The thing (well, one of the things) I keep coming back to is that human beings did this: someone who works in the passport office had to press the buttons, or if it was automated, a software engineer had to implement the "business logic" to enforce this.
Either way, someone had a choice: do I go along with this, do I help enforce this order, am I a willing instrument of this violence? Or do I refuse, resign, or otherwise resist?
So, the good news: I have a passport again. I can leave the country.
The bad news: They put an incorrect gender marker on it.
The name, photo, and gender marker on my passport no longer match each other. The gender marker on my passport no longer matches my legal gender, nor does it match the gender marker on all of my other identification.
Travel will unavoidably be less safe for me now, even in countries with relatively good track records re: the treatment of trans people.
I got this error message when trying to set my display name to "Theresa O’Connor": "The display name you entered contains invalid characters. Please try again with only letters, numbers."
@schwa@lisamelton when I went to see it at our local Alamo, they had a weekly showing for folks with sensory sensitivities. They narrowed the dynamic range of the audio, making the dialogue easier to hear and the explosions much quieter. It was awesome.