fact that she would likely have to accept a male gender marker. As she told Vox, “being able to travel is more important than the letter on a piece of paper.” Yet receiving a male-designated passport quickly emerged as the best-case scenario: after submitting an application, Fox was told that the agency couldn’t issue her a passport at all. “We don’t have authorization right now to issue a passport,” the official told her, according to a recording of the conversation. All of Fox’s documents—her birth certificate, her driver’s license—were taken away. “So I can’t leave the country?” Fox asked. “I can’t answer that,” the official responded. After her experience, Fox took to the internet to share her story. Pain begets visibility. Soon, many were outraged over what they took to be a blatant case of discrimination. Public pressure may have swayed the eventual outcome: Fox’s documents were issued and returned but with a male gender marker.

Understandably, many trans people are hesitant to discuss these issues publicly, in part because they’d rather not give the Trump Administration new ideas about how to close legal loopholes. A nonbinary TikToker in Florida recently went viral, for instance, after posting a video explaining how to get your state I.D. gender marker changed by pretending to have lost your previous I.D., only for Libs of TikTok, a popular right-wing account, to pick up the story and report the trans vlogger to the government. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis’s former press secretary even mocked the nonbinary TikToker by saying that they should “thank” the D.M.V. for its “dedicated service.” Meanwhile, Texas state representatives are attempting to pass a bill that could charge trans people with identity fraud. These issues are not limited to American citizens, either: Bells Larsen, a trans Canadian musician who was set to tour in the United States, was forced to cancel his concerts after he was told that he would be unable to secure a visa since U.S. Immigration only recognizes identification that corresponds with one’s assigned sex at birth. The legal and economic consequences of these policies are just beginning to make themselves known.

In the months since the executive order went into effect, the American Civil Liberties Union has been contacted by more than seventeen hundred trans people and their family members looking for legal advice. The A.C.L.U. has also filed a lawsuit—Orr v. Trump—challenging the order. On “At Liberty,” an A.C.L.U.’s podcast, Chase Strangio, a trans lawyer at the A.C.L.U., discussed how the order, which essentially renders certain documents useless, may infringe on the right to travel. The A.C.L.U. has also asserted that anti-trans laws are a form of sex discrimination—although it’s unclear how the courts will respond to this argument. (Judges have blocked Trump’s executive order banning trans people from serving in the military, as well as the order banning trans passports.)

Based on the scale of Trump’s anti-trans policies, the goal is not just to limit trans people’s ability to move through the world safely, or to keep them out of the military; it’s to codify a moral judgment: that trans people are deplorable. By predicating his executive orders on issues of morality, Trump has created an uneven playing field. Throughout the years, many pro-trans protests have used slogans such as “Trans Rights Are Human Rights” and “Trans Kids Deserve Better,” which, of course, are true. But the problem is that these types of statements are utterly banal. They are tautologies that fail to contend with the vicious rhetoric of the right.

Similar counter-statements by queer and trans activists did not save Sam Nordquist, a twenty-four-year-old Black trans man from Minnesota who was brutally tortured and assaulted for more than a month until he died, allegedly by seven adults who had lured him to a motel in upstate New York under the false pretense of a romantic weekend. While state police did not link the case to the broader anti-trans panic occurring on a national scale, it is impossible for trans people to ignore the connection. Some trans people are more vulnerable than others—this has always been the case, but even more so now—whether because of their race, their class, or their incarceration status. Melissa Gira Grant, of The New Republic, has written about how trans women in prison may be among the first to suffer under Trump’s anti-trans policies, given his executive order calling for them to be held in men’s prisons. Children, too, are at risk, having in some cases lost access to gender-affirming medical care—which is to say, life-saving care. Since the 2024 election, crisis hotlines for trans kids have been flooded with calls. Additionally, a new study by the Trevor Project found that suicide attempts went up by more than seventy per cent in states where anti-trans bills were passed. For Democratic state senator Karen Berg, of Kentucky, these statistics are personal. In 2023, during a floor debate over a bill that banned health care for trans children, Berg, whose trans son had recently died by suicide, emotionally addressed her fellow-lawmakers: “You know my child is dead.” The bill passed anyway.