The U.S. Supreme Court will allow enforcement of President Donald Trump's executive order that requires passports to accurately reflect biological sex.
The ruling split the court along ideological lines, with six conservatives siding with Trump as the three liberals joined in an emotional dissent.
On the first day of his second White House term, Trump signed an executive order requiring the State Department to identify passport holders using their true, biological sex.
Trump reversed the previous administration's approach, which allowed passport holders to inaccurately identify as members of the opposite sex or even as "X."
A federal district court blocked Trump's policy from taking effect, with the judge finding it was based on nothing but pure, irrational prejudice. An appeals court declined to overturn that order, spurring Trump to seek the Supreme Court's intervention.
The Trump administration challenged the lower court's block as an affront to "scientific reality" and Trump's authority over foreign affairs.
"U.S. passports are official government documents, addressed to foreign nations. The Executive Order in this case is an exercise of power conferred on the President both by the Constitution and by statute to determine the contents of U.S. passports. Yet the court’s injunction countermands that Order -- and in so doing, interferes with the President’s foreign-policy prerogatives," Solicitor General John D. Sauer wrote.
In a brief, unsigned order, the conservative majority found that Trump's policy does not violate equal protection principles.
"Displaying passport holders’ sex at birth no more offends equal protection principles than displaying their country of birth -- in both cases, the Government is merely attesting to a historical fact without subjecting anyone to differential treatment," the majority wrote.
The justices also said they saw no evidence that Trump's policy was motivated by an arbitrary desire to inflict harm on a particular social group, as the challengers claimed.
On the other hand, the justices found that Trump faces "irreparable injury" from the lower court interfering with "an Executive Branch policy with foreign affairs implications concerning a Government document."
In an emotional, nearly 12-page dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson blasted the court's intervention as inappropriate and said it would greenlight "imminent, concrete injury."
"This Court has once again paved the way for the immediate infliction of injury without adequate (or, really, any) justification. Because I cannot acquiesce to this pointless but painful perversion of our equitable discretion, I respectfully dissent," she wrote.
Justice Jackson infamously declined to define what a woman is during her confirmation hearing.
