The Supreme Court on Thursday allowed the Trump administration to enforce a policy restricting sex designations on passports to “male” and “female” based on the sex an individual was at birth.
The conservative-majority High Court granted an emergency request filed by the Trump administration, which is trying to undo a pro-transgender Biden administration policy allowing people to self-select their sex or put X as a gender marker. The Supreme court granted the government’s request to temporarily stay rulings by a lower court that would have required the State Department to issue passports to transgender-identifying Americans based on their self-professed “gender identity,” rather than biological reality.
“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 said in its order.
Attorney General Pam Bondi celebrated securing “our 24th victory at the Supreme Court’s emergency docket” in a post to X.
“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.
