The U.S. Supreme Court has allowed the Trump-era policy banning transgender people from updating the gender markers on their passports to take effect. The decision will cause “irreparable harm,” advocates say.
The ruling, issued Thursday, lifts an injunction that had temporarily blocked the policy from being enforced. Now transgender, nonbinary, and intersex Americans are once again unable to access accurate federal ID documents, a basic right that has been recognized in U.S. passport policy for over 30 years.
“This decision will cause immediate, widespread and irreparable harm to all those who are being denied accurate identity documents,” said Jessie Rossman, legal director of the ACLU of Massachusetts. “The Trump administration’s policy is an unlawful attempt to dehumanize, humiliate and endanger transgender, nonbinary and intersex Americans, and we will continue to seek its ultimate reversal in the courts.”
Since 1992, transgender individuals have been able to update gender markers on passports. In 2021, the “X” marker was introduced to reflect nonbinary identities. But in January, the Trump administration moved to reverse that progress, attempting to limit gender markers strictly to “male” or “female,” and declared that gender designations on federal IDs would be fixed at birth, a move widely condemned by civil rights organizations as transphobic and medically baseless.
The American Civil Liberties Union swiftly challenged the policy in court, winning a temporary injunction that kept the restrictions from being enforced until now.
Justices Ketanji Brown Jackson, Elena Kagan, and Sonia Sotomayor dissented from the majority ruling, with Justice Jackson sharply questioning the rationale for the rollback.
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“How urgent can this interest be,” she wrote, “when the Passport Policy itself allows transgender Americans who already have passports with sex markers reflecting their current gender identity to continue using those passports until they expire?”
Legal experts and LGBTQ+ advocates warn the policy shift carries real-life consequences.
According to the 2015 U.S. Transgender Survey, 22 percent of trans people whose ID did not match their gender presentation reported facing harassment, assault, or denial of services when asked to show identification.
From job applications and airport screenings to renting an apartment or voting, for those who must navigate everyday life without documents that reflect who they are, the stakes are both deeply personal and materially dangerous.
“This isn’t just about passports,” said a local Pittsburgh trans advocate who asked to remain anonymous. “This is about our right to exist, to move through the world safely and authentically. When the government tells us we don’t have the right to name ourselves, it’s an act of violence.”
For now, the decision marks another rollback in a broader pattern of attacks on trans rights from healthcare bans to book censorship to bathroom bills that have escalated across the country in recent years.
