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Airlines will no longer be able to give their passengers a third gender marker designation when reporting passengers' information to CBP made the announcement back in July, alerting airlines that they must begin giving passengers a M (male or F (female) designation and will no longer be allowed to use X to indicate a third gender option created for CPB established a 90-day compliance period, and on October 14, 2025, airlines were no longer able to input an X marker for gender in the Advance Passenger Information System, which is used by CBP to gather passenger data. "If the travel document presented by a traveler for an international flight to or from the United States has a sex indicator other than “M” or “F” or does not otherwise indicate the sex of the traveler, the carrier or the traveler should select either “M” or “F”," the CBP release stated. Airlines will not face penalty for entering "M" or "F" for a passenger who has an "X" designation on official travel documents. Back in 2022, the Biden administration expanded the option for transgender Americans to identify themselves as a third gender option on official government documents in an effort to "serve all U.S. citizens, regardless of their gender identity," a press release at the time stated. Through a January 20 executive order titled "Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government," President Donald Trump decreed that the United States government would "recognize two sexes, male and female." The Trump administration then sought to void travel documents which had a third gender marker, but a federal judge in Massachusetts ruled in June that these travel documents are still valid. The CBP's new guidelines says while the documentation may be valid, airlines aren't able to use the third gender remarking in reporting passenger's data to CBP. “Foreign travelers with authorized and valid US travel documents are being processed as they were previously. New or renewing Trusted Traveler Program applicants are now required to choose one of the two approved designations, male or female, to complete the application. An applicant’s choice of sex is not criteria for an applicant’s admission into the US, a CBP said in a statement to
