1st American with 'X' gender passport speaks out on 'awesome moment'

Dana Zzyym from Fort Collins, Colorado, became the first U.S. citizen on Wednesday to receive a passport accommodating nonbinary, intersex and gender nonconforming individuals.

In an interview with ABC News Live's Stephanie Ramos, the 63-year-old Zzyym said opening the envelope and receiving the first passport with an "X" gender marker designation was "an awesome moment."

Zzyym -- a disabled Navy veteran and the associate director for the Intersex Campaign for Equality -- has been advocating for equal rights for intersex persons for years.

As a client of Lambda Legal, a civil rights organization for the queer community, Zzyym filed a federal discrimination lawsuit against the U.S. Department of State for denying them a passport on the grounds of an unclear gender-marker designation on Oct. 26, 2015.

"It's just been a long journey," Zzyym told ABC News, referring to the court proceedings. "And the accumulation of that fight was in my hands and it represented a lot of things to me."

Zzyym believes that the new passport allows intersex Americans the freedom to identify as who they truly are. However, they speculate that many people who are stuck in "Stockholm syndrome" after being raised as male or female won't make use of the new opportunity.

After being born with "ambiguous sex characteristics," Zzyym was raised as a boy and made to undergo irreversible surgeries by their parents. Both their sex and gender identity are nonbinary and they use "they/them/their" pronouns.

Zzyym's passport, a milestone for gender nonconforming residents, comes four months after Secretary of State Antony Blinken announced that individuals could choose the gender displayed on their passport and would no longer have corroborate it with medical certificates.

"It freed me up to get out of the country and do things, but it also represented the first step in having some rights as an intersex and nonbinary person," Zzyym told ABC News.

State Department spokesperson Ned Price announced in a statement the agency is committed to "promoting the freedom, dignity, and equality of all people -- including LGBTQI+ persons," and that the agency is working on broadening options for gender and sexual identity across other legal documents, such as the consular report of birth abroad.

"I am thrilled that the U.S. government issued the first ever passport with an X gender marker," Erin Uritus, CEO of Out & Equal Workplace Advocates, a LGBTQ workplace equality advocacy organization, said in a statement. "The official gender-neutral description for those who do not fit into the binary marks a key milestone and precedent. Most importantly, by issuing this new passport, the U.S. government is saying to nonbinary Americans: ‘We see you. You exist. You matter.’"

With intersex conferences canceled due to the pandemic, Zzyym plans to first use their new passport to go fishing in Costa Rica or Mexico.

ABC News' Conor Finnegan and Tony Morrison contributed to this report.