I was a guest on CBC’s The Current with Anna-Maria Tremonti this week discussing gender identification on passports and border security. What rules, laws, and policies govern the way our gender is reported on government documents and is that reporting as necessary as we’re led to believe? At the heart of the question is a ten-year-old transgender individual in BC who wants to have their gender data removed from the passport. It’s easier said than done: a passport is an identity document, ascribing a gender selection on holders, but a passport is

also a travel document, and it contains within its pages a bundle of rights, most obviously perhaps, the right to mobility and to return home. It grants that permission as citizen of Canada, and so passports are federal documents, not beholden provincial politics but also subject to the Charter of Rights and Freedoms in important and valuable ways. In the post-9/11 world, where visibility and identity are often conflated with security, the passport is increasingly seen as a security document, but that suggestion may be more hype than can be legally demonstrated.

I offer up a few solutions to the debate in this audio clip from the show: “The Currrent” Checking In Podcast, 31/10/13 My segment, on gender identification, begins at ~17:00.