The U.S. Supreme Court
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In a significant move, the U.S. Supreme Court has greenlighted a policy by former President Trump requiring that passport applicants list the sex assigned on their birth certificate. This development reverses a prior lower court injunction that permitted individuals to select their gender identity on passports, including a non-binary ‘X’ option introduced in 2021 under President Biden.
Since 1976, passports have displayed male and female sex markers. However, for over three decades, U.S. citizens could request documentation reflecting their gender identity instead of the birth certificate sex. The provision to use an “X” as a sex marker was a more recent change implemented under the Biden administration.
Transgender advocate Ashton Orr, facing accusations of using a fraudulent passport due to mismatched sex markers, led a coalition challenging the policy. They argued that it adversely impacts transgender and non-binary individuals, complicates identification processes, and violates the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause. Orr’s legal team emphasized, “The challenged policy undermines the very purpose of passports as identity documents that officials check against the bearer’s appearance,” asserting that it targets the identity of transgender Americans.
The government turned to the Supreme Court after the First Circuit Court of Appeals declined to block the lower court’s suspension of Trump’s policy. The administration contended that the injunction hampered U.S. diplomacy and conflicted with “scientific reality.” The Supreme Court’s 6-3 decision, split along ideological lines, allows the policy to take effect while ongoing litigation continues at lower levels.
In the court’s unsigned order, it was stated, “Displaying passport holders’ sex at birth no more offends equal protection principles than displaying their country of birth.” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, dissenting with the court’s liberal justices, criticized the decision as a “pointless but painful perversion of our equitable discretion,” lamenting the ruling’s lack of justification.
This article was originally written by www.npr.org
