The US Supreme Court ruled Thursday that President Trump can move forward with his directive requiring passport applicants to list their gender exactly as it appears on their birth certificates. This ruling overturns a lower court injunction that had temporarily stopped the policy and allowed individuals to choose whether to mark M, F, or X on their passports.
Gender markers were first introduced on U.S. passports in 1976. For more than three decades, the government has permitted citizens to align their passports with their gender identity rather than the designation listed at birth. The “X” option — representing those who do not identify as male or female — was introduced in 2021 during President Biden’s administration.
A coalition of plaintiffs led by Ashton Orr, who was accused of presenting a false passport because it still displayed a female gender marker, challenged the Trump policy in court. They argued that the rule would unfairly target “transgender and non-binary people,” undermine identification accuracy, and stem from unconstitutional bias in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause.
“The challenged policy undermines the very purpose of passports as identity documents that officials check against the bearer’s appearance,” Orr’s attorneys wrote. “It is aimed at the rejection of the identity of an entire group — transgender Americans — who have always existed.”
The Justice Department brought the issue before the Supreme Court after the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit declined to reinstate Trump’s rule. In its emergency petition, the administration said the injunction “injures the United States by compelling it to speak to foreign governments in contravention of both the President’s foreign policy and scientific reality.”
By lifting the hold on the rule, the Supreme Court signaled support for the administration’s reasoning, allowing the birth-gender policy to be implemented while litigation continues. The ruling does not resolve the underlying legal questions but enables enforcement during ongoing proceedings in lower courts.
The justices divided 6–3 along ideological lines. The unsigned order stated, “Displaying passport holders’ sex at birth no more offends equal protection principles than displaying their country of birth, in both cases, the Government is merely attesting to a historical fact without subjecting anyone to differential treatment.”
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson authored the dissent, joined by the court’s other liberal members, calling the decision a “pointless but painful perversion of our equitable discretion.”
“This Court has once again paved the way for the immediate infliction of injury without adequate (or, really, any) justification,” she wrote.
{Matzav.com}
