By Chantelle Billson
Copyright thepinknews
The Trump administration has petitioned the US Supreme Court to enforce the president’s policy aimed at banning passports with gender markers for trans and non-binary people.
The Justice Department filed an emergency request to lift a federal judge’s order that has prevented the State Department ending the use of “X” markers on passports and from stopping transgender men and women obtaining documents showing their gender identity.
This is the latest legal wrangle over an executive order signed by Donald Trump soon after he returned to the White House, in which he proclaimed that there were only two genders and these that were “unchangeable”.
However, in June, building on a ruling she made earlier this year, US district judge Julia Kobick ruled that the State Department was discriminating against six trans and non-binary plaintiffs on the basis of sex, by following the executive order.
Now, despite the Boston-based 1st US Circuit Court of Appeals declining earlier this month to put the injunction on hold, the administration has claimed in court papers that the judge’s order “has no basis in law or logic”, Reuters reported.
“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,” Justice Department lawyers claimed.
During his inaugural address on 20 January, Trump said there were only two genders, adding that he would end “government policy of trying to socially engineer race and gender into every aspect of public and private life”.
Among the directives of other executive orders, Trump looked to scrap diversity, equity and inclusion policies, end birth-right citizenship, which guarantees citizenship to anyone born on US soil, withdraw the country from the World Health Organization, and pardon those convicted of crimes surrounding events on 6 January 2021.
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