On bad things happening in foreign countries

To start by reiterating a point from elsewhere, two things are true: the first is that Trump's new policy on passports, which requires listing the holder's natal sex irrespective of his or her gender identity, is going to create real hardship for trans people.

The second is, there are reasons why official government-issued ID documents do actually need to accurately and consistently reflect the holder's sex.

Thing number one proved mostly uncontroversial when I said it yesterday on Twitter, except among the kind of people who insist on using female pronouns for Buck Angel (which is to say, jerks, the small contingent who would argue that they're doing it on principle nonwithstanding.)

But the second thing, well. "What possible reason could there be for listing sex on a passport?" people sneered, all day long, and I do mean all day long: I drove an hour to the Berkshires with my dad and cross-country skied seven miles through the woods, then drove back and had dinner with my parents, and then drove another two hours home to Connecticut, and when I looked at my phone at the end of all this, people were still asking/ sneering! And so here we are.

The thing is, for morbid crime novelist imagination reasons, I find it extremely easy to think of scenarios in which it might be important that a passport list a person's natal sex (more on that in a moment.) But I also just want to note, first, that we’re talking about a system already in place. Governments worldwide agree both that they have a vested interest in knowing who people are, and that sex is one of the markers that allows them to do that, and while you may or may not agree with their reasons for this, the reasons are not a secret. You can look them up! I would even go so far as to say that you should look them up, particularly if you’re perplexed by the notion that countries might want to know, roughly, who is moving across and within their borders.

Will the real Dickie Greenleaf please stand up?

But that said, for those who demanded I personally describe even one scenario in which it would be necessary to have sex listed on a passport, okay: let's imagine a 23 year-old guy named Jack.

Jack has just arrived in Rome, Italy, for a three-night stay. He hails a cab at the airport and checks into a hotel, where he immediately hangs the “do not disturb sign” on the door. It’s still there when he leaves that evening — and remains there until two days later, when he’s supposed to check out. But when a housekeeper enters the room that afternoon, she finds all Jack’s belongings still there. The suitcase is open and unpacked on the bed, which appears to have never been slept in; on the nightstand is an open bottle of Pellegrino, half drunk, entirely flat. Disturbed, the housekeeper calls the manager, who in turn calls the police, who commence a missing persons search using the information on Jack’s passport — which the hotel collected and conveyed to authorities on the day he arrived, in keeping with Italian law. Name: Jack Smith. Nationality: American. Date of birth: March 2, 2002.

Sex: Male.

Except (and no doubt, at least some of you have already guessed where this is going), Jack is a trans man, which means that if something bad happened to him — and in this scenario, I’m sorry to say that something very bad has happened — the police are now scouring the city in search of a man named Jack Smith, while Jack Smith’s female body, which was pulled naked from the Tiber River less than 24 hours after his arrival in Rome, moulders unidentified in the city morgue. For how long? Who knows: if someone who knows that Jack was trans reports him missing, and if this information reaches the right people in a timely manner, maybe only a couple weeks. But that's two weeks of time, money, and resources wasted because police were looking for Jack's ghost when they should have been looking for his murderer, and is anyone going to argue that it would not have been better for everyone involved if, in this case, Jack’s natal sex were known from the outset?

To be clear, this is not an argument for making trans people put their birth sex on their passports; it’s just a scenario (a very macabre one) that illustrates why this issue is complicated and comes with tradeoffs. Consistent and accurate identity records-keeping may seem like an inane hassle — right up until you need to parse the identities of people involved in a mass casualty event, or hostage situation, or act of terrorism, or fraud case. There are many reasons why people want to alter the data on their passports; some are benign, some are not. And does the state really need to track your whereabouts — to know your name, your birth date, your sex? 99.9 percent of the time, the answer is no, but that’s not really what the system is built for; it’s for the 0.01 percent of times when you find yourself sharing an Italian AirBnB with the Talented Mr. Ripley.

Even then, I’m not saying the importance of knowing someone's natal sex in these rare catastrophic and/or criminal scenarios outweighs the importance of the dignity and privacy afforded to trans people by being able to obscure that information. It seems very possible that the latter deserves priority. But this is for policymakers to decide — which I hope they do thoughtfully, compassionately¹, and with the input of the people whose lives stand to be affected by whatever standard they seek to impose. But on the narrow question of why we need standards in the first place, the answer is that sometimes bad things happen in foreign countries, and when they do, it is in all of our best interest to know both who is doing the bad things, and who they are happening to.

1. Yeah, I know: a tall order for the Trump administration, but one can hope.