By Nate Raymond, Omar Younis, Roselle Chen
BOSTON (Reuters) -When Zaya Perysian received her new passport in the mail in late January, she knew exactly who to blame for why it listed her, a transgender woman, as male: U.S. President Donald Trump.
First the California social media influencer took to TikTok to express her frustrations with what she called the “big ugly M” the U.S. State Department under Trump mandated her new passport feature. And then she sued, along with six other transgender and non-binary people who argue the policy is unconstitutional.
The 22-year-old is now waiting to see whether a federal judge in Boston agrees. The closely watched case is challenging a policy the department adopted in accordance with an executive order signed by the Republican president on his first day back in office.
That executive order directed the federal government to recognize only two, biologically distinct sexes – male and female – and directed the State Department to change its policies to only issue passports that “accurately reflect the holder’s sex.”
“This is something that has been forced upon me, basically,” Perysian said, in an interview with Reuters with her lawyer at the American Civil Liberties Union present. “And it’s really unfair and kind of crazy, but that’s why we’re fighting it.”
The U.S. State Department declined to comment. The U.S. Department of Justice, which is defending the policy in court, did not respond to requests for comment.
The administration has argued the policy does not constitute unlawful sex discrimination, does not prevent transgender people from traveling abroad, and is vital to addressing the concerns Trump’s executive order raised that indeterminate definitions of sex undermine “longstanding, cherished legal rights and values.”
Perysian has lived as a transgender woman in all aspects of her life since 2020, according to court papers. She said she has had surgical procedures and had secured changes to other government documents like her driver’s license to match her gender identity.
She had submitted on January 23 an expedited application to update the sex designation on her passport to female. But by then, Trump was in office, and less than a week later her passport was returned to her with a notice stating her sex was “corrected on your passport application.”
“At the end of the day, I’m a woman, and I don’t care how many people agree or disagree,” she said. “I live every day as a woman. I surround myself with people who see me and respect me as a woman.”
The lawsuit she joined was filed by lawyers at the ACLU, who argued the policy unconstitutionally discriminates against transgender people and exposes them to potential harm if they travel abroad with passports reflecting a different sex designation to their gender identity.
“This executive order made it impossible for transgender, nonbinary, and intersex Americans to have accurate federal identity documents, including their passports,” said ACLU attorney Sruti Swaminathan.
Lawyers for the plaintiffs say the policy reversed decades of practice at the State Department, which for more than 30 years allowed people to update the sex designation on their passports.
In 2022, Democratic President Joe Biden’s administration allowed passport applicants for the first time to choose “X” as a neutral sex marker on their passport applications, as well as being able to self-select “M” or “F” for male or female.
Benjamin Takemoto, a Justice Department lawyer, previously told U.S. District Judge Julia Kobick, who is overseeing the lawsuit, that Trump has “broad discretion to determine rules for issuing passports,” allowing him to scrap Biden’s policy to ensure a consistent approach to identifying individuals throughout the federal government.
But during a March 25 hearing, Kobick, a Biden appointee, appeared skeptical of that argument. Kobick, who has yet to rule, at the hearing sharply questioned how the policy could not be considered discriminatory.
“It seems to deny that gender identity is something worth recognizing,” she said.
(Reporting by Nate Raymond in Boston, Omar Younis in Los Angeles and Roselle Chen in New York; Editing by Stephen Coates, Alexia Garamfalvi and Rosalba O’Brien)
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