‘Euphoria’ star Hunter Schafer ‘shocked’ to find gender marker changed on passport
‘Euphoria’ star Hunter Schafer — one of the most well-known transgender women in Hollywood — said she was “shocked” to discover the gender marker on her passport was changed to “male” against her will.
In an eight-minute video posted to her TikTok story, the actress said it was a “harsh reality check” about the presidential administration’s anti-trans policies she felt was “important to share with whoever is listening.”
An executive order from President Donald Trump earlier in February called for federal agencies to wipe any acknowledgment of transgender people, intersex people and nonbinary people, including on federal identification documents, McClatchy News previously reported.
The U.S. Bureau of Consular Affairs cut out any mention of trans travelers from its website, providing guidance only for “LGB” travelers — a shortening of the LGBTQIA+ acronym that excludes transgender and intersex people, McClatchy News reported.
“My initial reaction to this, because our president is a lot of talk, was like ‘I’ll believe it when I see it’ … and today I saw it on my new passport,” Schafer said in her video as she held the passport up to the screen and pointed to the line displaying her sex as “M” for male. “I’m not making this post to fearmonger, or to create drama or receive consolation. I don’t need it. But I do think it’s worth posting to sort of note the reality of the situation and that it is actually happening.”
“And I was shocked,” she added. “I was shocked because…I just didn’t think it was actually going to happen.”
The 26-year-old actress explained that she first changed her gender markers about a decade ago when she got her driver’s license as a teenager. Gender markers on her passport and other documents following that have all been classified as “female” ever since, she said.
“Hasn’t really been a problem,” she said, adding that the passport was supposed to last into her 30s.
Then last year when she was filming in Spain, her bag was stolen with her passport inside, she said. She said she got an emergency passport that was essentially a temporary copy of her passport that would only be valid for one year.
She filed for a permanent replacement when she got back to the states, which she said she has done once before as well.
“No part of the process was different,” she said in the video. “I filled everything out just like I normally would. I put female and when it was picked up today and I opened it up…uh, they had changed the marker to male.”
She believes the change is “a direct result of the administration our country is currently operating under,” she said.
“I just feel like it’s important to share that it’s not just talk. That this is real. And it’s happening. And no one, no matter their circumstance, no matter how wealthy or white or pretty or whatever, is excluded,” she said. “It doesn’t change really anything about me or my transness. However it does make my life a little harder.”
She suspects she’ll have to “out” herself as transgender to border patrol agents when she travels abroad “more often than I would like to or is really necessary,” she said.
She said she feels “scared of the way this stuff slowly gets implemented” and ultimately normalized.
“I just want to say trans people are beautiful. We are never going to stop existing,” she said. “I’m never gonna stop being trans. A letter on a passport can’t change that.”
