The day after President Donald Trump returned to office, Lisa Suhay took her 21-year-old daughter, Mellow, to a passport office in Norfolk, Virginia, where they live.
Getting a passport for Mellow, who is transgender, was urgent.
In an executive order Trump signed the night before, the president used a narrow definition of the sexes instead of a broader conception of gender. The order says a person is male or female and it rejects the idea that someone can transition from the sex assigned at birth to another gender. The framing is in line with many conservatives’ views but at odds with major medical groups and policies under former President Joe Biden.
Her family wants Mellow to be able to leave the country if things became unbearable for transgender people in the U.S. as the federal government increasingly moves not to recognize them.
“If the worst was to come to worst and things were to threaten my life,” she said, “I would have some way out.”
Trump’s Jan. 20 order, which questions the existence of transgender and nonbinary people, created confusion and pain for Mellow and others seeking new, renewed or updated passports. A group of impacted people challenged the policy with a lawsuit filed Friday in federal court in Boston.
The State Department quickly stopped issuing travel documents with the “X” gender marker preferred by many nonbinary people, who don’t identify as strictly male or female. The department also stopped allowing people to change the gender listed on their passport or get new ones that reflect their gender rather than their sex assigned at birth.
Applications that had already been submitted seeking gender marker changes were put on hold. The State Department also replaced its webpage with information for “LGBTQI+” travelers to just “LGB,” removing any reference to transgender or intersex people.
Knowing about the policy change, Mellow checked the box for “male,” even though that’s at odds with her life and her state-issued driver’s license.
“We had to swear oath to the fact that the information that we presented was true, even if what we had to do was not truthful to ourselves” Mellow said. “It was emotional because it was in a way lying to yourself.”
Her mother worries that Mellow might not be granted a passport — or that it could create legal problems if her documents don’t match or because she swore to something that’s not true.
The passport policy is among several actions Trump has taken since returning to office that could stifle rights and legal recognition of transgender, intersex and nonbinary people.
The same order that seeks to define the sexes to exclude them would also require housing transgender women in prison in men’s facilities. Additional orders could open the door to kicking transgender service members out of the military, barring the use of federal taxpayer money to provide gender-affirming care to transgender people under 19 and keeping transgender girls and women out of girls and women’s sports competitions.
The lawsuit filed Friday by ACLU lawyers challenging the passport change contends that the order discriminates against people based on their sex or transgender status, depriving them of their rights to equal protection, privacy and speech. It also contends the abrupt policy change violates the requirement for a 60-day notice and comment period.
Trump’s administration has said the policy would not affect existing unexpired passports.
Groups such as New Jersey-based Garden State Equality warned transgender and nonbinary members that they could be at risk when returning to the U.S. after traveling abroad, particularly if their passport has the “X” gender marker.
Elise Flatland, a mother of four in the Kansas City suburb of Olathe, Kansas, is still waiting to hear about whether a passport has been approved for her 12-year-old transgender son.
The family filled out the application in December at the same time they requested passports for two of their other children. The others have arrived, but his has not. Flatland said it’s essential to have the travel document so the family could go to another country for gender-affirming care if it becomes unavailable in the U.S.
It would also help her son in other ways. A 2023 Kansas law left them unable to change his birth certificate, so he has no government-issued document that reflects his gender. Having one could help answer fellow sixth graders who question his identity, more so since Trump was elected in November.
“There is definitely a sense of everyone being emboldened in their anti-trans, anti-LGBTQ attitudes, and they have no need to act politely in public,” Flatland said.
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