The Supreme Court's conservative majority issued an emergency order Thursday allowing the Trump administration to stop issuing passports for trans people with their stated gender identity on them, and Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson has again made her disgusted feelings known in a dissent.

In an unsigned emergency order Thursday, the Supreme Court issued a stay of a lower court's injunction barring the Trump administration from enacting a policy hostile to trans and nonbinary people, requiring that only their sex at birth be displayed on their passports. While the case still has not been decided, the court's six-justice conservative majority made their opinion clear in the emergency order on the case's merits, indicating that they side with the government's claim of "harm," and don't acknowledge any potential harm to individuals seeking passports.

"Displaying passport holders’ sex at birth no more offends equal protection principles than displaying their country of birth," the majority writes. "In both cases, the Government is merely attesting to a historical fact without subjecting anyone to differential treatment. And on this record, respondents have failed to establish that the Government’s choice to display biological sex 'lack[s] any purpose other than a bare... desire to harm a politically unpopular group.'"

Justice Jackson wrote a dissent, which was joined by the other two liberal justices Sotomayor and Kagan, that follows a trend in her dissents of ringing the alarm bell about Trump's fascist, discriminatory tendencies and her fellow justices' complicity in them.

"As is becoming routine, the Government seeks an emergency stay of a District Court’s preliminary injunction pending appeal," Jackson writes. "As is also becoming routine, this Court misunderstands the assignment."

"Our task in deciding stay applications is not simply to make a 'back-of-the-napkin assessment of which party has the better legal argument,'" Jackson continues. "Rather, the actual nub of the project (if we choose to involve ourselves in the matter at all) is to fairly determine whether the applicant’s showing justifies our extraordinary intervention."

Jackson goes on to say that the conservative justices are wrong to suggest that, on balance, the government suffers more harm from not being able to enact its bigoted policy than the harm individuals may face by having to show a passport in a foreign country that outs them as being trans or gender non-conforming.

"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," Jackson writes, adding that the court is clearly ignoring the "harm to be inflicted on the most vulnerable party."

"Such senseless sidestepping of the obvious equitable outcome has become an unfortunate pattern," Jackson concludes. "So, too, has my own refusal to look the other way when basic principles are selectively discarded."

The case was brought by the ACLU in federal court in Massachusetts following Trump's executive order to roll the policy back to the 1980s, requiring passports to show only one's gender as assigned at birth.

The lower court issued an order in June blocking the policy from taking effect, and that was upheld by an appeals court in September.

As the New York Times notes, the State Department did not include gender markers on passports until 1971, in a move that was attributed to "unisex" hairstyles and a growing fashion that made one's gender less obvious among American passport holders. Trans people have been able to get passports issued with their proper gender identity since the 1990s, with the government initially requiring proof that gender transition surgery had taken place to display a gender other than what was on a birth certificate. Under Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the policy changed in 2010 to require only a doctor's letter stating that the applicant had undergone "appropriate clinical treatment for gender transition."

In the first year of the Biden administration, 2021, the State Department began issuing passports with the gender-neutral marker "X," and the policy was loosened further the following year allowing applicants to choose any gender marker they liked.

In other words, what the Trump administration wants is not to undo a Biden Era policy, but to roll back the clock on State Department policy nearly 40 years in a baldfaced gesture to please hard-right conservatives and transphobes.

This is likely to be another highly consequential court term when it comes to the civil rights of trans people, following last term's devastating decision for the cause of gender-affirming care for minors. The court is set to hear arguments in a pair of cases out of West Virginia and Idaho challenging state laws against participation by trans athletes in girls' and women's team sports — and we already know the likely outcome there.

In a dissent in the healthcare case in June, Justice Sotomayor wrote that the court had "abandon[ed] transgender children and their families to political whims."

Previously: Supreme Court to Weigh In On Trans Athlete Controversies

Top image: Police officers stand guard outside the Supreme Court on November 5, 2025 in Washington, DC. The high court is hearing arguments on the legality of the Trump Administration's tariffs. (Photo by Andrew Harnik/Getty Images)