Transgender Americans File Suit Over Trump Passport Policy

A proposed class of transgender, intersex, and nonbinary Americans have sued the Trump administration over its order requiring passports to show a person’s sex assigned at birth.

The order endangers those who don’t present or live as the sex designated on their passports, and violates their rights to equal protection, travel, privacy, and speech, the complaint filed Friday in the US District Court for the District of Massachusetts said. It also disregards the Administrative Procedure Act, the complaint said.

“For many of the people now barred from receiving a passport unless they accept one with the Trump Administration’s inaccurate sex designation, they are forced to ‘out’ themselves over and over again, harming them and imposing wrongful barriers to travel,” the complaint said.

Officials may question the validity of a person’s passport if their appearance seems not to match the sex designated on the document, the complaint said, threatening their ability to enter or leave countries and putting them at risk of arrest, serious psychological harm, or physical violence.

The plaintiffs include transgender, nonbinary, and intersex Americans who say their plans to travel for medical appointments, work, education, or family are now jeopardized.

Their passports have been edited or denied, or they have avoided submitting their passports for renewal out of fear they’ll be suspended or unusable, according to the complaint.

They seek an order that the passport policy and executive order are unconstitutional and an order restoring the previous policy.

The executive order “is unmoored from scientific and medical reality: Transgender people, intersex people, and people who do not identify as either (or exclusively) male or female exist,” the complaint said. “Scientific and medical authorities have recognized that fact, as have courts across the country, including the U.S. Supreme Court.”

The American Civil Liberties Union and Covington & Burling LLP represents the proposed class.

The case is Orr v. Trump, D. Mass., No. 1:25-cv-10313, 2/7/25.