In a move that exposes a disregard for biological reality, a lack of understanding about the separation of powers, and contempt for what is – or is NOT – written in the U.S. Constitution, Julia Kobick, a judge for the Federal District Court of Massachusetts, April 18 sided with the American Civil Liberties Union's motion for a preliminary injunction against Donald Trump making U.S. passports conform to biological reality, telling him to make no changes until a suit over the issue can be adjudicated in the U.S. “justice” system.
The Associated Press Reports that the order”
“…blocked the Trump administration from enacting a policy that bans the use of the ‘X’ marker used by many nonbinary people on passports as well as the changing of gender markers.”
And they also offer key background, but, of course, slant it to avoid mentioning what is biological reality, opting, instead, to adopt a pretense of “balance” by mentioning that the Trump policy change is frowned upon by “major medical groups.”
“In an executive order signed in January, 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.”
Do you need “major medical groups” to tell you the difference between a biological male and a biological female?
Do security personnel, police, and EMTs need amorphous, fantastical sobriquets to handle potentially life-threatening situations, or do they need biological facts?
On behalf of seven clients, the ACLU claims the policy:
“…would effectively mean transgender, nonbinary and intersex Americans could not get an accurate passport.”
But this assertion hinges on the idea that “accuracy” in identification documents should prioritize self-perception over biological fact. It’s a curious stance, one that assumes the state’s role is to validate personal identity.
And one that the tax-consuming judge finds to be meritorious, and something that the Trump policy change would jeopardize:
"The Executive Order and the Passport Policy on their face classify passport applicants on the basis of sex and thus must be reviewed under intermediate judicial scrutiny," Kobick wrote. "That standard requires the government to demonstrate that its actions are substantially related to an important governmental interest. The government has failed to meet this standard."
In other words, is one to take it that a government-issued “identity document” -- a document that many other nations check when arriving in their airports and seaports, and something the US government requires in order to reenter the nation – is not supposed to identify the sex of the individual at all? Even as the government pushes REAL ID biometrics on us as a requirement to get into federal buildings or on planes (which is completely contrary to the Bill of Rights), or, perhaps soon, onto trains, this judge tells us that one of the key markers of identity, being male or female, is not important for the actual process of governmental identification.
If you detect conflicting signals from the government overlords who deign us too foolish to handle our own lives and security, who force us to pay for courts, and for their police and guards and airport security theater, you are not alone.
"’We all have a right to accurate identity documents, and this policy invites harassment, discrimination, and violence against transgender Americans who can no longer obtain or renew a passport that matches who they are,’ ACLU lawyer Sruti Swaminathan said.”
Which, of course, is a complete reversal of reality. A person’s fantasy and role-play is not who he or she is. God delivers us into the material world and fashions us from matter-given life. No matter how people dress up that life, or try to mutilate it, that life is, for the vast, vast majority of humans, either male or female, and to pretend otherwise is to undercut the argument that the government ID has any valid purpose at all.
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But, perhaps, that is the point.
At the heart of this legal battle is the question that rarely, if ever, gets questioned nowadays, and that is:
“Is it morally or constitutionally justified for the government to demand from us ‘identity papers’ in order to travel?"
As human beings, do we not have a right to peacefully move in public places?
To put it a different way, do you have a right to stand between your neighbors and tell them they cannot travel unless they do what you demand, or to form a gang to do that?
Passports and visas are government constructs. They are politically-enforced requirements that rarely are questioned, but the more people pare-down the issue, the more people study the incorrectly assumed contemporary norm that government can demand from you “papers” as if you are trying to escape Nazi Germany, the clearer it becomes that all of this disputation about gender versus biological truth on government-mandated documents misses the major issue.
The issue, the problem, is the political mandate that you get a government document.
Once that is forced on a populace, the Tragedy of the Commons comes into play, and various groups will want their preferred kind of government document.
And, as we see today, the arguing will continue, until a lot more people stand up for the principle of individual liberty and freedom to peaceably travel, unfettered by the concept of government-instituted “prior restraint.”
No one has a right to make you get an ID. No one has a right to make you pay for what he or she believes is “security.”
And, by stripping away all the discord encoded in this current legal battle, one can see that it is about more than the Executive Branch managing the visa-passport bureaucracy. It is about more than biology versus fantasy.
It is about freedom, privacy, and the right to travel without someone with a government uniform demanding “your paperssss, please!”