The social media site Twitter now “identifies” as “X.” A different kind of “X” now marks the spot where radical gender ideology has trumped national security under the Biden administration.
Over the past decade, encouraging people to be their “authentic selves” has left us with no clear and agreed upon terms for sex, gender, and so on. But in official matters, we still need a shared reality. Or let’s just call it “reality.”
As of April 2022, the State Department’s U.S. passport application was changed to include options for three “genders,” Male, Female, and X.
A year later, the Department of Homeland Security allowed applicants for immigration benefits “to mark their preferred gender identity without needing their other documentation to match.”
Unaccompanied minors caught entering the U.S. illegally are also allowed to self-identify their gender to federal authorities as “female, male, or X (unspecified or another gender).” This will only complicate an already dysfunctional system.
For one, the negligible number of foreign minors who might want to identify as X will be magnified by activist groups seeking to game the asylum process. Under President Joe Biden, the U.S. has encouraged immigrants to claim persecution in their home countries because of their “sex or gender identity” on their application for asylum although that is not one of the valid grounds in U.S. refugee law.
Here’s another problem with “X”: When it comes to identifying someone, humans are either male or female—even self-proclaimed “nonbinary beauty influencers.” There are a small percentage of people with differences in sexual development, but biological sex can be determined for all human beings. “Nonbinary” is an assertion, not a verifiable condition.
In addition, there is “a growing pile of evidence that there are inherent differences in how men’s and women’s brains are wired,” according to Stanford Medicine Magazine. You can change your outfit, but you can’t rewire your brain.
“Gender” used to be a synonym for “sex.” Now, it is a catch-all for how a person wants to “identify,” with no correlation to verifiable fact. Gender ideology is full of contradictions. It holds that a person can identify as one of many genders or multiple genders, or can move between them. But it also says a person’s sense of their own gender is definitive and trumps observable, biological reality.
The section of the U.S. Code of Federal Regulations dealing with unaccompanied alien children says that “sex” “refers to a person’s biological status and is typically categorized as male, female, or intersex.”
The code defines “gender” as something which “refers to the attitudes, feelings, and behaviors that a given culture associates with a person’s biological sex.”
The code defines “transgender” as “a person whose gender identity (i.e., internal sense of feeling male or female) is different from the person’s assigned sex at birth.”
A person’s “feeling” or “sense” cannot be proved or disproved, which makes it worthless for the purpose of establishing identity—which is a required element in applying for any State Department or Department of Homeland Security travel and immigration benefit. Feelings and attitudes don’t belong in official government documents—facts do.
“Identifying” as male, female, or nonbinary is a nonrebuttable assertion subject to change. After seeing historically unprecedented numbers of cross-sex “transitioners,” we are now seeing increased numbers of detransitioners, too. Male and female sex, in contrast, are immutable. That’s why sex is a good data point to include in identity documents, and gender identity is not.
Allowing applicants to self-identify markers for the purposes of a passport weakens its purpose. Markers must be things that can be verified. Like height and eye color, sex is a characteristic that can help identify one human being with reference to billions of others. Its presence on a passport or visa is only for that use—not as a personal statement.
When used alone rather than as a modifying adjective, “gender” should be treated as a synonym for “sex,” which is a biological marker that has a purpose in documents used for identity and law enforcement. In the tragic event that Health and Human Services official Rachel Levine or swimmer Lia Thomas needed to be identified after an accident abroad, an accurate sex marker in their passport would be helpful. An X marker for nonbinary, a changed sex, or any supposed gender identity would not.
Letting individuals self-identify their gender identity, change it at will, and privilege that over their natal sex in documentation is both a national security and fraud risk.
We should never entrench in passports, nor require anyone to accept, solipsism as reality. “Gender identity” is an individual assertion irrelevant to the business of travel or identification.
The BorderLine is a weekly Daily Signal feature examining everything from the unprecedented illegal immigration crisis at the border to immigration’s impact on cities and states throughout the land. We will also shed light on other critical border-related issues such as human trafficking, drug smuggling, terrorism, and more.
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This article was originally published at www.dailysignal.com
