The driving force behind this policy is hate and religious bigotry. It is explicitly designed and intended to misgender trans women, causing profound psychological harm. Forcing transgender women to list their so-called "biological sex" on passports amounts to state-sanctioned outing of deeply personal medical history—exposing transgender women to social ostracism, violence, and clearly unconstitutional discrimination.
It also enables an ex post facto application of law and policy, suddenly subjecting us to a reversal of our sex classification for actions, records, and legal statuses that were fully established long before this policy existed.
It is important to note that the concept of "biological sex" did not exist in federal law or policy until the start of the Republican moral panic around 2015–2016, when party leaders began weaponizing the term to justify targeted animus toward transgender people.
For cisgender people, this may seem like a trivial bureaucratic detail. For transgender women—especially those of us who have completed our medical and legal transition—it is an assault on a fundamental human right: the right to establish and maintain our legal identity in our true sex. That right is explicitly recognized in international human-rights instruments such as the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights, both of which the United States has pledged to uphold. Under the Supremacy Clause of the U.S. Constitution, these commitments form part of the law of the land and create binding obligations on every branch of government—including the Supreme Court, the State Department, and the presidency.
At the same time, this policy guts the obligations created by the Full Faith and Credit Clause by inviting federal agencies to disregard reissued or amended state documents and valid court orders. These orders already recognize trans women in our true sex. When a state updates its vital records, the federal government has no constitutional authority to override that action, which—under the Tenth Amendment and long-established historical practice—belongs to the states that issue those birth certificates.
For the first time in history, the Court has permitted the federal government to retroactively invalidate human rights, settled law, and both agency and court actions through executive fiat—an act that undermines constitutional protections, international human-rights commitments, and the Full Faith and Credit owed to state judgments and records.
People have the legal and constitutional right to rely on the persistence of these actions beyond the goodwill of this administration or the next. These are real people's lives—lives that should never be subjected to the fickle whims of politics or presidential animus, especially when that animus is grounded in hate and bigotry.
