A lower court judge had provisionally blocked the administration’s plan that demanded that passports reflect sex as found on an original birth certificate.
By Catholics for Catholics
In another victory for the Trump administration, the Supreme Court paved the way on Thursday for the government to cease issuing passports that include gender identity markings selected by applicants.
The emergency order will remain as the case goes through the lower courts. The case was another important victory for President Donald Trump before the Supreme Court.
The case at hand is Trump v. Orr, which comes from a Trump administration policy to change gender requirements for passport holders. In June, a federal court temporarily stopped the administration from enforcing the policy while the court case continued.
According to The Epoch Times, the court’s ruling in Trump v. Orr took the form of an unsigned order without comment.
Still, three of the judges—Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor— disagreed with the new ruling. “Displaying passport holders’ sex at birth no more offends equal protection principles than displaying their country of birth—in both cases, the government is merely attesting to a historical fact without subjecting anyone to differential treatment,” the court’s order states.
The U.S. Department of State started permitting applicants in 2010 to file a doctor’s certification stating “they had undergone clinical treatment for gender transition.” By 2021, the department was allowing applicants to choose the sex marker consistent with their gender identity without any additional requirements.
According to federal regulations, a passport is supposed to “attest to the identity and nationality of the bearer,” Jackson said. The State Department’s sex marker policies have long demonstrated that “what is important for identification purposes is the bearer’s gender identity today. No matter.”
But on Jan. 22, the department changed the rules for sex markers on passports, going back to its pre-1992 practices by requiring that new passports “reflect the holders’ sex assigned at birth.” “Why? Because two days earlier, on January 20, President Trump issued Executive Order No. 14168, characterizing transgender identity as ‘false’ and ‘corrosive’ to American society,” Jackson said.
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