Trump returned to office for a second time earlier this week, and went on to sign over 200 executive orders within his first 24 hours at the White House.
Many of these orders have sparked controversy — one called ‘Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government’ in particular.
The key takeaway of the order is that Trump wants the country to, from now on, only accept that there are two genders: male and female.
“It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female,” the order states.
“These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality.”
With the change in mind, those applying for a passport will only be able to put their sex as male or female, instead of ‘X’ sex marker that was brought forward by the Biden Administration for non-binary Americans.
Any passport applications that request a X sex marker have now been suspended, and any future ones will be as well.
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However, they will likely face issues when it comes to renewing their passport.
The State Department’s National Passport Information Center has since advised people with questions to sit tight and wait for the new guidance that will become available ‘in the coming days’, says ABC News.
This is undeniably a huge blow to the LGBTQ+ community in the US, but it’s expected that this change will have limited impact on travel in the country in general.
It’s said that around 16,700 non-binary LGBTQ+ people may request passports with X gender markers per year, Skift reported, which makes up around 1.4 percent of the US population.
Over 16,000 Americans are thought to apply for an ‘X’ passport each year (Getty Stock Images)
Elsewhere, Trump is expected to bring back his infamous ‘travel ban’, which will prohibit people ‘from certain areas of the world’ coming to the US.
“We will bring back the travel ban – you remember the famous travel ban,” President Trump said recently.
“We didn’t take people from certain areas of the world because I didn’t want to have people ripping down and burning our shopping centres and killing people.”
In 2023, 66.5 million people are thought to have visited America; a number that’s likely to be affected once Trump clamps down on who can enter the country.
