Soccer fans walk through a shopping center on the eastern edge of Berlin in August. Over the course of the past half-year, some international tourists have had second thoughts about visiting the United States for next year’s World Cup. (Photo by Patrick Maynard)
PATRICK MAYNARD | Special Contributor
PatrickMaynard@gmail.com
BERLIN — The outbound U-Bahn train to Köpenick late on a Saturday morning in August is a moving constellation of hotdog-stand-colored jackets and scarves as soccer fans prepare for a game between FC Union Berlin and VfB Stuttgart. And for Olaf Forner, who’s on his way to take part in the pageant, a club-level game is a far bigger event than the World Cup matches that Dallas and other U.S. cities are preparing to host next year.
“For us, [2026] is the World Cup, not football, ” said Forner, who argues that most sports are too commercial, in contrast to the Berlin team’s cooperative ownership model and homespun roots.
The well-known vendor was a longtime fan of soccer in the German capital before starting a more official role at games, selling newspapers to fans. “We [in the stands in Berlin] have a different understanding of football from FIFA,” he stated.
Many German fans, however, have other reasons to avoid travel to the U.S.-hosted World Cup matches. Among them is a new U.S. border policy that disallows the use of an “X” in the gender column on passports — part of a White House-led crackdown on the rights of transgender and gender-diverse people.
Anna Eroshenko, a member of the German LGBTQ+ advocacy group Quarteera e.V., said in a Sept. 11 video interview that hostile attitudes at American border crossings can cause stress for gender diverse travelers from Europe, but that there can also be “legal consequences, for example, you receive a rejection.”
She mentioned not just text markings for gender, but also the possibility of facial changes after transitions as yielding negative results for gender diverse and transgender travelers from abroad, especially since the start of the second Trump administration.
“After the Trump election, some people in the U.S.A., as I know, feel themselves more free to make some damaging psychological or discursive … harm, and also body harm, for queer people and especially trans people,” she said.
Shannon Minter of the National Center for LGBTQ Rights was similarly skeptical of the new policies.
“There is no benefit whatsoever to forcing a transgender person to put their birth sex rather than their current sex on a passport,” Minter stated in a Sept. 3 email. “The purpose of a passport is to identify the individual, which is why a passport includes a photo. Forcing someone who has undergone a gender transition to list their birth sex defeats that purpose.
“It would serve only to cause confusion and potentially put that person in danger by needlessly disclosing that they are transgender or by making it appear that they are not the person listed in their passport,” Minter said.
Previous travel fiascos
Germans, especially, can point to multiple recent travel fiascos, situations in which their compatriots have been detained for long periods by American border patrol agents.
(German citizens are still allowed to use an “X” on their passports within limits. None of the recent well-known incidents involving German citizens have involved gender misclassification, but they have made transgender and gender-diverse Germans especially wary, given the intersection of risk factors.)
The detentions involving Germans have included the cases of Jessica Brösche, Maria Lepere, Fabian Schmidt and Charlotte Pohl, each of whom were held while coming into the country. Another person, Lucas Sielaff, was detained after visiting his fiancée.
Conditions for at least one of the travelers have allegedly included extended solitary confinement. Some have described environments in which hostile tactics were intentionally used to evoke fear among detainees, as have tourists from other countries.
Customs and Border Protection stated through a spokesperson that “U.S. Customs and Border Protection’s mission remains unchanged. We have the most secure border in American history. This has allowed CBP to focus on vetting and interviewing the people attempting to come into our country
“Lawful travelers have nothing to fear from these measures, which are designed to protect our nation’s security,” the written statement continued. “However, those intending to enter the U.S. with fraudulent purposes or malicious intent are offered the following advice: Don’t even try.”
Experts on the border entry process are less confident about how things currently run. With many immigration- and border-related detention facilities being run by private corporations, there is money to be made by slowing the process to a Kafkaesque crawl, according to a recent report by ABC, which found that one company touted a 9.8 percent increase year-over-year from the same quarter in 2024.
The hoops travelers must jump through go beyond simple detention, sometimes involving financial transactions as well. “Beyond citing fears of being questioned at the border, or general opposition to the Trump administration’s policies,” CNN’s Natasha Chen reported in late August, “visitors from some countries are now facing an added upfront cost of $250 for a new ‘visa integrity fee.’”
Economic losses mount
Combined with other policies, including tariffs and talk of annexing Canada, the Trump administration’s border tactics have put the U.S. on pace to lose $12 billion in travel revenue in 2025, according to Bloomberg. That includes tourists from around the globe who are increasingly cautious about entering the U.S. for fear of incarceration.
(AP Photo/Matt Slocum)
(Other would-be tourists are performing more politically-oriented boycotts out of solidarity — protesting a travel ban that targeted largely countries of color, for example.)
Losses encountered in 2026 because of changes in border policy are likely to include dents to the Dallas economy, says James Gerber, a San Diego State University economist who studies cross-border business.
“[The Texas state government] reports that total direct spending by travelers (domestic and international) in Dallas was $7.5 billion in 2024, up 3.5 percent over 2023,” Gerber wrote. “It created 55,000 jobs, which is down slightly (0.2 percent) from the previous year.”
Gerber said that if Fort Worth or other parts of the Metroplex were included in the numbers, they would be even larger. But since the new administration took over in January, the numbers are expected to be far lower.
And Germans are not the only fans considering staying home during the games.
In recent decades, LGBTQ+ fans all over the globe have had increased economic clout, despite outdated stereotypes about lack of interest in sports. This has included a flexing of muscles in Texas: In 2017, there was significant worry that a discriminatory “bathroom bill”
Texas legislators were considering would prevent San Antonio from hosting NCAA events, resulting in a projected loss of $240 million in local revenue. The bill was ultimately shelved, but the incident demonstrates evolving relationships between sports organizations and the LGBTQ+ community, according to researchers at Texas A&M University.
That the bathroom bill was revived and passed in the Texas Legislature’s special session, just in time to impact World Cup visitors.
More recently, boycotts have included national-level shunnings by people outside of the U.S. as border crossings become increasingly stressful. Other reasons for boycotting include unfair deportation policies targeting long-term residents of the United States, according to materials from the group Boycott USA 2026.
In addition to the group’s work, less formal online petitions have also pushed for boycotts.
For her part, Jerry, a Dallas LGBTQ+ community organizer who asked to go only by her first name for safety reasons, hopes that potential visitors will be able to weigh the risks while building a nuanced picture of the opportunities many Texas communities provide for LGBTQ+ people. She cites southern hospitality and the care and the love Texans have for each other as possible drivers of future policy changes.
“It’s very important to me that folks who are thinking of coming to the United States, [and particularly, to the Dallas-Fort Worth area] don’t see Texas as this homogenous place. The cities are very different from the rural parts, and even within the city, there are a lot of different communities,” she said.
If LGBTQ+ visitors were to come to the Dallas-Fort Worth area, she says, they would find many explicitly welcoming spaces, including Sue Ellen’s, Round-Up Saloon, S4, Liberty Lounge and Club Reflection.
Policies can change, then change again
There are voices within Texas pushing for birth gender markings on passports. Dr. Robert Kauffman of the Texas Tech University Health Sciences Center, who has published medical research on transgender care, stated in an Aug. 24 email that he believes it would be “highly desirable” for all people to designate their gender identity on passports and official documents, citing the need for a periodic prostate exam as an example of a way such information could be used.
Other subject matter experts and advocates chafed at the idea that a yearly prostate exam had anything to do with the gender marking on a travel document.
“I do fortunately have a passport that aligns with my gender identity, and I feel very lucky that I was able to get that done prior to the changes in policy from this current administration” stated Jerry, the Dallas community organizer. “When I was considering that change, I did have the option to also switch my gender marking to an ‘X.’ However, I was looking ahead at what could potentially happen … for changes in policy, as well as what would be safer for international travel.”
She argued that the current policy from the White House is unwelcoming to gender-diverse visitors from other countries. Washington Post columnist Sally Jenkins went further in her critique of the new border and immigration policies, writing that foreigners have been “detained and gulag-ed simply for wearing the wrong ink on their skin.”
(The Salvadoran prison the Trump administration has sent some deportees to, often without charges, has been labeled by the New York Times as a gulag.)
Back in eastern Berlin, an area where there is still living memory of Stasi detention cells and botched border crossings, there’s a sense of patience that underlies conversations with FC Union soccer fans. And for good reason: The club struggled along in Germany’s second league for years before being promoted to the first league in 2019.
There are other memories of resilience as well, including the patience to wait out stringent border policies that eventually went away.
“Friends behind barbed wire,” reads a tiny pin that Forner, the newspaper vendor, gives me on the train, marking the solidarity fans of East and West Berlin soccer clubs felt for each other during the existence of the Berlin Wall.
“Freunde hinter Stachel Draht.”
Patrick Maynard is an American freelance writer living in Germany. He reported this article from Berlin.