The Supreme Court ruled on Thursday that the Trump administration can move forward with plans to remove the “X” option on passports and require Americans to mark their biological sex on passports.
In a 6-3 unsigned opinion, the Supreme Court froze a lower court’s order that stopped the Trump administration from enforcing the passport gender policy. The court’s ruling was not a final decision on the case, but the majority of justices agreed that the Trump administration is likely to succeed on the merits of the case.
“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 wrote. “And on this record, respondents have failed to establish that the Government’s choice to display biological sex ‘lack[s] any purpose other than a bare … desire to harm a politically unpopular group.’”
The three liberal justices dissented, with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson writing in a dissenting opinion that “the plaintiffs will be subject to imminent, concrete injury if the policy goes into effect.”
“The Court nonetheless fails to spill any ink considering the plaintiffs, opting instead to intervene in the Government’s favor without equitable justification, and in a manner that permits harm to be inflicted on the most vulnerable party,” Jackson added in her dissent, which was joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan.
U.S. passports have had only male and female designations throughout the country’s history until the Biden administration created the “X” category to represent “unspecified or another gender identity” in 2022. The administration at the time framed it as a “milestone” that would “better serve all U.S. citizens.”
Since the 1990s, the State Department has allowed Americans, in some circumstances, to choose the gender option on passports that does not align with their biological sex. The Trump administration also wants to put a stop to that practice.
The Trump policy was blocked by a federal judge in Massachusetts after a trans-identifying woman from West Virginia sued when she was prevented from choosing the male option on her passport, NBC News reported. In the Trump administration’s filing with the Supreme Court, Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote, “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.”
Since taking office for a second term on January 20, President Donald Trump has issued numerous orders recognizing biological reality and pushing back against leftist gender theories. In Trump’s executive order on “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” the president told the Secretary of State to require that passports “accurately reflect the holder’s sex.”
