Trump admin asks Supreme Court to allow it to enforce passport sex designation policy

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President Donald Trump's administration on Friday asked the Supreme Court to permit enforcement of a passport policy requiring transgender and nonbinary applicants to list their sex as male or female according to their birth certificate.

Due to a lower court order, transgender and nonbinary people can receive passports with an "X" identification marker instead of male or female. The Justice Department has appealed that order, the Associated Press reported.

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In its filing on Friday, Justice Department lawyers argued, "Private citizens cannot force the government to use inaccurate sex designations on identification documents that fail to reflect the person’s biological sex — especially not on identification documents that are government property and an exercise of the President’s constitutional and statutory power to communicate with foreign governments."

On Jan. 20, President Trump signed an executive order directing the federal government to recognize only male or female designations based on "an individual’s immutable biological classification." 

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The order instructed the State Department to issue official documents, including passports, in line with that standard.

A federal judge in Massachusetts later ruled the State Department must provide transgender and nonbinary applicants with passports reflecting the gender designation they select. 

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The 1st Circuit Court of Appeals declined to block that order while the case moves forward, prompting the administration to appeal to the Supreme Court.

For more than three decades before the Trump administration, the State Department permitted people to update the sex designation on their passports.

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In 2022, the Biden administration introduced the option for applicants to choose "X" as a gender-neutral designation and to select "M" or "F" to indicate male or female, according to Reuters.

Fox News' Bill Mears and Shannon Bream contributed to this report.

Sophia Compton is a Writer at Fox News Digital. Sophia was previously a business reporter covering finance, energy and tourism and has experience as a TV news producer. She graduated with a journalism degree in 2021 from the University of Hawaii at Manoa.