Supreme Court blocks transgender people from updating passports

LGBTQ+ reporter

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The Supreme Court will allow the Trump administration to bar transgender people from changing the gender markers on their passports, it announced in an order Thursday. The order is the latest in a back-and-forth on the policy as the country debates the right for its transgender citizens to live openly.

LGBTQ+ advocates quickly called the order dangerous and discriminatory.

“This decision will cause immediate, widespread and irreparable harm to all those who are being denied accurate identity documents,” said Jessie Rossman, legal director of the ACLU of Massachusetts. “The Trump administration’s policy is an unlawful attempt to dehumanize, humiliate and endanger transgender, nonbinary and intersex Americans, and we will continue to seek its ultimate reversal in the courts.”

Transgender people have been able to change the gender markers on their passports since 1992. Gender markers delineating nonbinary people as “X” became available in 2021. The Trump administration sought in January to block gender changes in passport updates, declaring that the federal government would recognize only “male” and “female” and saying these could not be changed after birth.

But the ACLU sued and won a temporary injunction against the policy — one that lasted until Thursday.

Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor dissented. Jackson questioned why the government was pressing to restrict new gender marker changes and what harm they were causing.

“But how urgent can this interest be when the Passport Policy itself allows transgender Americans who already have passports with sex markers reflecting their current gender identity to continue using those passports until they expire?” she asked.

According to the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey, 22 percent – nearly a quarter — of transgender people whose ID did not match their gender presentation reported that when they tried to prove identity, they faced harassment, assault or a denial of service.

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