Hunter Schafer is one of the many transgender people affected by Donald Trump’s new gender policy.
The Euphoria actress took to her TikTok story to reveal how Trump’s executive order declaring that the government will only acknowledge male and female genders has impacted her. Schafer recently received a newly issued passport where her gender was marked as male.
She confessed that she doubted the policy would be enforced because “our president is a lot of talk… And today, I saw it on my new passport: male.”
She then explained that she changed her gender markers in her teens, upon receiving her driver’s license; since then, her passports have shown her gender as female. Unfortunately, her passport was stolen last year while filming in Barcelona, Spain. Once she returned to the States, she applied for a replacement.
“I filled everything out just like I normally would, I put female, and when it was picked up today and I opened it up, they had changed the marker to male.”
She surmised that this likely happened because she never had the gender on her birth certificate changed and believes that agencies are cross-referencing these types of documents before renewing 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 continued, “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 concluded. “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 26-year-old is one of the most well-known trans actresses in Hollywood, having appeared in Euphoria, The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes, and Amazon’s upcoming Blade Runner 2099. Euphoria’s Season 3 is currently in production.