By Kierra Frazier
February 21, 2025 / 6:59 PM EST / CBS News
Model and actress Hunter Schafer, one of the most prominent transgender women in Hollywood, said Friday that her newly issued passport lists her gender as male despite selecting female while filling out paperwork.
Schafer, best known for her role in the HBO drama “Euphoria,” said in an eight-minute video that her driver’s license and passport were first changed when she was a teenager, but she never updated her birth certificate.
After losing her passport recently, Schafer, 26, went through the process of replacing it, but when she received her new passport this week, the gender marker was incorrect.
“I’m sure most of us remember on, I think, the first day of Trump’s presidency, he signed an executive order to declare only two genders recognized by the state, male and female assigned at birth,” Schafer said in the video.
“As a result of this, which I wrote down because I want to get it right, the Bureau of Consular Affairs has frozen passport applications requesting a gender marker change or renewals or new applications with a gender marker deferring from an applicant’s gender assigned at birth,” she continued.
President Trump signed an executive order last month that says sex assigned at birth will determine gender markers on newly issued passports and that the federal government will only recognize “two sexes, male and female.”
“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.
Americans had been able to select “X” on their passports since April 2022 under former President Joe Biden.
Schafer said she posted the video to spread awareness rather than “to fearmonger or to create drama or receive consolation.”
“Trans people are beautiful. We are never going to stop existing. I’m never gonna stop being trans,” she said. “A letter and a passport can’t change that.”
