“Euphoria” star Hunter Schafer posted a video to her TikTok story in which she revealed that her renewed passport lists her gender as male following Donald Trump’s executive order declaring the government will only recognize two genders: Male and female. Schafer is one of the most prominent trans actors in Hollywood thanks to her roles in HBO’s “Euphoria,” “The Hunger Games: The Ballad of Songbirds and Snakes” and Amazon’s upcoming “Blade Runner 2099,” among other projects.
“I’m sure most of us remember on I think the first day of Trump’s presidency, he signed an executive order to declare only two genders recognized by the state, male and female assigned at birth,” Schafer said in the video. “As a result of this, which I wrote down because I want to get it right, the Bureau of Consular Affairs has frozen passport applications requesting a gender marker change or renewals or new applications with a gender marker deferring from an applicant’s gender assigned at birth.”
More from Variety
Schafer admitted she initially doubted such a policy would go into action because “our president is a lot of talk… And today, I saw it on my new passport: male.”
“Now, to specify, my gender markers were first changed in my teens, when I first got my driver’s license and then passports following, all have been female since then,” Schafer explained. “Hasn’t really been a problem. However, last year when I was filming in Barcelona, our car got broken into and my bag got stolen and inside of that was my passport which was supposed to last me up until my 30s. So I got an emergency passport, which was very simple at the time. It’s basically just a copy of my old passport but temporary and only supposed to be used within the year. So as soon as I got back to the States, I had to get this fixed and get it replaced with a real, proper passport, which I went to the Federal Passport Agency today in L.A. and did. I’ve had to do this one time before, no part of the process was different. 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.”
Schafer said that she was speaking out on the matter not to “create drama or receive consolation” but because it’s worth noting “the reality of the situation, in that it is actually happening. And I was shocked, because I don’t know, I just didn’t think it was actually going to happen.”
“I never had my birth certificate changed, so this has led me to believe that I think the agencies who are in charge of passports and this sort of thing are now required to cross reference birth certificates or, I don’t know exactly what changed as far as the processing goes, but this is the first time this has happened to me since I changed my gender marker,” Schafer said. “We’re coming up on a decade now, or something. And 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.”
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 found 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,” Schafer 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.”
Schafer is reprising her role of Jules in the upcoming third season of HBO’s “Euphoria,” which is now in produciton. She has championed trans rights throughout her career and has also been honest in interviews about shifting the public’s focus away from her gender identity. Simply put, Schafer does not want her identity to be the sole talking point about her. She’s even avoided saying the word “trans” during interviews.
“It has not just happened naturally by any means. If I let it happen, it would still be giving ‘Transsexual Actress’ before every article ever,” Schafer explained to GQ magazine last year. “It took a while to learn that I don’t want to be [reduced to] that, and I find it ultimately demeaning to me and what I want to do. Especially after high school, I was sick of talking about it. I worked so hard to get to where I am, past these really hard points in my transition, and now I just want to be a girl and finally move on.”
Best of Variety
Sign up for Variety’s Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
