A group of seven people have filed a class action against President Donald Trump, seeking to overturn his policy of disallowing gender marker changes on passports and the use of the "X" marker to denote gender.
The defendants are Trump in his official capacity as president, the State Department and Secretary of State Marco Rubio. The lawsuit was filed in U.S. District Court in Boston.
Trump's executive order requires government-issued identification documents, including passports, to adhere to its definition of sex: "an individual's immutable biological classification as either male or female." That designation, the order states, happens "at conception."
Within 24 hours of the executive order, the State Department began holding some documents (including passports) submitted by transgender, intersex and nonbinary people as well as rejecting other applications, according to the American Civil Liberties Union. Some were issued passports marked with their sex assigned at birth, the ACLU said.
More than 1,500 transgender people or their family members have contacted the ACLU concerned about getting passports reflecting their identity, the organization said.
The lawsuit was filed by the ACLU, ACLU of Massachusetts and law firm Covington & Burling on behalf of seven people. The suit describes the Trump administration's policy as "abrupt, discriminatory and dangerous."
It argues the policy violates the First Amendment of the Constitution, the Administrative Procedures Act and the rights of transgender, intersex and nonbinary people under the U.S. Constitution's Due Process Clause and Equal Protection Clause.
"The plaintiffs in this case have had their lives disrupted by a chaotic policy clearly motivated by animus that serves zero public interest," said Sruti Swaminathan, a staff attorney for the ACLU's LGBTQ & HIV Project. "Our clients need to travel for work, school and family, and forcing them to carry documents that directly contradict what they know about themselves to be true -- or withhold those documents altogether -- is a blatant effort to violate their privacy and deny them their freedom to be themselves."