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transgender
Supreme Court Allows Trump to Impose Anti-Trans Passport Policy
“This decision will cause immediate, widespread, and irreparable harm to all those who are being denied accurate identity documents,” said a lawyer for the ACLU.
Nov 06, 2025
The US Supreme Court issued an emergency order Thursday upholding President Donald Trump's discriminatory policy barring transgender and nonbinary Americans from changing the gender listed on their passports from the gender assigned to them at birth.
Reversing a lower court decision blocking the policy in June, the six conservative justices assessed in an unsigned majority opinion that by requiring passports to reflect a person's sex at birth, the State Department "is merely attesting to a historical fact without subjecting anyone to differential treatment."
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote the dissent, which was joined by the two other liberals, Justices Elena Kagan and Sonya Sotomayor. Lamenting the Trump administration's "routine" reliance on the court to issue emergency rulings, Brown wrote that she would have denied the request, because “the documented real-world harms to these plaintiffs obviously outweigh the government’s unexplained (and inexplicable) interest in immediate implementation of the passport policy.”
Last month, a group of transgender and nonbinary plaintiffs, represented by the ACLU, requested that the court reject the Trump administration's petition for a stay on the lower court's ruling blocking the policy. That ruling had come after transgender and nonbinary plaintiffs testified that they were afraid to submit passport applications to the government as a result of the policy.
"Forcing transgender people to carry passports that out them against their will increases the risk that they will face harassment and violence and adds to the considerable barriers they already face in securing freedom, safety, and acceptance," said Jon Davidson, senior counsel for the ACLU’s LGBTQ & HIV Project.
The attorneys argued last month before the Supreme Court that the policy "irrationally undermines the very purpose of passports—identifying a US citizen when they travel” and also is “motivated by anti-transgender animus.”
That animus has been on display since Trump's first day in office this term, when he signed an executive order declaring that his administration would only recognize “two sexes, male and female," based on one's “biological classification” at birth.
The passport policy has already led to confusion, which the actress Hunter Schafer—a transgender woman—put on display in February, when she was issued a passport that identified her as male in conflict with both her appearance and other legal documents like her driver's license.
“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, following the Supreme Court's ruling Thursday. “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.”
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Trans Plaintiffs Call On Supreme Court to Reject Trump's 'Discriminatory' Passport Restrictions
"The administration’s attempts to deny that right to transgender, nonbinary, and intersex people has no basis in law or policy," said one lawyer.
Oct 06, 2025
A group of transgender plaintiffs is calling on the US Supreme Court to reject the Trump administration's request to lift a judge's order blocking what they describe as a "discriminatory" passport policy.
The US State Department earlier this year announced that it would bar transgender Americans from changing the gender listed on their passports from the gender assigned to them at birth. Several transgender plaintiffs, represented by attorneys from the ACLU, quickly filed for an injunction against the policy, which was granted by a lower court and upheld by the 1st Circuit Court of Appeals.
In asking the Supreme Court to reject the Trump administration's request for a stay, the ACLU attorneys argue that the passport policy "irrationally undermines the very purpose of passports—identifying a US citizen when they travel" and also is "motivated by antitransgender animus."
The ACLU attorneys are asking for the injunction to be upheld so that transgender and nonbinary Americans can continue to either change the designated gender on their passports or receive a passport with a gender marked as "X."
Jessie Rossman, legal director at the ACLU of Massachusetts, said that the injunction should be upheld because the administration's policy would "cause immediate, irreparable harm" if it came into effect.
"Transgender, nonbinary, and intersex Americans rely on accurate identity documents to travel with safety, privacy, and dignity," Rossman said. "We are asking the Supreme Court to reject this request for a stay and preserve the injunction issued below so our clients will be spared profound disruption and distress while their case proceeds."
Li Nowlin-Sohl, staff attorney for the ACLU’s LGBTQ and HIV Project, urged the Supreme Court to follow the lead of the lower courts, which "made abundantly clear how discriminatory and baseless the State Department's new policy is and the harm it poses for hundreds of thousands of people like our clients."
"People across the country depend on identity documents that accurately reflect their identity—who they are in their workplaces, their schools, and their communities," Nowlin-Sohl emphasized. "The administration’s attempts to deny that right to transgender, nonbinary, and intersex people has no basis in law or policy, and we’ll continue to fight this policy until it is permanently defeated."
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Trump Backs Pride Flag Ban as Allies Spread False Claims Tying Transgender People to Violence
One rights advocate noted that the creator of the flag the president said he'd consider banning recently left the US due to fears of persecution under the Trump administration.
Sep 17, 2025
After false claims spread last week that a transgender person was behind the fatal shooting of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, US President Donald Trump and his allies are continuing to push the erroneous narrative that the transgender community is a danger to the American public.
Trump on Monday said that he'd consider banning LGBTQ pride flags as his political allies ratcheted up dehumanizing rhetoric.
During an exchange in the Oval Office, Real America's Voice correspondent Brian Glenn showed Trump a photo of a trans flag currently on display in Washington, DC, and claimed that "a lot of people are very threatened" by it.
"Would you be opposed to taking this flag down, up and down the streets of DC?" Glenn asked.
"Well, I wouldn't be," Trump replied. "Then they'll sue and they'll get freedom of speech stuff, you know, so that'll happen. But I would have no problem with it."
Trump then pivoted to saying that he wanted anyone who burned an American flag to "go to jail immediately."
The day after the president signaled his support for banning transgender pride flags, Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-Texas) likened the transgender rights movement to a “cancer” and suggested detaining all transgender people in the United States.
In an interview with Newsmax, Jackson baselessly said that transgender women "have an underlying level of aggressiveness" and suggested they be forcibly committed to mental institutions.
"We have to treat these people," he said. "We have to get them off the streets, and we have to get them off the internet, and we can't let them communicate with each other. I'm all about free speech, but this is a virus, this is a cancer that's spreading across this country."
In response to Trump's attack on the transgender flag, ACLU communications strategist Gillian Branstetter pointed out that the transgender activist who created the symbol, Monica Helms, recently left the US "for fear of her safety as a trans person under Trump."
After the assassination of Kirk—who also falsely connected transgender people to mass shootings with no evidence—right-wing commentators quickly reacted by claiming the attacker was transgender and federal agents reported early on in their investigation that symbols of "transgender ideology" were found at the crime scene—a claim that was amplified by the Wall Street Journal.
In reality, mass shootings carried out by transgender individuals represent a minuscule fraction of the total number of mass shootings carried out in the US, and there is no evidence that transgender people are disproportionately likely to engage in acts of violence.
Laura Loomer, once a fringe far-right internet commentator and conspiracy theorist who is now an influential informal adviser to the president, has also been ramping up attacks against the transgender movement, and she even went so far this week as to demand that gender-affirming care be completely banned by executive order.
"It’s time to designate the transgender movement as a terrorist movement," she wrote in a social media post. "Trans people are a threat to society. We can’t allow them to continue killing people. They need to be socially ostracized and the president should make medical transitioning ILLEGAL in our country."
Conservative attacks on the transgender movement have persisted in the wake of the murder of right-wing activist Charlie Kirk, despite the fact that the alleged killer, Tyler Robinson, was not himself transgender.
Evidence released by prosecutors on Tuesday showed that Robinson's transgender partner refused Robinson's request to delete incriminating text messages the two had exchanged. The partner subsequently shared these messages with law enforcement.
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