Supreme Court OKs Trump's passport policy targeting transgender sex markers

• The case is another example of Trump's administration winning cases brought to the court via the "emergency docket," a truncated process that forgoes the briefings and arguments that go with traditional cases.
• The three liberal justices on the court dissented.

State of play: Trump signed an executive order earlier this year, banning the use of 'X' markers on U.S. passports — a designation that allowed transgender and nonbinary Americans to reflect their gender identity.

• U.S. District Judge Julia Kobick in June temporarily blocked the administration's policy, saying the lawsuit applied to those who "currently want, or in the future will want, a U.S. passport issued with an 'M' or 'F' sex designation that is different from the sex assigned to that individual under the Passport Policy."

What they're saying: "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," the court said in the unsigned order.

• "Such senseless sidestepping of the obvious equitable out-come has become an unfortunate pattern," Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson said in her dissent, which Justice Sonia Sotomayor and Justice Elan Kagan joined. "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," she said.
• "The Trump administration's policy serves one purpose: discrimination," the Human Rights Campaign shared in a statement. "It exists to out our transgender friends and loved ones, to make their lives more difficult, to demean and embarrass them at the border, in the airport, and throughout their daily lives."

Editor's note: This story has been updated with additional information throughout.