The Supreme Court ruled that the Trump administration can require that individuals list their biological sex on U.S. passports.
“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 order says.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor, wrote in a dissenting opinion that “senseless sidestepping of the obvious equitable outcome has become an unfortunate pattern.”
In September, the Trump administration filed an emergency appeal to the Supreme Court, urging the justices to block an order mandating that passports be rooted in gender identity rather than biological sex.
“President Trump issued an Executive Order that defined ‘[s]ex’ as ‘an individual’s immutable biological classification as either male or female,’ and required the Department of State to issue passports that ‘accurately reflect the holder’s sex’ based on that definition,” Solicitor General John Sauer wrote in the application, going on to declare that the policy is “eminently lawful.”
“The Constitution does not prohibit the government from defining sex in terms of an individual’s biological classification,” he wrote, adding, “U.S. passports are official government documents, addressed to foreign nations. The Executive Order in this case is an exercise of power conferred on the President both by the Constitution and by statute to determine the contents of U.S. passports.”
The matter surrounds President Trump’s January order, where he directed officials to “implement changes to require that government-issued identification documents, including passports, visas, and Global Entry cards, accurately reflect the holder’s sex.”
