{"id":4235,"date":"2015-10-27T13:49:38","date_gmt":"2015-10-27T08:04:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pahichan.com\/?p=4235"},"modified":"2015-10-27T13:49:38","modified_gmt":"2015-10-27T08:04:38","slug":"third-gender-passports-may-be-the-future-of-trans-travel","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pahichan.com\/en\/third-gender-passports-may-be-the-future-of-trans-travel\/","title":{"rendered":"Third-Gender Passports May Be the Future of Trans Travel"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"shrestha\"<\/a>KYLE KNIGHT (Pahichan) ) October 27 –\u00a0<\/em>The arrival of a transgender activist from Nepal in Taiwan last Saturday for the 2015 International Lesbian and Gay Association\u2019s Asia conference may seem unremarkable. But it was in fact quite special: The activist, Bhumika Shrestha, is the first Nepali citizen to travel abroad carrying a passport marked O for \u201cother\u201d instead of M \u00a0for \u201cmale\u201d or F for \u201cfemale.\u201d<\/p>\n

This is a groundbreaking and long-overdue achievement for global travel because it demonstrates that self-identification can and should be the sole factor in obtaining gendered documents.<\/p>\n

Nepal\u2019s legal recognition of a third category began with a 2007 Supreme Court case<\/a> in which the judge ordered the government to create a legal category for people who identify as neither male nor female. Crucially, the judgment dictated that the ability to get documents bearing a third gender should be based on \u201cself-feeling.\u201d That is to say: no tests, expert opinions, or other potentially humiliating adjudication should play a role in the process.<\/p>\n

But that concept had at the time only recently been enshrined in the Yogyakarta Principles, the first international guidelines on sexual orientation, gender identity, and human rights standards. And carrying out the court decision proved knottier than the court\u2019s declaration.<\/p>\n

Following the court\u2019s judgment, LGBTI rights activists in Nepal advocated with bureaucrats to include the third gender on everything from voter rolls to citizenship papers. In 2011, Nepal included a third gender in its census<\/a>. But when I went with Shrestha that year to the District Administration Office in Kathmandu, the capital, to change her legally recognized gender on various documents, she got a real run-around. First she was told that she needed to change her citizenship certificate. The DAO bureaucrats sent her from office to office and handed her case off dismissively \u2014 ultimately telling her she needed more paperwork indicating various approvals.<\/p>\n

\u201cThis is the 13th time I\u2019ve been here, and the officials\u2019 excuse for not changing my papers is different every time,\u201d she told me as we exited to muddy monsoon streets. Shrestha was assigned male identity at birth and raised as a son by her parents. When she was a teenager, she began to develop her identity differently and soon came to understand herself as female. Her parents accepted her identity, and she still lives at home with them<\/a>. But the government, despite the court\u2019s ruling, needed more convincing. Like transgender people around the world<\/a> who seek legal recognition of who they are, she braved dozens of humiliating and degrading inquisitions \u2014 government officials asked her questions about her genitalia and her sex life.<\/p>\n

Only this year, after sustained pressure from LGBTI rights activists, was Shrestha able to finally obtain her third-gender citizenship certificate and begin changing other documents.<\/p>\n

Shrestha\u2019s push for third-gender documents, alongside other Nepali activists, is not the only way forward. Some transgender people prefer to be identified as male or female, not a third category. But for global travel, the concept of self-identification is too rarely implemented. There is already some precedent for reflecting gender identity on travel documents even if it falls outside a male-female binary. International travel document guidelines set out by the United Nations\u2019 International Civil Aviation Organization, which sets regulations on global air travel, already specify that passports can be issued bearing M for male, F for female, or X for indeterminate gender. Australia, New Zealand, and Malta all allow for X passports in some cases. As one U.N. expert noted<\/a> in 2009, \u201cmeasures that involve increased travel document security, such as stricter procedures for issuing, changing and verifying identity documents, risk unduly penalizing transgender persons whose personal appearance and data are subject to change.\u201d<\/p>\n

But in addition to the dignity such a shift affords people who want third-gender passports, this autumn\u2019s successful issuance of Shrestha\u2019s passport and her Taiwanese visa shreds one common argument against issuing passports in three genders: that foreign governments will not acknowledge them, imperiling those who possess them. There is no Taiwanese consulate in Nepal, so Shrestha had to travel to India to apply for her visa. This means she left Nepal, entered India, and successfully obtained a Taiwan visa all bearing her legal gender marker, O. Hong Kong also issued her a transit visa for the trip.<\/p>\n

That the budding politician is attending a major Asian LGBT rights conference is significant. The region\u2019s governments have a long way to go<\/a> on legal gender recognition. But there are glints of progress that should be held up as examples, and Shrestha\u2019s long-overdue achievement should stand as an illustration of how dignity can be achieved and progress made simply by following basic human rights standards and international guidelines.<\/p>\n

KYLE KNIGHT is a researcher in the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, and Transgender Rights Program atHuman Rights Watch<\/a>.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

KYLE KNIGHT (Pahichan) ) October 27 –\u00a0The arrival of a transgender activist from Nepal in Taiwan last Saturday for the 2015 International Lesbian and Gay Association\u2019s Asia conference may seem unremarkable. But it was in fact quite special: The activist, Bhumika Shrestha, is the first Nepali citizen to travel abroad carrying a passport marked O for \u201cother\u201d instead of M \u00a0for \u201cmale\u201d or F for \u201cfemale.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":44,"featured_media":4173,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[8,621,490],"tags":[829,502,830,458,705],"class_list":["post-4235","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-human-rights","category-news","category-slider","tag-international-lesbian-and-gay-associations-asia-conference","tag-lgbti","tag-passport-marked-o","tag-transgender","tag-united-nations"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pahichan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4235","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pahichan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pahichan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pahichan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/44"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pahichan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=4235"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/pahichan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4235\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4237,"href":"https:\/\/pahichan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/4235\/revisions\/4237"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pahichan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/4173"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pahichan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=4235"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pahichan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=4235"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pahichan.com\/en\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=4235"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}