The Canadian Passport: Proud to be “X” Rated
2 min readOnly 18 countries offer an “X” on passports, and Canada is one of them, ranking as the seventh best passport in the world.
The post The Canadian Passport: Proud to be “X” Rated appeared first on JourneyWoman.
Challenges in LGBTQ+ travel
by Kathy Buckworth
What’s so great about having a Canadian passport? Many, many things, according to a Henley and Partners report on world passports, quoted by CIC News, in July 2024. Canada ranks as the seventh best passport to hold in the world, ahead of our neighbours to the south, mostly due to our ability to travel visa-free to 187 countries, and our acceptance of dual citizenship. (Click here for more information on travel visas).
Canada is tied with Czechia, Hungary and Malta. The number one spot goes to Singapore, with France, Germany, Italy, Japan and Spain tied for second. The American passport is ranked eighth, last amongst the G7 countries. Afghanistan is ranked last of 195 countries, with the ability to visit only 26 countries without a visa.
Canadian passports have three gender identifiers
While the ranking is largely based on the number of countries the passport holders can travel to without a visa, Canadians also have the advantage of being able to select from three gender identifiers on their passport: M, F and since 2019, “X”, which indicates non-binary and intersex individuals.
As of today (August 2024), there are only 18 countries in the world that allow this, including the United States, which passed a regulation on it in 2022. (Note that Idaho and West Virginia still do not recognize it for their state identification issuances, so travelling there with an “X” gender passport as your only ID might be difficult.)
Australia was the first country to widely accept this gender identifier in 2011, after it had a single issuance of the “X” gender in 2003. Germany is set to approve the “X” identifier in November of 2024. You can check which countries accept “X” on Equaldex here.
