The U.S. Supreme Court
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Chip Somodevilla/Getty Images
The U.S. Supreme Court on Thursday allowed President Trump to proceed with his plan to require that passport applicants list their sex as what was designated on their birth certificate. The court’s decision overturns a lower court order pausing Trump’s policy and allowing applicants to choose for themselves whether they would like to identify with an M for male, F for female, or an X for neither.
Male and female sex markers began to be listed on passports in 1976. The government has allowed citizens for over 30 years to request a passport that reflects their gender identity instead of the sex listed on a birth certificate. The choice to use an “X”, however, only began in 2021 under President Biden.
Led by Ashton Orr, a transgender man who was falsely accused of using a fake passport by airport security when traveling with a passport that had a female sex marker, a nationwide group of plaintiffs argued that Trump’s policy would hurt transgender and non-binary individuals, would harm the government’s ability to identify citizens, and was motivated by unconstitutional transphobia in violation of the Fourteenth Amendment guarantee to equal protection of the law.
“The challenged policy undermines the very purpose of passports as identity documents that officials check against the bearer’s appearance,” Orr’s attorneys said in their briefs. “It is aimed at the rejection of the identity of an entire group — transgender Americans — who have always existed.” The government, Orr’s counsel points out, acknowledged that…