THE first person to be granted an X on their passport here in Australia under a recently announced revised Department of Foreign Affairs & Trade (DFAT) policy on designation of sex is a trans person named Norrie May Welby. The second was a member of OII Australia.
Close up photo of an Australian passport showing an X in the Sex designation field.
The new rules
The qualification to receive an X sex designation on your passport is based simply on a medical doctor’s letter stating that you live as a person of indeterminate, unknown or non-specified gender*. Anyone can apply so long as they have a willing doctor.
The X is available because of an insistence from OII Australia, and especially by our president Gina Wilson who advised the Ministerial Panel, that an X must continue to be available for intersex people who desire it. Gina also argued for that designator to be generally available.
The history of the X sex marker
The only allowable designators under ICAO rules are M, F or X where X signifies “sex unknown”. X has been available since 1945 when the United Nations (UN) vested control of passports in the International Civil Aviation Organisation (ICAO).
The X arose out of the huge refugee migration following World War II. Several international organizations such as the Red Cross were responsible for resettling concentration camp survivors and displaced persons following that conflict. Emergency passports were generated in large numbers to allow the quick resettlement of individuals without any identifying documentation and from places where that documentation had been destroyed during the war.
When making up the passports the agencies could not, from the names alone, decipher the sex of the individuals due to foreign names often being too complicated for the ears of French, English and American aid workers.
X was made an allowable designator in view of the difficulties resettlement aid workers had with unfamiliar names and the sex usually associated with them.
The rules do not require that the X must eventually be resolved into an F or M designation, though that was likely the intention when the policy was drafted. We are legally able to take advantage of this facility despite differences between the original objective and the current policy.
The previous Australian policy
Australia has allowed X on passports since about 2003 when a Victorian-born Western Australian-resident intersex person, Alexan MacFarlane, fought for that designator through the Administrative Appeals Tribunal.
Five or six Australians were granted the right to an X designator under a subsequent policy, where it was necessary to have “not specified” stated on one’s birth certificate to qualify for an X designation.
The state of Victoria maintained the only birth registry that was willing to have that appellation on a birth certificate and would only do so for people known to be intersex and where that was evident from the original notification of birth paperwork – the birth certificate.
Consequently X was rarely put on passports.
Easing the burden of proof
The current policy eases the burden of proof so that a letter from a medical practitioner is all that is required to qualify, making it much easier for intersex people and anyone else to opt for it.
OII Australia continues to lobby for the X designator to be freely available to everyone as a matter of choice and without other qualifying documents.
Footnote:
*Sex, and not gender, is the marker on passports and the ICAO rules make that fact very clear, although legislation and government policy tends to confuse the two. Intersex is also about biological sex and not gender roles.
Internal links:
- Articles on passports and travel issues
- OII Australia – Major reform to passport law for sex and gender diverse Australians including intersex people
