Hunter Schafer shares poignant TikTok after new passport lists her as male
Euphoria star Hunter Schafer has revealed her newly issued passport now lists her sex as male.
The 26-year-old trans actor and activist’s harsh new reality comes amid President Donald Trump’s ongoing fight to erase protections for LGBT+ Americans.
“I had a bit of a harsh reality check today, and felt like it’s important to share with whoever is listening,” Schafer said in a TikTok Story.
“On the first day of Trump’s presidency, he signed an executive order to declare only two genders recognized by the state, male and female, assigned at birth,” she explained, adding that as a result, “the Bureau of Consular Affairs has frozen passport applications requesting a gender marker change or renewals or new applications with the gender marker deferring from an applicant’s gender assigned at birth.”
Schafer admitted that she had initially brushed off Trump’s plans to eradicate what he described as “gender ideology extremism” as “just talk.”
“I was like, ‘I’ll believe it when I see it,’ and today, I saw it on my new passport,” she said. The Kinds of Kindness actor went on to show a close-up of the identification page in her passport, which had her sex marked as M for male.
Explaining that her gender markers were first changed in her teens, she said her first issued driver’s license and passports following have “all been female since then.”
She said she had never faced an issue before until her most recent visit to the Federal Passport Agency in Los Angeles. While she maintained that there was nothing different about the renewal process, saying that she filled out the forms marking her gender as female as she normally would, when she picked it up, she saw “they had changed the marker to male.”
Schafer said her post was not meant to “create drama” or drum up sympathy but instead to highlight the “reality of the situation” and let people know that “it’s actually happening.”
“I was shocked because I didn’t think it was actually going to happen,” she said. “I wanna acknowledge my privilege as a celebrity trans woman who is white and thin and can adhere to contemporary beauty standards — and it still happened.”
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Schafer continued: “I never had my birth certificate changed, so this has led me to believe that the agencies who are in charge of passports are now required to cross-reference birth certificates.”
Adding that it’s been nearly a decade “since I changed my gender marker,” she said she believes the incident “is a direct result of the administration our country is currently operating under.”
“There’s a lot of talk, and then things start happening,” she warned. “It’s not just talk. This is real, and it’s happening. No one, no matter their circumstance, no matter how wealthy or white or pretty or whatever, is excluded.”
Ending on a defiant note, Schafer said: “I don’t give a f*** that they put an M on my passport. It doesn’t change really anything about me or my transness. However, it does make life a little harder.”
Earlier this month, Trump signed an executive order banning trans women and girls from participating in women’s sports.
In remarks from the White House, while surrounded by young girls, Trump claimed that the “radical left” has “waged an all-out campaign to erase the very concept of biological sex and replace it with a militant transgender ideology.”
Transgender athletes who “beat and batter female athletes” is “going to end, it’s ending right now, and no one’s going to do a damn thing about it,” he said.
