The topic of discussion for this Constitution Monday concerns sex. Early in the current administration, President Donald Trump signed an executive order “requiring the federal government to recognize ‘male’ and ‘female’ as biological sex instead of [allowing] people to mark their perceived gender,” according to Eva Terry at the Deseret News.
The
executive order provoked a lawsuit, and a lower court in Massachusetts “blocked
the policy, claiming the new passport policy violated the Equal Protection
Clause in the Constitution and the federal Administrative Procedure Act.” On
Thursday “the U.S. Supreme Court granted an emergency stay order requiring all
new passports to display an individual’s biological sex at birth” in a 6-3
decision.
An
immediate response came from ACLU Massachusetts claimed that the ruling will “cause
immediate, widespread, and irreparable harm to all those who are being denied
accurate identity documents.” It also claimed that the new passport policy “is
an unlawful attempt to dehumanize, humiliate, and endanger transgender,
nonbinary, and intersex Americans.”
The
attorneys general in 26 states saw it differently when they filed a legal brief
with the Supreme Court. They “called sex a ‘useful category of information,’
adding that the government ‘must be able to adopt some consistent definition of
the term rather than let individuals be definitions unto themselves.”
Terry
shared a bit of history of sex markers on passports and the dissent written by
the three liberal justices. Then she noted that the new passport policy will
remain in place “until the Supreme Court issues a final ruling based on the
merits phase of litigation, which is currently at the U.S. Court of Appeals for
the First Circuit.” Meanwhile, there will be only two types of sex listed on
U.S. passports – male and female.
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