For some people, it’s not enough to let others experience a loss; they feel the urgent need to share their two cents, making things even worse. That said, a transwoman went to a passport agency in Boston to get a new passport that had her updated name with a gender change to F (female). Even though she had a court order and urgent travel plans, the agency stated it would not be processing applications but would hold onto hers and her current passport. If that wasn’t enough of a blow, the manager insulted her, explaining why he believed she should be denied a passport.
“It is like this because of giant strong men sneaking into women’s sports and people identifying as F or X ‘to feel special or different’,” the manager in charge told the transwoman, making her feel worse about the situation. “I did everything right,” she protests in a post on Reddit. She went so far as to contact her state senators to request their help in getting everything in order for her new passport to be processed. Sadly, it was all for naught.
“So they’re just leaving you without a passport?” a Reddit user asks, confused. “Yes,” the transperson confirms. “I was given the option to simply not submit an application at all, however, which would have meant keeping my passport. I declined because I figured I’d rather be in line in case there’s even a single day any passports are allowed to be updated.” She’s holding onto hope, clearly, and wishes for there to be a small chance that everything gets processed as it should.
Unfortunately, some Redditors weren’t very sympathetic to her situation: “That was pretty stupid, honestly. You’re trans. You’re not getting an updated passport until whenever the current regime is out of power.” Thankfully, some came to back her up, saying things like, “That’s a really unnecessary thing to say to a trans person. You think we need to be lectured on how bad it is?“
As for the manager’s unnecessary transphobic insults and comments to his client, Reddit users had a few things to say about that. “No reason at all for anything said at the end. Personal beliefs have no room in administration,” one remarked, to which they are 100% correct. The agency is offering a service for processing passports, nothing more, nothing less. “The manager there was putting his personal ideology first, and opened his agency up to legal action,” another person added.
From the way things are going, there seems to be little hope for this Boston transwoman, let alone any transperson, to have their passport properly updated, even if they’ve done everything correctly. We can only hope the current administration somehow changes its ways.
