If you are a non-binary, intersex or transgender person applying for a Canadian passport today you now have the option to select gender neutral on your sex designation, and your passport will carry an “X” for “unspecified” instead of “M” or “F”.
Joining Australia, Bangladesh, Germany, India, Malta, Nepal, New Zealand and Pakistan, who also offer a third option on either passports or ID cards, Canada’s minister of immigration, refugees and citizenship, Ahmed Hussen, said that the designation was added to advance “equality for all Canadians regardless of gender identity or expression.”
Canada becomes the first country in the Americas to allow the X designation, and human rights campaigners and organisations that promote LGBT rights, have enthusiastically welcomed the changes.
Another first for Canada on the subject of gender neutrality was widely reported in July of this year when a baby in British Columbia was given the gender identity “unknown” on it’s health card because the baby’s parent, a non-binary transgender, intends to raise the child as gender neutral.
But what does the addition of a gender neutral option actually mean for travelers? Today, the International Civil Aviation Organization passport standards permits a third sex field on travel documents. But despite the LGBT victories we seem to read about every day in the news, in research published last year by the International Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Trans and Intersex Association (ILGA), there were 74 countries where same-sex relationships are punishable, some even by death. So what faces “X” designated passport holders who wish to travel to these countries?
As reported in The Guardian, Helen Kennedy, executive director of Egale, a Canadian organisation that promotes LGBT human rights has said “In order to successfully increase the safety of non-binary, intersex and trans folks, Canada needs to do more work to lobby internationally to remove gender markers on passports, as well as break down existing barriers that are preventing access to gender autonomy in our country.”
In God’s wisdom He created them male and female; to be connected, to love, to reproduce and to grow. In Man’s wisdom it is oppressive, unfair and even dangerous to be designated as such…
