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A federal court rejected an appeal by President Donald Trump‘s administration Sept. 4 to deny transgender and nonbinary Americans passports that reflect their gender identities.
The court upheld a preliminary injunction against a policy directive from the administration requiring identity documents to reflect a person’s sex “at conception.”
“We’re thankful the court rejected this effort by the Trump administration to enforce their discriminatory and baseless policy,” said Li Nowlin-Sohl, a lawyer with the American Civil Liberties Union.
The White House had no immediate comment.
In an order, a three-judge panel of the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals wrote that the Trump administration had failed to argue the policy does not violate federal law and that the government would be “irreparably injured” if the policy were enjoined.
The administration, the judges wrote, had also failed “to engage meaningfully” with an earlier district court analysis that its passport policy is rooted in an “unconstitutional animus toward transgender Americans.”
In June, a federal judge has blocked the Trump administration from limiting passport sex markers. The ruling June 17 from U.S. District Judge Julia Kobick means that transgender or nonbinary people who are without a passport or need to apply for a new one can request a male, female or “X” identification marker rather than being limited to the marker that matches the gender assigned at birth.
The State Department changed its passport policy to “request the applicant’s biological sex at birth,” rather than permit applicants to self-identify their sex, and to only allow them to be listed as male or female.
Before Trump, the State Department for more than three decades allowed people to update the sex designation on their passports.
