On Inauguration Day, President Trump issued an executive order (titled “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government”) that declared that “It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female.” Among its many provisions, Trump’s executive order directs that passports shall “accurately reflect the holder’s sex.” Consistent with that directive, the State Department revised the policy it had adopted in 2021: passport applicants can no longer obtain a passport that reflects a gender identity that differs from their sex, and an option of X is no longer available as a sex marker.

In Orr v. Trump, seven individuals who identify as transgender or non-binary challenged the State Department’s new policy on multiple grounds. In an order on Friday, federal district judge Julia Kobick (of the District of Massachusetts) ruled that the policy violates the equal protection principles of the Fifth Amendment, the Administrative Procedure Act, and, yes, even the Paperwork Reduction Act. She granted a preliminary injunction in favor of six of the seven individual plaintiffs. (The seventh plaintiff has a passport that identifies her as male that is not due to expire until 2028, so she does not need immediate relief.) That injunction requires the State Department to issue them passports “with an ‘M, ‘F,’ or ‘X’ sex marker that aligns with their gender identity.”

Judge Kobick purports to assess whether the new passport policy can be justified by any of the purposes expressed in the executive order. She somehow thinks it “obvious” that the policy “has no relation” to the stated purpose of preventing men who self-identify as women from “gain[ing] access to to intimate single-sex spaces and activities designed for women, from women’s domestic abuse shelters to women’s workplace showers.” But given that a passport is a widely accepted form of identification, I don’t see how her proposition is obvious or correct.

Judge Kobick likewise hastily dismisses the government’s interest in “maintaining a consistent definition of sex across the federal government.” She reduces to a mere “administrative convenience” the goal of having an individual consistently identified across federal government agencies.

Kobick also condemns the executive order for its supposed “animus” against transgender individuals. But it is difficult to see how what she calls animus is anything more than rejection of radical transgender ideology.

Kobick’s own bias is evident in her opening sentence, which asserts: “For over thirty years, transgender Americans have been able to obtain a passport from the Department of State that reflects their gender identity rather than the sex they were assigned at birth.” But the sentences that follow contradict that sweeping proposition: From 1992 to 2010, only transgender individuals who “submit[ted] evidence of surgical reassignment” could receive a passport that reflected their gender identity rather than their biological sex, and from 2010 until 2021, only those who provided “a certification from a physician that they were receiving appropriate clinical treatment for gender transition” could do so. It’s far from clear that Kobick would allow either of those policies to re-adopted.

Alas, the very liberal First Circuit, which consists entirely of Democratic appointees, is very unlikely to reverse Kobick’s ruling. (Kobick herself was appointed by Joe Biden to the district court in 2023.)