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The U.S. Supreme Court has given the green light to the Trump administration’s policy mandating that passports list sex as either “male” or “female,” based strictly on an individual’s sex at birth.
The predominantly conservative Supreme Court approved an emergency appeal from the Trump administration, aiming to overturn a Biden-era policy that permitted individuals to self-identify their gender or choose an “X” marker. This decision temporarily halts lower court rulings that would have compelled the State Department to recognize transgender individuals’ self-identified gender on passports, instead of their birth-assigned sex.
The court articulated that indicating a passport holder’s sex at birth does not violate equal protection rights any more than noting their birthplace. In both instances, the government is merely recording a historical fact without imparting unequal treatment.
Attorney General Pam Bondi lauded this decision as the administration’s “24th victory at the Supreme Court’s emergency docket” in a statement shared on the social media platform X.
Bondi further explained, “Today’s stay empowers the government to mandate that citizens declare their biological sex on passports. Essentially, it affirms the existence of two sexes, and our legal team will persist in advocating for this fundamental truth.”
“Today’s stay allows the government to require citizens to list their biological sex on their passport,” she continued. “In other words: there are two sexes, and our attorneys will continue fighting for that simple truth.”
The court’s three liberal-leaning justices dissented. Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, who infamously refused to define what a woman is at her confirmation hearing, wrote:
The Court ignores these critical limits on its equitable discretion today. The Government seeks to enforce a questionably legal new policy immediately, but it offers no evidence that it will suffer any harm if it is temporarily enjoined from doing so, while 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.
“Such senseless sidestepping of the obvious equitable outcome has become an unfortunate pattern. So, too, has my own refusal to look the other way when basic principles are selectively discarded,” she continued. “This Court has once again paved the way for the immediate infliction of injury without adequate (or, really, any) justification. Because I cannot acquiesce to this pointless but painful perversion of our equitable discretion, I respectfully dissent.”
On President Donald Trump’s first day of his second term, he signed an executive order called “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.” That order requires passports to “accurately reflect the holder’s sex” according to the administration’s definition of sex, which is “an individual’s immutable biological classification as either male or female.”
‘”Sex’ is not a synonym for and does not include the concept of ‘gender identity,”‘ the order reads.
The policy was quickly challenged by several transgender-identifying people, who claim the rule violates their right to equal protection under the Constitution’s Fifth Amendment, as well as a federal law called the Administrative Procedure Act, according to NBC News.
Ashton Orr, a woman who identifies as a man, is the named plaintiff in the case. She applied for a passport with a male sex marker in January, and was told by the State Department in February that she could only have a female sex marker, in accordance with reality.
A federal judge in Massachusetts ruled against the Trump administration, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit declined to pause the ruling during litigation.
The Supreme Court wrote that the Trump administration was “likely to succeed on the merits.”
“And the District Court’s grant of class-wide relief enjoins enforcement of an Executive Branch policy with foreign affairs implications concerning a Government document. In light of the foregoing, the Government will suffer a form of irreparable injury absent a stay,” the court wrote.
Katherine Hamilton is a political reporter for Breitbart News. You can follow her on X @thekat_hamilton.
