Judge skeptical over Trump admin policy ending non-binary passports: ‘You’ve got to give me something’
A federal judge on Tuesday appeared skeptical that the Trump administration had solid evidence to support its decision to stop issuing passports with a non-binary ‘X’ sex marker.
“You’ve got to give me something, or else I’ll assume there’s nothing,” Massachusetts federal Judge Julia Kobick reportedly said in court in a hearing for a lawsuit challenging the policy, according to Bloomberg Law.
The administration has argued that the president has wide latitude over passport policy. They also say that the challengers can still travel abroad, but that the government “is not responsible for Plaintiffs’ choice to change their sex designation for state documents but not their passport.”
The judge appeared skeptical of this too, reportedly telling administration lawyers on Tuesday, “That’s a very sweeping argument.”
The American Civil Liberties Union, which helped bring the lawsuit, argued that the reason for the passport policy is “inexplicable to anything other than animus.”
Last month, the group helped a collection of transgender, intersex, and nonbinary people sue the administration over the passport policy, which came after Donald Trump signed an executive order mandating that the government recognize only two immutable sexes, male and female, on government documents.
They allege that the inability to update the sex marker on their passports has put them at risk during foreign travel, caused invasive questioning at airports, and prevented one plaintiff from traveling abroad to receive gender-affirming medical care.
The suit claims the Trump administration has violated equal protection, travel, privacy, and speech rights, as well as the Administrative Procedure Act.
“This is preventing me from having an accurate identification and the freedom to move about the country as well as internationally,” Ash Lazarus Orr, one of the plaintiffs, told The Associated Press. “This has really, truly impeded on my life and my freedom as well … The government is questioning who I am as a trans person.”
As The Independent has reported, critics of the administration argue that the passport policy doesn’t fall in line with present-day medical understandings of sex and gender.
Intersex people, for instance, are born with a combination of anatomical, genetic, or hormonal characteristics that do not fall into the binary categories of male or female. Mainstream medical groups like the American Medical Association recognize gender as a spectrum.
“The sex and gender executive order is ideology,” Carl Charles, a senior attorney at the advocacy group Lambda Legal, previously told The Independent. “Its ideology is, ‘Let’s ignore science. Let’s ignore the experts. Let’s ignore people’s lived experiences.’”
