Read more at Erin in the Morning.
The State Department quietly updated its website this week to signal that the Trump administration may move to invalidate passports held by transgender Americans, following a Supreme Court emergency ruling that overturned earlier protections on gender-marker updates. The change was first spotted by journalist Aleksandra, who writes as Transitics on Substack. Until recently, the website assured transgender passport holders that their documents would “remain valid until [their] expiration date.” As of Thursday morning, that language had been replaced with: “A passport is valid for travel until its date of expiration, until you replace it, or until we invalidate it under federal regulations.” The new phrasing has sparked alarm across the transgender community, with one government source telling Erin in the Morning that there is growing interest within the administration in exploring some level of revocations.
The change comes one week after the Supreme Court issued an emergency ruling allowing the Trump administration’s passport restrictions on transgender people to take effect. In that decision, the Court concluded that the administration is likely to prevail in ongoing litigation, and rejected the argument that the policy was driven by “a bare desire to harm a politically unpopular group.” This conclusion stands in stark contrast to the administration’s own executive orders enabling the passport crackdown, which describe transgender people as inherently “wrong,” “dishonorable,” and “socially coercive.”
“The Court ignores these critical limits on its equitable discretion today. The Government seeks to enforce a questionably legal new policy immediately, but it offers no evidence that it will suffer any harm if it is temporarily enjoined from doing so, while the plaintiffs will be subject to imminent, concrete injury if the policy goes into effect,” responded Justice Jackson in her dissent.
Previously, there were signs that a Trump administration victory in court could trigger efforts to invalidate transgender people’s passports. As first reported by Erin in the Morning, a single paragraph in a government filing stated that “if the government prevails in this case and the Department proceeds to revoke and replace passports issued pursuant to the preliminary injunction, the Department will incur additional administrative costs.” At the time, some observers dismissed this as routine legal positioning. But the State Department’s latest website change suggests the administration may, in fact, be preparing to take exactly that step.
One government source familiar with internal discussions said such conversations are indeed underway, though any revocation effort would be difficult to carry out and would almost certainly ensnare some cisgender people by mistake. According to the source, the most likely targets would be passport holders with X markers and those who updated their documents through the affidavit process—a temporary pathway created under lower-court rulings that allowed transgender people to obtain corrected passports if they signed a sworn statement attesting to their gender identity. At the time, EITM reported that the State Department was collecting data on every person who signed the affidavit in case a ruling like this arrived, enabling the government to potentially invalidate those passports. Now, that appears to be one of the avenues the administration is actively considering.
For those who updated their passports before this administration, any attempt to revoke those documents would be far more complicated. The process would be costly, the relevant information is not easily accessible, and such actions would almost certainly run into additional legal hurdles and face separate court challenges. And for anyone whose passport the government does seek to change, the law guarantees an appeal with a hearing on request—an extraordinarily expensive and resource-intensive process for an agency that is not equipped to handle a surge of such cases.
When asked what the process would look like for transgender people traveling overseas if their passports were revoked, the source told EITM that those individuals would likely be contacted and instructed to report to the nearest U.S. embassy or consulate to replace their passport or receive special guidance. Such a requirement could severely disrupt international travel for transgender people. For now, however, any move in this direction appears to be weeks or even months away—if the administration chooses to pursue it at all.
Meanwhile, the case will continue in the lower courts, a process that could drag on for years. And while those courts could, in theory, rule in favor of transgender plaintiffs, recent Supreme Court actions suggest the justices are prepared to side with the administration on virtually any policy targeting trans people. The Court is already set to hear a case in January that will determine whether transgender Americans receive equal protection under the law at all, and the memory of the Skrmetti decision—upholding bans on trans youth care—still hangs heavily over the legal landscape. In the meantime, transgender people in the United States are left to navigate shifting rules in nearly every aspect of daily life under an administration and a Republican Party intent on making that life as difficult as possible.
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