On February 14, 2025, the Department of State (DOS) published a 30-day notice requesting public comments until March 17, 2025, on changes to the Application for a U.S. Passport (Form DS-11). Among other things, to comply with Executive Order (EO) 14168, DOS updated the form to replace the term “gender” with “sex” and to request the applicant’s “biological sex at birth, male ‘M’ or female ‘F’.”
DOS said it also made “plain language changes” and revised the Acts or Conditions statement on the form to add an applicant statement “affirming that he or she is not required to register as a sex offender.”
On February 11, 2025, DOS said the agency “will no longer issue U.S. passports or Consular Reports of Birth Abroad (CRBAs) with an X marker. We will only issue passports with an M or F sex marker that match the customer’s biological sex at birth.” Passports with “X” for a person’s gender (sex) will remain valid until expiration.
On February 7, 2025, a lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court in Massachusetts by seven people challenging the executive order and the passport changes. The complaint argues that the EO is “transparently unlawful and unconstitutional. It also is unmoored from scientific and medical reality: Transgender people, intersex people, and people who do not identify as either (or exclusively) male or female exist.” Plaintiffs seek a declaration that the passport policy and the EO as applied to passports are unconstitutional, a declaration that the passport policy violates the Administrative Procedure Act, and a permanent injunction. “Declaratory and injunctive relief are needed to remedy the many constitutional and statutory violations the Passport Policy inflicts. Relief is needed on a class-wide basis to prevent class-wide harm to the hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of transgender, nonbinary, and intersex people in the United States who need a passport they can use without suffering harm,” the complaint states.