The Trump administration on Friday asked the Supreme Court to halt a judge's order allowing transgender and nonbinary people to choose the sex marker on their passports. The June court order, which followed an earlier injunction, allows transgender or nonbinary people to request a male, female, or "X" identification marker rather than being limited to the marker that matches the gender on their birth certificate, the AP reports.
The order from US District Judge Julia Kobick in Boston came after a lawsuit challenging an executive order from President Trump that required people choose "male" or "female" based on the designations on their birth certificate. The plaintiffs said some transgender people had seen their applications returned with changed designations and others were afraid to submit applications. The transgender actor Hunter Schafer said in February that her new passport had been issued with a male gender marker, even though she'd had female gender markers on her license and passport since she was a teenager.
In a court filing, the Justice Department said, "Private citizens cannot force the government to use inaccurate sex designations on identification documents that fail to reflect the person's biological sex—especially not on identification documents that are government property and an exercise of the president's constitutional and statutory power to communicate with foreign governments." In her order, Kobick said the policy likely violated the Constitution's equal protection clause because the policy was "rooted in irrational prejudice toward transgender Americans," as Reuters puts it.
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