ACLU Asks Supreme Court to Reject Trump’s Bid to Enforce Anti-Trans Passport Policy
“I thought that 18 years after transitioning, I would be able to live my life in safety and ease,” one plaintiff said.
Today, the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) asked the U.S. Supreme Court to reject the Trump administration’s request to stay, or pause, a lower court’s order that temporarily blocks the president’s anti-trans executive order that requires a passport only bear a person’s sex assigned at birth.
On the first day of Trump’s second term, he signed an anti-trans executive order, entitled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” which directed the Department of State and the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) to “to require that government-issued identification documents, including passports, visas, and Global Entry cards” reflect a person’s sex “at conception.”
As the ACLU noted in its filings, the order’s “definition of sex at conception contradicts basic biology.”
The ACLU and others filed a class action suit on behalf of those impacted by the discriminatory order.
The court subsequently granted a preliminary injunction temporarily barring the order from going into effect. The Trump administration appealed to the First Circuit Court of Appeals, which upheld the lower court’s order. The Trump administration then appealed to the Supreme Court.
For now, the State Department must provide passports that align with a person’s gender identity, or with an “X,” to those applying for a new passport, to those replacing a lost, stolen, or damaged passport, to those who are renewing their passport within one year of its expiration, and to those who seek to change the sex designation or update their name on their current passport, as per the ACLU.
U.S. passports did not include a person’s sex until 1976, according to the ACLU’s brief. In 1992, the State Department first implemented a policy permitting applicants to choose a sex marker that aligned with their gender identity. Then, in 2021, the department permitted, as many countries and states had already done, allowing X sex markers on passports, which is often used by nonbinary and intersex people.
Trump’s executive order, if implemented, will put transgener people’s lives at risk and restrict their ability to travel, according to the ACLU.
Chastain Anderson, a transgender woman, is “terrified that having an inaccurate sex designation on her passport will place her in uncomfortable and unsafe circumstances,” the complaint says.
“Her fears are justified: in 2017, prior to updating her driver’s license to her accurate sex designation, she had a harrowing experience going through a TSA security checkpoint at the Richmond Airport,” the complaint continues.
She was forced to stay in a holding area for a half hour and then strip searched by a manager, which, she believes, “was a direct result of the perception that her outward appearance did not match the sex designation on her license,” the complaint says.
Another plaintiff, Reid Solomon-Lane, a transgender man, said in a statement that if his passport does not align with his gender identity, he would be “forcibly outed every time I used my passport for travel or identification, causing potential harm to my safety and my family’s safety.”
“I thought that 18 years after transitioning, I would be able to live my life in safety and ease,” he said.
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