Hunter Schafer is so ethereally stunning. If I were a producer on Amazon’s The Rings of Power, I would be bending over backwards to write a new elf character just to cast her. (And if Hunter does show up in season 3 — Amazon, I’ll accept payment in mithril.) Hunter was at the Spirit Awards last Saturday as a leading performance nominee for her indie horror film Cuckoo. While walking the blue carpet, Hunter chatted with E! about some news she’d broken on TikTok the day before. In a candid eight-minute video, Hunter explained that she’d just received her reissued passport, after losing it last year and completing all the necessary paperwork. Paperwork where Hunter clearly checked off her gender as female. She was aware of Trump’s inauguration day executive order insisting that government agencies only recognize gender assigned at birth, yet also knew that Trump blusters a lot. In her own words, Hunter thought: “I’ll believe it when I see it.” Yeah, well, she saw it on her new passport, which changed her gender to male.
Hunter Schafer is finding power in her voice.
After the Euphoria star revealed that her new United States passport listed her gender as male despite holding female-marked government documents for years, she shared why she decided to speak out.
“It was a sort of spur-of-the-moment thing,” Hunter exclusively told E! News on the Film Independent Spirit Awards red carpet Feb. 22. “I’m still processing what’s happened. But in the moment, I felt like it was important to share what was going on.”
The 26-year-old, who came out as transgender in the ninth grade, shared the update in a Feb. 21 TikTok Story after receiving her new passport.
“To specify,” she added, “my gender marker was first changed in my teens when I first got my driver’s license and then my passports following — all have been female since then.”
Hunter said that when she applied for a new passport after losing her in Spain last year, she marked her gender as female on the application. However, she revealed that when it was picked up, “the marker was changed to male.”
While Hunter stressed that her TikTok video wasn’t posted to “create drama” or “receive consolation,” she believed it was “worth posting the reality of the situation.”
The Cuckoo actress’ news comes one month after President Donald Trump signed a Jan. 20 executive order requiring agencies to only recognize genders assigned at birth. A spokesperson for the State Department told E! News in a statement that “due to privacy laws and restrictions, we do not comment on specific cases.”
However, the representative added, “The Department is implementing the President’s Executive Orders and executing on administration priorities. We are only issuing U.S. passports with a male or female sex marker that matches the applicant’s biological sex as defined in the Executive Order.”
But Hunter emphasized that she doesn’t “give a f–k that they put an M on my passport.”
She asserted, “It doesn’t change really anything about me or my transness.”
I understand Hunter wanting to diffuse the Trump administration’s power to hurt her, when she says she doesn’t “give a f–k that they put an M on my passport.” But how could she not? Less than a year ago, Hunter was speaking to GQ about wanting to let her body of work and success act as her trans advocacy, more than literally speaking about it in every interview. She’s fought so hard to become who she knew she was, and now she just wants to be. She probably could’ve taken that path had things gone differently in November. But they didn’t, and I think Hunter decided to make the TikTok video — which I’m so glad she did — because she realizes that living through this administration demands visibility, if not screaming from the rafters. She said “I’ll believe when I see it,” when it came to Trump’s worst promises. Sadly, I think that also goes for a lot of Trump voters (to be clear, I’m not saying Hunter is one). Now that everyone is seeing it, the question is: what are we doing about it? To quote Jane Fonda’s barn-burning SAG speech, “This is not a rehearsal.”
Photos credit: Xavier Collin/Image Press Agency/Avalon, Olivier Huitel/Avalon