A federal judge has expanded a prior order, now blocking the enforcement of a Trump-era policy that required identity documents to reflect an individual’s sex “at conception” for all transgender, nonbinary, and intersex Americans seeking to change their passport’s sex designation.
The original ruling in April allowed only six transgender and nonbinary plaintiffs, named in a federal lawsuit, to obtain passports aligning with their gender identity while their case proceeded. This lawsuit, filed in February in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, argues that the administration’s policy “is motivated by impermissible animus.”
In April, the legal team representing the plaintiffs—the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the ACLU of Massachusetts, and the law firm Covington & Burling LLP—requested the court to certify a class of individuals affected by the passport policy. They also asked for the preliminary injunction to be extended to all who are currently or may be impacted.
Judge Julia E. Kobick, an appointee of former President Biden, granted this request. In her ruling, she stated that both the initial six plaintiffs and the newly certified class “face the same injury: they cannot obtain a passport with a sex designation that aligns with their gender identity.”
When she granted the initial injunction in April, Judge Kobick noted that the federal government had failed “to demonstrate that its actions are substantially related to an important governmental interest.”
