The United States Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) has revised its Form N-400 Application for Naturalization to provide a third gender option. The USCIS has updated guidance in the USCIS Policy Manual to account for Form N-400 revisions and other forthcoming ones that will add a third gender option, according to a Monday press release. With the Form N-400s, the USCIS said the edition effective Monday will be the first to include the X gender option. This means applicants filing these forms on or after Monday will have X available as a gender option right away. Applicants who have these forms pending from an edition in effect before Monday can request to update their gender. For all other forms, they must wait until it revises those to include X. Until it completes additional form revisions with the X option, it said naturalization certificates are the only secure identity documents reflecting it. It added X is unavailable on Form N-565. If people have other benefit requests pending and want to choose X as their gender, they must wait until it updates the relevant forms before they do so. Once it updates additional forms to offer it, benefit requestors might follow the instructions on the Updating or Correcting Your Documents webpage to select it. The USCIS concluded by saying people do not need to provide supporting documentation to select as their gender. It said the gender they select does not need to match the gender listed on their immigration documents or on supporting identity documents such as their birth certificates, passports, or state identification. This incident comes after a British resident set to be deported because of serious criminality got to stay in Canada for a little longer in August because the judge wondered if using gender-neutral pronouns in a government document violated his rights. READ MORE: Federal Court judge delays deportation over gender-neutral pronouns“One of my questions is this: is gender identification a protected right under the Charter of Rights and Freedoms?” said Federal Court of Canada Justice Richard Bell. “If one reads the social science literature on this whole issue of gender identity, some authors go so far as to call this, this misnaming of identity, as being a violence committed towards somebody, which is quite shocking to me, but that’s what some of the social scientists say.”
