Back in January, the Trump Administration issued an executive order meant to erase the legal standing of transgender people. It redefined terms like “male” and “female” — inventing new definitions that extended to federal identification documents like passports, visas, and Global Entry cards, meaning trans people could no longer obtain such ID with a proper gender marker. That executive order was challenged, and its enforcement stayed while the matter worked its way to the supreme court. Now, though, the ruling is in: Trans people cannot have properly updated federal identification.
The executive order, entitled “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism And Restoring Biological Truth To The Federal Government,” was blocked from enforcement on IDs shortly after its pronouncement. The Trump administration has since sued to be allowed to enforce the order, which is the case that the Supreme Court decided on today. The ruling came in as a shadow docket decision, with no author willing to put their name on it, though justices Jackson, Sotomayor, and Kagan all dissented.
An executive order wrought from pure malice
The executive order redefined the terms “male” and “female” to refer exclusively to “an individual’s immutable biological classification as either male or female” — a definition that just gets circular as it tries to get more detailed. The intent here, though, is not to shore up legal language in any sort of biology. Its intent is the erasure of trans people, a goal the U.S. government has now been allowed to carry out on the stage of federal identification.
As of now, it’s not clear what enforcement of this policy will actually look like, though it can be assumed that the State Department will not issue new passports with gender markers that don’t match an applicant’s birth certificate. What this means for applicants who have already updated their birth certificates in states that still allow such changes, or for people who already have valid passports with updated gender markers — like me — remains to be seen.
The right wing of the United States has waged a scorched-earth war on trans people for years, and this is simply the latest effort by the Trump administration to erase trans people from daily life. The administration likely understands that it’s impossible to force a trans person to stop being trans, the same way it’s impossible to force a gay person to be straight, but that it is possible to force people into the closet or an early grave. Whether I’m allowed to fly within the United States is now an open question, whether federal agencies will recognize my ID, but one thing’s certain: The State Department will have to pry my accurate passport out of my cold dead hands.
