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A federal judge has expanded an injunction against the Trump administration’s anti-transgender passport policies, temporarily blocking their enforcement for trans, nonbinary, and intersex people who have or need a U.S. passport.
In an order issued Tuesday evening in the ongoing lawsuit Orr v. Trump, Massachusetts District Judge Julia Kobick expanded the preliminary injunction she issued in April, which required the State Department to issue passports that match the plaintiffs’ gender identities.
Kubick’s expanded injunction now blocks the Trump administration from denying passport gender marker changes to all trans, nonbinary, and intersex people who want an M, F, or X designation that differs from their assigned sex at birth, and who “do not have a currently valid passport, need to renew their current passport because it expires within one year, need to make changes to their passport to have the sex designation on it align with their gender identity or to reflect a name change, or need to apply for another passport because their passport was lost, stolen, or damaged.”
The State Department and current Secretary of State Marco Rubio are expressly directed under the injunction to “to process and issue passports […] consistent with the State Department’s policy as of January 19, 2025,” and to allow passport applicants to self-declare their gender even if that information is “different from the sex assigned to those individuals under the [Trump] Passport Policy.”
Excluded from the class certification are all plaintiffs in the similar lawsuit Schlachter v. U.S. Department of State, which is currently being argued by attorneys for Lambda Legal. Kubick also did not specifically include intersex people in the class of those seeking X gender markers, writing in her opinion that because the only Orr v. Trump plaintiffs seeking X gender markers were endosex nonbinary people, it was “not clear that non-binary class representatives could fully represent the interests of intersex class members.”
“[T]he plaintiffs have introduced uncontroverted evidence of the harms that transgender and non-binary people face if they are required to use passports bearing sex designations aligning with their sex assigned at birth rather than their gender identity,” Kubick wrote in her opinion, citing expert testimony that mismatched documents put trans people at heightened risk while traveling and have negative effects on mental health.
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