Trump cannot limit passport sex markers for many transgender and non -binary people, judge the rules

Boston – A federal judge prevented the Trump administration from Limit the sexual markers of passports for many transgender and non -binary Americans.

The decision of Tuesday of the American district judge Julia Kobick means that transgender or non -binary people who are without passport or who need to apply for a new one can request a marker of male, female or “x” identification rather than being limited to the marker that corresponds to the genre attributed to the birth.

In an executive decree signed in January, the president used a close definition of the sexes instead of a broader design of the genre. The ordinance said that a person is a man or a woman and rejected the idea that someone can go from sex to birth to another sex.

Kobick first published a preliminary injunction against politics last month, but this decision was only applied to six people who joined the American Liberties Union in a trial on passports policy.

In Tuesday’s decision, she agreed to extend the injunction to include transgender or non -binary people who are currently without a valid passport, those whose passport expires in a year, and those who need to ask for a passport because theirs was lost or stolen or because they must change their name or sexual designation.

The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comments.

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The government has not shown that blocking its policy would cause him a constitutional injury, wrote Kobick or harm the relations of executive power with other countries.

Transgender and non -binary people covered by the preliminary injunction, for their part, have shown that passport policy violates their constitutional rights to equal protection, Kobick said.

“Even assuming that a preliminary injunction inflicts constitutional damage to the executive power, such damage is the consequence of the adoption by the State Department of a passport policy which probably violates the constitutional rights of thousands of Americans,” wrote Kobick.

Kobick, who was appointed by former President Joe Biden, fell on the side of the ACLU request for a preliminary injunction, which remains the action while the trial takes place.

“The executive decree and the passport policy on their face classify passport applicants on the basis of sex and must therefore be examined under intermediate judicial supervision,” Kobick wrote during the preliminary injunction published earlier this year. “This standard obliges the government to demonstrate that its actions are substantially linked to a significant government interest. The government has not respected this standard. “

In his trial, the ACLU described how a woman made her return her passport with a male designation while others are too afraid of submitting their passports because they fear that their candidates are suspended and that their passports held by the State Department.

Another posted in their passport on January 9 and asked to change his name and their sexual designation of the man to the woman. This person was still waiting for his passport, said aclu in the trial and feared missing a family wedding and a botanical conference this year.

In response to the trial, the Trump administration argued that the change in passport policy “does not violate the equal protection guarantees of the Constitution”. He also argued that the president had a large discretionary power in the passport policy and that the applicants would not be injured because they are always free to travel abroad.