US Passports Will Now Only Show Someone’s Gender At Birth In Major Supreme Court Win For Trump Administration

The Supreme Court has ruled in a 6-3 majority opinion that the Trump administration is allowed to enforce an executive order that only allows US passports to be issued with someone’s assigned gender at birth… at least for now.

The White House had petitioned the Supreme Court for a stay on a lower court’s temporary injunction that banned the executive order from being enforced while a lawsuit over the issue is resolved.

The executive order, known officially as 14168 Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government, was one of President Trump’s first actions in the Oval Office after he was sworn in for his second term in January.

The order set about reversing Biden-era rules that allowed passport applicants to self-select their gender of male or female without requiring medical certification, regardless of their gender at birth.

In 2021, the administration also made the landmark decision to allow US citizens to choose an ‘X’ gender marker to signify that the holder is either non-binary, intersex, or gender non-conforming.

Following the signing of the executive order, the State Department moved quickly to halt processing of passports with the X gender marker, but there has been legal confusion over whether the Trump administration is allowed to force passport holders to have their biological sex at birth displayed in their passports.

On Thursday, we came one step closer to clearing up this confusion, as the Supreme Court released an unsigned opinion granting the administration’s stay as requested.

Notably, the majority ruling concluded that “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.”

The court added that displaying biological sex at the time of birth was nothing more than a “factual statement” and could not be considered discrimination, and concluded that the government was likely to succeed on its merits at a full appeal hearing.

Writing in dissent, Justice Jackson said the court had “again paved the way for the immediate infliction of injury without adequate (or, really, any) justification.”

“The documented real-world harms to these plaintiffs obviously outweigh the Government’s unexplained (and inexplicable) interest in immediate implementation,” Justice Jackson continued.

Thursday’s Supreme Court ruling means that the State Department is allowed to immediately start issuing passports with the biological sex at the time of birth, regardless of how the holder now identifies, or even if they have undergone gender reassignment surgery.

It recently emerged that US Customs and Border Protection had ordered airlines to ignore ‘X’ gender markers on bookings when submitting passenger information to the agency through the Advance Passenger Information System for international travel.

While passports with an X gender marker remain valid travel documents to enter the United States, the agency has told airlines to replace ‘X’ markers with either ‘M’ or ‘F’ when submitting data to CBP.

It has been more than 21 years since Australia became the first country to allow citizens to choose the ‘X’ gender marker in their passports. A growing number of countries now also allow the same, including Canada, Belgium, and Iceland.