I ended up getting the X on not just my passport, but all other legal documents with a marker. Here's why.

I've always felt a personal duty, for lack of a better term , "take one for the team". To me, it feels like things aren't going to get better for us until some unknown critical mass of us unsubtly comes out and exists loudly, stubbornly, and unapologetically, accepting the risk that comes with that. In non-binary spaces, I find I tend to be in the minority when it comes to this outlook. I feel that by giving bigots what they want, they end up winning in some way, even if we're just responding to our natural survival instincts at times.

Civil rights progress has never been pretty or sexy and the inconvenient truth is that it seems to always involve a pattern of growing pains where folks push back hard and get pushed down repeatedly (sometimes to the point of assassination and/or prison time) until the more marginalized group eventually wins progress, crumb by painstaking crumb.

I also think that having gender markers on documents at all is completely unnecessary to begin with. While it's of course ultimately everyone's personal choice what marker to have on their documents, I'd love it if some of us organized and maybe even included some cis and binary trans people too, in a coordinated grassroots effort to stymie this profoundly useless part of the system of government identification documents, and start applying for X markers en masse.