My Chemically Imballanced Romance

by Harrowhark Nonagesimus

In the United States the average native-born citizen can prove their definitive citizenship in terms of eligibility for work through either a birth certificate or a passport. Birth certificates are legally owned and issued by the government of the state you are born in.

I was born in Texas. Texas has banned trans people from changing our birth certificates to match our name and gender. Texas will put me on a list if I reveal I am trans in any legal way, including having ever applied to change my gender marker. I cannot change my birth certificate.

This means the only way I can prove my eligibility for work is with my passport. Without my passport, I can’t legally apply for work.

That is why the executive order banning trans people from changing our passports to match our gender identity is such a huge problem. It’s not boo hoo I can’t leave the country to go on vacation, it’s stripping me of my labor rights and daring me to work in a sweat shop if I want to survive.

And say I did want to cross the border because oh, I don’t know, fleeing to seek asylum in a new country suddenly becomes very important—wouldn’t it be a good idea to have a passport that matches my identification to show local authorities, so they don’t deport me back to America?

Like idk if it’s just because I’m a Jew and this

is burned into my cultural memory, but your passport is your fucking life, and there has never been a single point in time when I was old enough to know what one was and didn’t understand that fact

Your passport is the thing that protects you with the force of your home government while abroad, and it’s what lets you escape if your home government turns rotten. It’s the one document you grab if you can only grab one. It lives in a safe place always, and when things are really bad, that safe place is on your person, on your body, with you, so that when a jackbooted thug with a gun on his hip says “papers, please” you can say “yes, sir” and flash him the last thing still keeping you under any color of legal protection at all, and live to see another day. If they try and take your fucking passport, you should always always assume that the next thing they’ll take is your life.