On Friday, the Department of Justice requested an urgent ruling over a federal judge’s decision to halt a passport policy that required the Department of State to enforce.
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According to Justice Department attorneys, the government cannot be made to “use inaccurate sex designations on identification documents,” which are “government property and a function of the president’s constitutional and statutory power to communicate with foreign governments.”
The administration’s policy is “an unjustifiable and discriminatory action that restrains the essential rights of transgender, nonbinary, and intersex citizens,” according to Jon Davidson, senior counsel for the civil liberties group ACLU, which represents the plaintiffs.
We are committed to defending those rights, including the freedom to travel safely and the freedom for everyone to be themselves, because this administration has taken escalating steps to restrict transgender people’s access to healthcare, speech, and other rights under the Constitution, he said.
The administration of former president Joe Biden’s administration wants to reverse a policy that allowed passport applicants to choose “X” as a neutral sex marker on their passport applications and to choose either “M” or “F” for male or female.
According to the UCLA Williams Institute, 1.6 million people in the US identify as transgender, 1.2 million as non-binary, and 5 million as intersex.
Executive order
The president signed an executive order in January that mandated the government to recognize only two biologically distinct sexes, which is one of several in which the president is at odds with.
According to Trump’s executive order, “sex” refers to an individual’s “immutable biological classification as either male or female” and requires that the State Department issue passports that “accurately reflect the holder’s sex” in accordance with that definition.
A number of transgender people have reported receiving passports with inaccurate gender markers as a result of the order.
Despite using the female gender marker on both her driver’s license and previous passport, transgender actor Hunter Schafer claimed in February that her new passport had been issued with a male gender marker.
Following a lawsuit filed by nonbinary and transgender people, some of whom claimed they were afraid to submit applications, a federal judge in June blocked the Trump administration policy.
The judge’s order was reinstated by an appeals court.
The Trump administration requested on Friday that the Supreme Court suspend the lawsuit’s proceedings.
According to Solicitor General D. John Sauer, “The Constitution does not forbid the government from defining sex according to an individual’s biological classification.”
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Source: Aljazeera
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