By Andrew Chung and John Kruzel
WASHINGTON (Reuters) -President Donald Trump’s administration asked the U.S. Supreme Court on Friday to allow it to block the issuance of passports that reflect the gender identities of transgender and nonbinary Americans.
The Justice Department filed an emergency request to lift a federal judge’s order that bars the U.S. State Department from enforcing a Trump-directed policy.
The dispute is one of several over an executive order Trump signed after returning to office on January 20 directing the government to recognize only two biologically distinct sexes, male and female.
The administration in court papers argued that the judge’s order “has no basis in law or logic.”
“Private citizens cannot force the government to use inaccurate sex designations on identification documents that fail to reflect the person’s biological sex — especially not on identification documents that are government property and an exercise of the president’s constitutional and statutory power to communicate with foreign governments,” Justice Department lawyers wrote.
U.S. District Judge Julia Kobick in Boston issued a preliminary injunction in April that stopped the enforcement of the policy against six of the seven transgender and nonbinary people who sued to challenge the policy. She later expanded the scope of her ruling to halt the policy’s enforcement against all similarly situated transgender, nonbinary and intersex passport holders.
Kobick, an appointee of Democratic former President Joe Biden, found that the State Department policy was arbitrary and rooted in an irrational prejudice toward transgender Americans that violated their equal protection rights under the U.S. Constitution’s Fifth Amendment.
The Boston-based 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals declined on September 4 to put the judge’s injunction on hold, prompting the Trump administration’s request to the Supreme Court.
The plaintiffs are represented by the ACLU, the civil liberties group. Jon Davidson, senior counsel for the ACLU’s LGBTQ & HIV Project, on Friday called the administration’s policy “an unjustifiable and discriminatory action that restricts the essential rights of transgender, nonbinary, and intersex citizens.”
“This administration has taken escalating steps to limit transgender people’s health care, speech, and other rights under the Constitution, and we are committed to defending those rights including the freedom to travel safely and the freedom of everyone to be themselves without wrongful government discrimination,” Davidson said.
Before Trump, the State Department for more than three decades allowed people to update the sex designation on their passports.
In 2022, Biden’s administration allowed passport applicants to choose “X” as a neutral sex marker on their passport applications and to self-select “M” or “F” for male or female.
Trump’s executive order defined “sex” as “an individual’s immutable biological classification as either male or female” and required the State Department to issue passports that “accurately reflect the holder’s sex” based on that definition.
“That policy is eminently lawful,” Justice Department lawyers argued in their filing to the Supreme Court. “The Constitution does not prohibit the government from defining sex in terms of an individual’s biological classification.”
(Reporting by Andrew Chung and John Kruzel in Washington with additional reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston; Editing by Howard Goller)
Comments