Dem
47
GOP
53
Yesterday, we had an item on Donald Trump's XO repealing the Fourteenth Amendment. That obviously affects people born on U.S. soil (possibly many years ago) to undocumented immigrants, who could suddenly lose their U.S. citizenship if the Supreme Court grants Donald Trump his wish.
But there is another XO that could cause some other people extreme grief if it is upheld. It is the one that states there are exactly two genders and a person's gender is determined at conception based on whether the person resulting from that fertilized cell will eventually produce egg cells (= female) or sperm cells (= male). This XO directs the State Dept. to mark all newly issued passports, including renewals, with the gender on the person's birth certificate.
This is a bit abstract, so let us make it more concrete with a case well known to (V). Here is a photo of Lynn Conway:
She grew up partly in White Plains, NY, as (V) did. She and (V) both graduated from White Plains High School and both went to MIT thereafter. She later went on to invent the methodology that is now the basis for designing all the computer chips in the world. She died in June 2024 and we ran an obituary of her on June 21, 2024.
Conway was born as a boy and had a difficult transition. Here is her story. If she were alive now and renewed her passport, the Sex field would be marked: MALE. One can easily imagine every immigration official she encountered on her travels (both abroad and returning home) seeing this and instantly accusing her of stealing the passport from some man and pasting her photo on it. Since she looked like a woman and had lived as a woman for 50 years, she would obviously have been in great danger of officials believing the passport was fraudulent. That also holds for every trans person who looks visibly different from the sex listed on their passport and will undoubtedly cause many of them grief when traveling internationally. (V)