Hunter Schafer’s dealing with the real-world impact of Trump’s latest gender rules.
The Euphoria star jumped on TikTok to share how Trump’s new order – which says the government will only recognize male and female genders – has hit home. When her new passport arrived, she found her gender marked as male.
She admitted she didn’t think the policy would stick because “our president is a lot of talk… And today, I saw it on my new passport: male.”
Back in her teens, Schafer had switched her gender markers when she got her driver’s license, and her passports had shown female ever since. But things changed after her passport got swiped last year while she was filming in Barcelona, Spain. When she got back to the U.S. and applied for a new one, she got this surprise.
“I filled everything out the same way I always do, I put female, and when I picked it up today and opened it, they’d switched the marker to male.”
She figures this probably happened because her birth certificate’s gender was never updated, and thinks agencies are now checking these documents against each other before giving out new passports.
“I do believe it is a direct result of the administration our country is currently operating under. And I guess I’m just sort of scared of the way this stuff slowly gets implemented,” she said.
Schafer added, “I also want to say, I don’t give a fuck that they put a M on my passport. It doesn’t change really anything about me or my transness, however, it does make life a little harder. Personally, I mean I haven’t tested it out yet, I’ll [find] out next week when I have to travel abroad with my new passport, but I’m pretty sure it’s going to come along with having to out myself to like border patrol agents and that whole gig much more often than I would like to or is really necessary.
“And this is just my personal circumstance, and thinking about other trans women who this might also be happening to, or other trans people, the list only gets longer as far as the intricacies that come along with the difficulty that this brings into real life shit.”
“Trans people are beautiful,” she wrapped up. “We are never going to stop existing, I am never going to stop being trans, a letter on a passport can’t change that. And fuck this administration. I don’t really have an answer on what to do about this but I feel it was important to share. This is real. So um yeah, fuck.”
The rising 26-year-old star has made waves in Hollywood as a trans actress, starring in hits like Euphoria, The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, and she’s set to appear in Amazon’s upcoming Blade Runner 2099. Meanwhile, Euphoria‘s Season 3 is in the works.
