The Supreme Court Just Made Life More Dangerous for Trans Americans
Yesterday’s Supreme Court order turned my passport into both a threat to my safety and a symbol of federally sanctioned transphobia.
Yesterday afternoon, the Supreme Court made it official: it is no longer safe to be a transgender American.
Since January—when federal transphobia became the rule of law—I’ve lived with the quiet, constant fear of what could happen at a border crossing, an airport, or any checkpoint where my passport might be questioned. Yesterday, that fear became federal policy.
In an unsigned order, the Court allowed the Trump administration to enforce its new passport rule, mandating that every new U.S. passport display a person’s sex assigned at birth—not their gender identity.
My current passport lists the gender I live as. When it expires in December 2026, that protection disappears. I’ll be forced to travel with a document that outs me every time I hand it over.
And when that happens, I will not be safe. Not in America. Not abroad.
Here’s what the Court said to justify it:
“Displaying passport holders’ sex at birth no more offends equal protection principles than displaying their country of birth—in both cases, the Government is merely attesting to a historical fact without subjecting anyone to differential treatment.”
That isn’t neutrality. That’s cruelty dressed up as jurisprudence.
The Court isn’t “attesting to a historical fact.” It’s institutionalizing a lie. It’s branding transgender Americans as impostors on the most fundamental identity document we carry. It’s forcing us to live with a government-issued scarlet letter—one that invites danger every time we move through the world.
They call it “accuracy.” It’s not. It’s ideology—a weaponized fiction pretending to be data. “Sex at birth” is not a neutral descriptor; it’s a political statement crafted to erase. And this Court, fluent now in the language of dehumanization, has chosen to give that statement the force of law.
For thirty-three years, through six administrations, transgender Americans could obtain passports that reflected reality—the lived truth of who we are. That policy caused no chaos, no confusion, no crisis. What changed wasn’t practicality. What changed was power—and whose humanity this government decided was expendable.
Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, in a dissent that will be studied for generations, saw the danger the majority refused to face:
“Such senseless sidestepping of the obvious equitable outcome has become an unfortunate pattern. So, too, has my own refusal to look the other way when basic principles are selectively discarded. This Court has once again paved the way for the immediate infliction of injury without adequate (or, really, any) justification. Because I cannot acquiesce to this pointless but painful perversion of our equitable discretion, I respectfully dissent.”
She sees what they don’t—that this isn’t theoretical. It’s dangerous.
The government claims it needs “sex assigned at birth” for recordkeeping. If that were true, it would revoke every existing passport with gender-congruent markers. It hasn’t. Because this has never been about accuracy. It’s about control.
Justice Jackson again:
“Airport checkpoints are stressful and invasive for travelers under typical circumstances—even without the added friction of being forced to present government-issued identification documents that do not reflect one’s identity. Thus, by preventing transgender Americans from obtaining gender-congruent passports, the Government is doing more than just making a statement about its belief that transgender identity is ‘false.’ The Passport Policy also invites the probing, and at times humiliating, additional scrutiny these plaintiffs have experienced.”
I know exactly what she means. Airport checkpoints are already an exercise in vulnerability. I’ve had the full pat-down experience; it leaves scars you can’t see. Now I’ll have to brace myself for something worse—being outed every single time I travel, having to explain my existence to a stranger in uniform who holds the power to decide whether I can board a plane.
“Absent an injunction, the plaintiffs and the classes of transgender Americans they represent are forced to make a difficult choice that no other Americans face: use gender-incongruent passports and risk harassment and bodily invasions, on the one hand, or avoid all activities (travel, opening a bank account, renting a car, starting a new job) that may require a passport, on the other.”
That’s the choice the Court has now imposed on me—and on hundreds of thousands of us.
Risk danger, or give up freedom.
Justice Jackson didn’t mince words about the imbalance:
“The documented real-world harms to these plaintiffs obviously outweigh the Government’s unexplained (and inexplicable) interest in immediate implementation of the Passport Policy. That incongruity is where equity comes in. Because granting the stay application will be ‘of little advantage’ to the Government … while needlessly and significantly burdening the plaintiffs, equity cannot justify the Court’s intervention.”
But the majority didn’t care about equity. They cared about power.
And so here I am, left wondering what happens the next time I hand my passport to a TSA or border agent who decides the document tells a story they don’t believe. When I book a work trip overseas, I now have to calculate risk the way most people calculate airfare.
My passport doesn’t expire for another year and change, but this ruling forces me to start thinking long-term. Do I stop traveling once it does? Or do I pack my bags and make Aliyah—move to Israel—because at least there, my existence as both Jewish and transgender wouldn’t hinge on the approval of a government that has decided I’m an aberration instead of a citizen?
That’s not hyperbole. That’s the calculation this Court has imposed: exile or erasure.
This is what it means to live under a government that sees identity as a problem to be solved rather than a truth to be respected.
Today, I feel what so many trans Americans feel: fear, exhaustion, grief. But beneath that, I feel something stronger—resolve. Because Justice Jackson is right: this harm is “pointless but painful,” and it will not stand forever.
“This Court has once again paved the way for the immediate infliction of injury without adequate (or, really, any) justification.”
The Court chose cruelty. I choose survival.
We are still here. We will still fight. And someday soon, we’ll look back on this decision the same way we look at every era when power tried to erase humanity—with shame that it happened, and pride that we endured it.
They can stamp “sex at birth” on a passport. They cannot rewrite who we are.