Supreme Court revives Trump admin ban on transgender, nonbinary passport identification

The Supreme Court revived a ban on Americans self-identifying as their chosen gender on passports on Thursday.

President Donald Trump barred the practice via an executive order, saying that passports must reflect a person’s sex as noted on their birth certificate. That order was blocked by a lower court. In an unsigned order, the Supreme Court stayed the lower court’s demand, arguing that the Trump administration was likely to succeed on the merits and that the lower court’s stay would irreprebably harm the government.

“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 unnamed majority wrote.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson balked at the idea that not allowing the policy to take effect would harm the government, contrasting it with the obvious harm it would cause transgender and nonbinary Americans.

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“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,” Jackson wrote. “This court has once again paved the way for the immediate infliction of injury without adequate (or, really, any) justification.”