District judge blocks Trump admin policy enforcing two gender rule on US passports

Biden-appointed U.S. Judge Julia Kobick issued a ruling Tuesday to temporarily block the Trump administration’s move to only allow two genders, male and female, on U.S. passports.

In line with an executive order signed by President Donald Trump proclaiming the U.S. only recognizes two genders, the Department of State eliminated the “X” designation on passport applications and suspended a policy allowing people to identify as the opposite sex or as intersex or nonbinary.

The move was widely reported by media outlets as “targeting transgender” people. In April, Kobick, who is a federal judge for the U.S. District of Massachusetts, ruled to block the policy with regard to six people who sued the administration over it. 

Her Tuesday ruling extended her previous ruling to temporarily suspend the policy for all Americans.

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Kobick stated in her ruling that the suit against the Trump administration’s policy is likely to succeed because she finds that it discriminates on the basis of sex, is “arbitrary and capricious” and “rooted in irrational prejudice toward transgender Americans.”

Kobick wrote that “transgender and non-binary people who possess passports bearing sex markers that conflict with their gender identity and expression are… significantly more likely to experience psychological distress, suicidality, harassment, discrimination, and violence” and that “obtaining gender concordant identity documents is part of the standard of care for treating gender dysphoria.”

The judge wrote that the policy would cause transgender individuals to “experience anxiety and psychological distress or fear for their safety if they were required to travel with passports bearing a sex designation corresponding to their sex assigned at birth, largely because they would effectively ‘out’ themselves every time they presented their passports.”

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Trump’s order, titled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” directed executive agencies to “recognize two sexes, male and female,” saying, “these sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality.”

Though Kobick stated in her ruling that the government failed to demonstrate that the policies are substantially related to an important government interest, Trump’s executive order states that “efforts to eradicate the biological reality of sex fundamentally attack women by depriving them of their dignity, safety, and well-being” and that “the erasure of sex in language and policy has a corrosive impact not just on women but on the validity of the entire American system.”

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“Across the country, ideologues who deny the biological reality of sex have increasingly used legal and other socially coercive means to permit men to self-identify as women and gain access to intimate single-sex spaces and activities designed for women, from women’s domestic abuse shelters to women’s workplace showers. This is wrong … Basing Federal policy on truth is critical to scientific inquiry, public safety, morale, and trust in government itself,” reads the order.