Washington, 7 Nov

The US Supreme Court on Thursday allowed President Donald Trump’s administration to enforce a policy preventing transgender and nonbinary people from choosing passport sex markers that match their gender identity.

The decision marks another victory for the Trump administration on the court’s emergency docket, enabling it to implement the policy while a lawsuit challenging it is ongoing. It overturns a lower court order that had allowed individuals to select male, female, or X on their passports.

The ruling, issued in a brief, unsigned order, said displaying a person’s sex at birth “no more offends equal protection principles than displaying their country of birth.” The court held that the government was merely documenting a “historical fact” and not engaging in discrimination.

The court’s three liberal justices dissented, warning that the order exposes transgender and nonbinary people to “increased violence, harassment, and discrimination.” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote that the decision would cause “immediate infliction of injury without adequate justification,” noting that the policy stemmed from Trump’s executive order declaring transgender identity “false” and “corrosive.”

Advocacy groups said the move would put transgender people at risk during travel and identity checks. Some plaintiffs in the case said they had faced sexual assault, strip searches, and accusations of carrying fake documents when their gender presentation did not align with the marker on their passport.

The Trump administration argued that preventing enforcement of the policy harms national interests because passports fall under foreign affairs, an executive power. The dissenting justices countered that it was unclear how gender markers on personal documents relate to foreign policy.

The State Department adopted the new rules following Trump’s January executive order mandating that the US recognise only two sexes, male and female, based on birth certificates and “biological classification.”

Transgender actor Hunter Schafer was among those affected, revealing earlier this year that her renewed passport had been reissued with a male gender marker despite her long-standing female identification.

Civil rights groups condemned the court’s decision. Jon Davidson, senior counsel at the ACLU’s LGBTQ and HIV Project, said it was a “heartbreaking setback for the freedom of all people to be themselves,” warning that forcing transgender people to carry passports that “out them against their will” increases the risk of violence.

Sex markers were first introduced on US passports in the 1970s, with the government allowing changes backed by medical documentation from the 1990s. Under former President Joe Biden, the rules were relaxed in 2021, allowing self-declaration and the inclusion of an “X” marker without documentation.

White House spokeswoman Anna Kelly hailed Thursday’s ruling as “a victory for common sense and President Trump, who was elected to eliminate woke gender ideology from our federal government.” Attorney General Pam Bondi added that the Justice Department would continue to fight for what she called “the simple truth, that there are two sexes.”