Ever since 2019, Canada’s been my home and I’ve also been effectively unable to leave Canada. At first, this was because I was actively litigating a refugee claim but after Trump regained the Presidency in 2024, one of his first acts was to deny transgender people many of the rights of citizenship. One of these rights is the ability to access accurate passports. I applied for a certificate of identity in mid-July because, unfortunately, I am unable to obtain a legally usable, accurate passport from the US. Legally unusable pursuant to Canadian and American law.
While the harm was ordered by the Trump administration, the fact of the matter is that without a valid travel document, I am effectively unable to travel to my country of nationality. The Canadian courts have, to varying extents, recognized a denial of a national passport as a form of functional statelessness. In my previous post, I discuss the legal precedent of Canada v. Ward, [1993] 2 S.C.R. 689, where the Supreme Court of Canada affirms this logic.
The Cage
In a report on ghost immigrants and Sunny Wang’s Newcan immigration consultancy fraud, CBC’s The Fifth Estate touched on a fairly unique concept. Ian Young from the South China Morning Post referred to it as “Yiminjian” or “immigration jail”. This concept interprets the residency requirement as a form of “jail”. For me, I can see the applicability of this concept as the border has become not just much harder for me to cross but to the point of virtually impossible and legally perilous.
The concept is also echoed in interviews with stateless person Mike Gogulski. Unlike Gogulski, I’m in a much more precarious position as I do not have a legally usable travel document. He, on the other hand, has been issued a stateless person’s travel document by the Slovakian government. And even he characterizes his position as being “in a cage” due to his severely restricted ability to travel.
IRCC’s complicity
I have been actively reaching out to the powers that be to try to resolve this issue. And their initial correspondence once they received my application is not promising. Here is the bit of the letter they sent me that makes me think that IRCC is unlikely to grant me a Certificate of Identity.
Certificates of Identity are issued to permanent residents of Canada who are not yet Canadian citizens, and who, although not considered to have refugee status in Canada, are otherwise stateless or unable, for a valid reason, to obtain a national passport or travel document from any source. These documents are not issued simply to facilitate travel or the attainment of visas.
Since you are a citizen of the United States of America you would not, under normal circumstances, qualify for a Certificate of Identity unless a request for passport facilities was refused by the authorities of the United States of America and you could provide this office with the letter of refusal.
The information contained in your application does not provide us with sufficient grounds to warrant the issuance of a Certificate of Identity. It is, therefore, suggested that you communicate in writing with the embassy to determine your eligibility to obtain passport facilities, retaining copies of your letters as well as the registration receipt from the postal authorities. If your request is refused, forward the letter of refusal to this office. If the letter is not written in French or English it will be necessary for you to provide a certified translation.
I want to share what I sent them. This included the application with a 16-page letter that outlined why I can’t obtain a legally usable, accurate US passport, the risk of travelling under a false passport under US and Canadian law. I also included the following:
- a copy of the Executive Order that effectively orders the State Department to deny trans people accurate passports.
- copies of the court decisions in the Orr case
- a litigation summary from the ACLU
- a copy of the State Department’s own page on sex markers in US passports
- the IRB’s own guidance on how they judge misrepresentation cases
Corresponding with the Powers that Be
When IRCC determined, for reasons unstated, that the documentation I provided “does not provide us sufficient grounds to warrant the issuance of a Certificate of Identity”, I started reaching out. This determination was made in spite of the fact that there’s a clear causal chain between the Executive Order that directed the denial, the impact of the denial resulting in initial granting of injunctive relief, and the reversal of said relief by SCOTUS. I reached out to my US Congressman and Senators. These are Congressman Joe Neguse, Senator Michael Bennet, and Senator John Hickenlooper. Congressman Neguse’s office took point on this inquiry. Eventually, I received forwarded correspondence from the American Citizen Services chief of the Vancouver Consulate. While it didn’t deny me a passport specifically by name, it did reinforce my thesis.
Current US passport makes it extremely unlikely that a transgender person would be able to successfully apply for and receive an accurate, legally usable passport.
I forwarded this fact to IRCC early last month. The last correspondence I received from IRCC is from the Minister’s office. Strap in people, this gets ridiculous.
The correspondence from the Ministerial Enquiries Division
This is the e-mail I received from the Ministerial Enquiries Division, which is apparently who responds when you e-mail [email protected].
Dear Daria Bloodworth:
Thank you for your correspondence dated August 17, 2026, addressed to the Honourable Lena Metlege Diab, Minister of Immigration, Refugees and Citizenship, regarding your immigration situation. I have been asked to respond to you.
I appreciate you sharing the circumstances that prompted you to write, and I understand that you are going through a difficult time. Canada has a proud history of providing protection to the world’s most vulnerable groups, including persons in the LGBTQ2 community. Canada relies primarily on the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) to identify individuals for resettlement to Canada who are the most vulnerable and at risk. These individuals include persons persecuted on the basis of their sexual orientation, gender identity, or gender expression. Private sponsorship groups in Canada can also identify refugees who need to be resettled, including individuals from the LGBTQ2 community.
I note that you have contacted to the Case Processing Centre in Sydney, which is the appropriate office to respond to your request.
Although I understand that this may not be the response you had anticipated, I hope that you will find this information to be helpful.
Sincerely,
Ministerial Enquiries Division
I’m honestly not sure what any of this has to do with my Certificate of Identity application. In fact, it reads more like meritless back patting. They can claim that “Canada has a proud history of providing protection to the world’s most vulnerable groups” but I know better. I have first hand experience of how hard IRCC fights against transgender people who win a refugee claim. As of this date, the Case Processing Centre in Sydney has not responded to my request for a Certificate of Identity and we are well past double the service standard set by IRCC. The first, last, and only time I heard from the Case Processing Centre in Sydney was back in early August. This was almost two months ago.
Echoes from the past
There is a woman who was in a similar situation to my own. Guldana Salimjan only got her Certificate of Identity expedited after CBC reported on her story. She made more than twenty inquiries to IRCC and waited nearly six months before the media paid attention and got IRCC to act. Six months past mid-July, my US passport will already be expired.
In fact, the CBC article contains one line that sends chills down my spine and raises another very important question. And I’ll quote that line now:
According to the IRCC letter, Chinese citizens wouldn’t normally qualify for a Canadian certificate of identity, unless accompanied by paperwork from Chinese authorities proving their ineligibility for a Chinese passport.
Call me crazy, but that has a lot of parallels to the letter I received from IRCC in early August. Makes me wonder if this is a form letter that IRCC likes to send out when people apply for a Certificate of Identity. That suspicion is only strengthened by the volume of supporting evidence I submitted to IRCC when I applied for my Certificate of Identity. So, the case of Guldana Salimjan raises four very important questions.
Why do we need a journalist to get IRCC to act?
Why can’t the process just work?
What are my options if I can’t get a journalist to care about my application?
Is IRCC sending form letters with canned responses to applicants for Certificates of Identity in lieu of actually evaluating the applications on the merits?
So, what next?
As I said in my previous post on this topic, there is a clock ticking on this problem. January 10th, 2027 is the expiry date on both my US passport book and card. This means on January 11th, 2027, I will be without a valid travel document. And they are in the custody of IRCC, awaiting a decision on my Certificate of Identity. The question is no longer whether this policy denies me a passport, it’s whether anyone notices before the last accurate one I own expires.