The Supreme Court on Thursday granted the Trump administration’s emergency request to enforce its policy barring transgender and nonbinary people from updating their sex markers on passports.
The court said that while litigation continues at the lower level, the government can require passport seekers to select male or female sex designations based on their birth certificate, while the “X” designation is no longer available.
“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 wrote in the unsigned majority opinion.
The three liberal justices dissented, with Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson writing for all three.
“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 en-joined from doing so, while the plaintiffs will be subject to imminent, concrete injury if the policy goes into effect,” she wrote, joined by Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor.
