US threatens permanent visa bans on trans athletes based on sex markers

[NotNatacha]

Guardian link

This would apply to the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles.

According to the post I saw on SM, the directive applies not just to athletes but all visa applications made by trans-identifying people and declare it material fraud to use a sex marker on applications which is different from the one on the person’s (original?) birth certificate.

Thread here.

Apologies if this has already been linked but my searching didn’t find it.

If they DID include a visa ban on people from countries where birth certificates can be changed the knock-on effects would be extraordinary. Not gonna happen. But with this president?

Don't athletes at the competitive levels get regularly tested for drugs/doping. Including after winning events, and at random to try and avoid doping schemes based around knowing when scheduled testing will occur?
All tests involve samples of biological material.
Given biological samples are sent to a lab for testing it would surely be trivial to add Y chromosome testing to whatever list of tests are conducted? Testosterone levels are already on the list.
No amount of dishonest word play or word meaning obsfusication is going to get past biological testing, because males are males.

Beat me to it.
Even if some male Border Control officers can't tell all of the time you can bet the female ones can
The number of Trans people who "pass" IRL is miniscule. They like to think otherwise because most people won't point and yell "TRANS!!!!!" at them but we know.

How quickly do the cheek swabs take to work? Are they like a dip test which just take minutes, or even seconds?

Now, that would be a bit wonky wouldn´t it. I remember sometime in the 90s Annie Lennox was denied entry into (I think) Thailand, because very very tall, so obviously a man...as oriental women are short, and the difference was even starker. I know one trans person who really, really, really looks like a woman. And a really attractive woman at that.

If you want something to explain the key things you need to know about Alejandra Caraballo, this, from a House Oversight Committee hearing, is it:

Well worth watching.

Annie Lennox does not look like a man

If you want something to explain the key things you need to know about Alejandra Caraballo, this, from a House Oversight Committee hearing, is it:

Well worth watching

It never gets old watching that. Well done Nancy Mace!

Sorry, my formatting of your quote didn't work @nauticant

My partner and myself were part of the government's testing programme during COVID. Once a month for about 2 years we had to take two swabs, nose, and back of the throat. Then shove them in the post. Got paid £25 each for every month. Had to answer a bunch of questions too.
By far the quickest part was the taking of the two swabs. Big cotton bud type things. Took around 2-3 seconds to do a swab. Stick it in twirl it around a bit. By far the longest time is spent snapping the business end off the swab and carefully putting it into the sample container. Securing that container making sure it's properly labelled, put in a plastic bag that also has a matching label. etc....
Assuming when athletes get swabbed there's technicians doing all the fiddly bits to ensure the swabs are uncomtaminated before sampling, and putting the swabs in the sample containers, doing all the labelling and tracking, then all the athlete has to is confirm their identity, sit still, and open thier mouth for 2-3 seconds. Everything else the technicians will be doing.
Blood tests are more invasive and I assume are just like giving a blood sample for tests down at the doctors which I imagine eveyone reading has done many times in their life.

Was just reading about this in an appalling US Guardian opinion piece that wails on (and on) about the 'lie' now on the passport in question. It's... quite insane. Bizarro world:

Every trans person who is issued a wrong document is coerced into this same lie; every other person, cisgender or not, who has to work with these documents and in deference to these policies is coerced into a lie, too. We are told that what we see and feel and experience of trans people does not count, that we should not believe our lying eyes. We are told that no official body of the federal government will accept the plain and obvious truth.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2025/feb/28/trump-anti-trans-hysteria?CMP=ShareiOSAppp_Other

Does anyone know what is happening with US passport holders who have legally changed their US passport sex marker? I believe the American chap who was trying to get UK nonbinary legal status already had 'X' as his sex in his US passport, as California legally recognise nonbinary as a (well I'm not sure what, gender? sex?)

If you're talking about the penis preserving vaginaplasty guy, fortunately the Court of Appeal told him to fuck off:

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cyve4m79e6lo

Was just reading about this in an appalling US Guardian opinion piece that wails on (and on) about the 'lie' now on the passport in question. It's... quite insane. Bizarro world:

"We are told that what we see and feel and experience of trans people does not count, that we should not believe our lying eyes. We are told that no official body of the federal government will accept the plain and obvious truth".

Pure DARVO.

It is as much of a lie that Hunter Schafer is a man as it is that Donald Trump won the 2020 election, or that vaccines cause autism, or that climate change isn’t real. There is a moral case to be made for resistance to these orders, but there is also an intellectual one. We do not have to be as stupid, in the face of trans existence, as the Trump administration demands that we be. We do not have to pretend not to know things that we do.

Utterly mad.

Thank you.

I was thinking if they wished to rapidly check people coming through customs. Is there something that works as quickly as a pregnancy test or a dip test for diabetes. Blue for a boy, pink for a girl 😃

They can't hold people for days waiting for the labs to come back...well I suppose they could but probably wouldn't want to.

Quick tests wouldn't be as reliable but they'd confirm most of the minority whose sex might be dubious, assuming such a test exists.

Isn't pretending not to know things that we do the whole basis of being Trans and/or believing people can change sex?

At the competitive levels you wouldn't need to test at the destination airport.
So many samples would have already been taken during the athlete's sports career that the tests and the results would have been done many times.

It would require two things :
1 The co-operation of the sports governing bodies that implement and overseeing the drug testing programmes.
2 The labs tests of the existing samples to include one more test - male or female sample?

Pretty much no change to the testing methods, just a whole lot of arguments beauracracy and paperwork e.g. sharing the athlete's personal information with the US government agencies like immigration.

My understanding was that its having to state sex on the visa. So someone can still legally enter the states on a passport only showing gender, they just have to be truthful on the visa.

When there are multiple 'trans visibility' days and trans awareness initiatives, i dont see a problem. It isn't denying trans existence, without 'trans' this check wouldnt exist.

You and I feel the same.