New rules a passport to confusion

Earlier this month, Tracy Ayre took her 16-year-old son to renew his passport at the Toronto office. She brought his birth certificate, health card with photo, student ID card, bank statement, expired passport and her obviously boy teenager. Nope, not good enough. “We need something that says he’s a male,” Ayre was told.

Eyeball proof was insufficient. As a bureaucracy, documented proof was required. Except, being a bureaucracy that crawls on its red-tape belly, one level of government — federal, which issues passports — is out of socio-cultural sync with another level of government, that being Ontario.

As of this past June, sex designation is not displayed on new Ontario health cards, which is fine and progressive and inclusive in a suddenly assertive non-binary world, although that fraction of the population which doesn’t identify as either male or female is minuscule — estimated at 0.3 to 0.4 per cent.

Ottawa, operating in a different orbit, has yet to synchronize on federal documents such as passports.

The transgender community is difficult to quantify because only a handful of countries include the gender-unspecified option in the census. Germany became the first European country to recognize a “third gender” on birth certificates for “intersex infants” — those showing both male and female characteristics, with parents marking an X for “undetermined,” and the offspring deciding at a later date. New Zealand brought in the new gender category “unspecified” for passports in 2012, Australia a year earlier.

India saw the light in 2009 with its voter forms. That year, the Supreme Court in Pakistan ordered the government to issue national ID cards with a third gender option, a move triggered by police robbing and raping a number of transgender dancers. Nepal’s believed to have become the first country with a third gender on census forms (2007). Which leaves, oh, about 190 nations on the planet which might not recognize third-gender or unspecified on a travel document, potentially refusing entry.

Last spring, Canada’s reinstated mandatory long-form census still asked Canadians to identify as either male or female, ignoring the — let’s round it off at 100,000 — individuals who don’t fit the sexual binary mould. Statistics Canada has indicated it will hold public consultation on how to formulate the gender question for its next national census in 2021.

Here and now, that didn’t help Ayre. Having taken a day off work for the purpose and schlepped her kid to the passport office, she was directed to another government hive.

“I had to go to Service Ontario to get a receipt that says my son is MALE!,” Ayre wrote in an email (which got no response yet) to the office of Premier Kathleen Wynne. “That’s because of YOU removing gender on the health card I needed from the same place YOU had them remove it from! . . after taking time off work, time off school, to go stand in another line to get this . . . Can you even imagine what my son thought as to having to prove he’s male?”

What the teen thought he later expressed to his grandmother: “I guess I have to show I don’t have a vagina.”

Well, that’s not in fact proof of anything. Genitalia as affixed at birth is evidence of nothing when gender is self-determined later on.

See, it’s not just the washroom designation for transgender people which has vexed governments, ridiculously complicating an issue that should be easily solved if only common courtesy prevailed. It’s the Rube Goldberg apparatus of institutions that has gummed the works.

“They don’t even put these offices in the same building,” Ayre complained in an interview with the Star. “So you’re wasting all this time going back and forth, taking days off work, paying for parking. I told the passport people, ‘look at my son, this is a boy.’ It didn’t matter.”

Ayre adds: “What about senior citizens who may need to get a new health card and it doesn’t say gender and they might want to renew their passports? Why make it so difficult?”

Uh, because politicians are utterly transfixed in the righteousness of their focus?

When the Star called the provincial Ministry of Government and Consumer Services, Ayre’s frustrations with the system were confirmed.

“ServiceOntario has been working closely with the federal government to address this situation,” spokesperson Stephen Puddister responded in an email. “As a temporary solution, the federal government has agreed to accept the receipt from new health cards along with the health card itself as acceptable identification. ServiceOntario staff are advising customers to keep the receipt so that they can use it to apply for a passport.”

Right. So that means getting a ServiceOntario receipt which specifies gender — male or female, exclusively — because gender has been removed as a matter of policy from the very same health cards that the province now issues?

“Yes on that.” Rosie DiManno usually appears Monday, Wednesday, Friday and Saturday.