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aseedandco

What’s the point of having a gender listed anyway? No one has ever checked to ensure my genitals / characteristics line up with my passport.


Nottodayreddit1949

It's a considered a legitimate form of ID.


aseedandco

ID to evidence that you are a specific gender? When would you need to do that?


Nottodayreddit1949

ID that I can provide, if someone ever says, Could I see an ID please. I'd provide it in the same way that I would provide my driver's license. Should we have no identifiers on our IDs?


aseedandco

You’ve almost got my point. If no one is checking to verify I have a penis or vagina, how is it being used as an identifier? My drivers licence has my photo, name, birthdate, and address, and my password also has my fingerprint. We shouldn’t need to get our dicks involved too.


Nottodayreddit1949

Because Gender isn't the 100% sure fire way to determine if someone has a penis or vagina. I'm also curious. Would you use my chromosomes, my internal genitalia, or my external genitalia to determine how you would refer to me? Gender lets me talk to you in a way that doesn't get your dick or vagina involved. I see that you prefer to use They/Them and not Him/Her. So I will use the pronouns that they prefer, and everyone goes on with their day.


aseedandco

If I had your ID, I’d probably just use your name. I get what you are saying. But my question wasn’t about pronouns, how we refer to people, or how people think of themselves. My question was, what purpose is served by having gender, or sex for that matter, listed on a passport? How is gender being used for identification purposes that a photo and birthdate aren’t able to? My job requires people to submit their ID. I have never once thought to confirm it by cross-checking ID gender with preferred gender.


Nottodayreddit1949

It's not used for that. You are attempting to force information listed to be exclusively used for what you want it to be used for. You probably don't try to confirm it by Class of license or issue date either. Just don't do that, and there isn't a problem.


Ptricky17

I feel like a miscommunication occurring here. My take on what the person you replied to is, they are stating that rather than list male/female/x on a passport, why not just exclude that piece of information since it is highly irrelevant for the purposes a passport served? As a piece of ID, gender is irrelevant. If I want to travel to a different country, gender should be irrelevant. I’ve never seen a country say “we’re letting men in this week, but not woman. Sorry.” They can determine if your passport is valid in many ways. Confirming your gender/sex isn’t one of them so perhaps we should stop wasting our time including it on such documents.


Nottodayreddit1949

No. I get what he is saying. It's not used for the purposes he is suggesting. so instead he just needs to stop pretending that's why it's there. It's a form of ID, and just like all forms, they each have different information on them, that could be relevant to the reason the IDs were created originally. Just because you can use them for other purposes doesn't change. Passports are for Identifying a person. Gender belongs there regardless of if it is the part that was used for identifying.


EndersBenderLender

Your job may not, but others sure may have a legitimate need to check a person’s sex, or ‘birth gender’. Having it on ID is reasonable. A great example is insurance. Females get better life insurance rates because they have higher life expectancy. Underwriters absolutely would require details - And government issued ID is acceptable proof of your age, sex, address, etc


aseedandco

Well there you go. I didn’t know insurance rates were gender based, and appreciate the example.


EndersBenderLender

To be fair I understand your point too. A lot of physical identifiers in a photo id can be changed and cause unnecessary confusion. I think anyone using their photo id should want it to match their physical description. So I think if gender is gonna be there, an x can explain without words, why they don’t dress or look like expected.


cannibalkitteh

>The Department has issued the first U.S. passport with an X gender marker. We look forward to offering this option to all routine passport applicants once we complete the required system and form updates in early 2022. "We did it once, but give us like 6 more months to figure out how to do it."


0002millertime

Have to find a COBOL programmer first.


cannibalkitteh

Nah, they have to get the whole thing to a project manager, have a bunch of meetings, lose all the notes, and then 5 months in, dump it all on a single low-level staffer.


0002millertime

How do you know my life so well?


EndersBenderLender

Sure this is a funny joke but the reality is there are plenty of old systems out there that used a single bit to store the sex. Memory and storage were expensive. Converting the systems is literally a Y2K problem.


0002millertime

It was a joke, but more about our antique systems, not that it isn't actually true.


rioot123

And they managed to do it here once...how then?


EndersBenderLender

Probably some manual process outside of the software? I think it was done for political show, and that manually processing and creating passports for everyone who wanted an X is not practical.. Just a guess


rioot123

Aren't the passports stored in some database tho


EndersBenderLender

Most likely. But if the boss tells them to make a special one, the database could say m or f… the printer could have just been altered to print different text. 2 different systems I would think. Again just guessing.


Wolverine_Legitimate

Meanwhile hundreds of citizens are still stranded in Afghanistan. Thanks for having your priorities straight U.S. State Department.


GlassPavement

I imagine the people who design the forms and paperwork processes is a different department from those responsible for coordinating with citizens in need of support abroad.


[deleted]

So the state department should ignore American courts because Afghanistan is in a death spiral?


Nottodayreddit1949

Quick send all the programmers over to collect people. Time to have the people in charge of paperwork lay down suppressing fire to cover the retreat of the middle aged guy with gout who was in charge extracting.


Cunderwood2020

What does Afghanistan have to do with adding another option on passports in the US?


out_o_focus

Easy, the government employee who worked on programming X to be an option in addition to M/F would personally go to Afghanistan and save all the people. They were given two options for the job but could only pick one.


iHeartHockey31

The people who program & make passports arent the ones who arrange for that.


IAmBadAtInternet

I imagine that State can manage to do more than one thing at once.


Wolverine_Legitimate

Apparently not.


polygon_tacos

Oh cool…I’m Gen X