Dana Zzyym
American intersex activist

Dana Alix Zzyym ( ZIM; born 1958) is an intersex activist and veteran of the U.S. Navy. After the culmination of a six-year legal battle, they became the first U.S. citizen to receive an official U.S. passport with an "X" sex/gender marker.
Early life
Zzyym was born in 1958. Zzyym says that their childhood as a military brat made it out of the question for them to be associated with the queer community as a youth due to the prevalence of homophobia in the armed forces. Their parents hid Zzyym's status as intersex from them; Zzyym independently discovered their identity and the surgeries their parents had approved for them after their Navy service. In 1978, Zzyym joined the Navy as a machinist's mate.
Activism
Zzyym is the associate director of the Intersex Campaign for Equality. They are nonbinary and intersex.
Legal case
Zzyym is the first veteran to seek a non-binary gender U.S. passport, in the lawsuit Zzyym v. Blinken (formerly Zzyym v.
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This entry incorporates text from “Dana Zzyym” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.