The Supreme Court on Thursday allowed President Donald Trump’s administration to enforce a policy preventing transgender and nonbinary Americans from selecting passport sex markers that align with their gender identity.
According to The Associated Press, the ruling marks Trump’s latest victory on the court’s emergency docket, permitting the policy to take effect while a legal challenge continues.
It pauses a lower court order that required the State Department to keep allowing people to choose male, female, or X on their passports. The court’s three liberal justices dissented.
Since the start of Trump’s second term, the high court has sided with his administration in nearly two dozen short-term orders, including a prior decision upholding a ban on transgender people serving in the military.
In a brief, unsigned order, the conservative-majority court said the rule does not discriminate. “Displaying passport holders’ sex at birth no more offends equal protection principles than displaying their country of birth,” the court wrote. “In both cases, the Government is merely attesting to a historical fact without subjecting anyone to differential treatment.”
The dissenting justices warned the ruling would cause harm. “This Court has once again paved the way for the immediate infliction of injury without adequate (or, really, any) justification,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote, saying the policy stems from Trump’s executive order that labeled transgender identity “false” and “corrosive.”
Jackson noted that transgender plaintiffs have faced “increased violence, harassment, and discrimination” due to mismatched identification documents.
The Trump administration argued that enforcing the policy is necessary because passports fall under foreign affairs, an area of executive control. The dissenters said it was unclear how passport markers affect foreign policy.
White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly called the decision “a victory for common sense and President Trump,” while Attorney General Pam Bondi praised it as a defense of “the simple truth” that “there are two sexes.”
The ACLU’s Jon Davidson called the outcome “a heartbreaking setback,” warning it puts transgender Americans “at risk of harassment and violence.”
