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From The Hill: A federal judge on Tuesday extended an order blocking the Trump administration from enforcing a policy requiring identity documents to reflect an individual’s sex “at conception” to all transgender, nonbinary and intersex Americans who want to change the sex designation on their passports.
A previous ruling, handed down in April, had ordered the State Department to allow only six trans and nonbinary plaintiffs named in a federal lawsuit to obtain passports with sex designations matching their gender identity while the case proceeds. The lawsuit, filed in February in the U.S. District Court for the District of Massachusetts, argues the administration’s policy “is motivated by impermissible animus.”
The plaintiffs’ legal team at the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), the ACLU of Massachusetts and the law firm Covington & Burling LLP asked the court in April to certify a class of people adversely affected by the passport policy and extend the preliminary injunction to those who are currently impacted or may be impacted in the future.
Judge Julia E. Kobick, an appointee of former President Biden, granted that request on Tuesday. She wrote in her ruling that the six named plaintiffs and the new class of plaintiffs “face the same injury: they cannot obtain a passport with a sex designation that aligns with their gender identity.”
Judge Kobick claimed in her initial ruling in April that the federal government had “failed to demonstrate that its actions are substantially related to an important governmental interest.”
ABOUT THIS JUDGE: Julia E. Kobick, 42, has been a United States district judge of the United States District Court for the District of Massachusetts since 2023. She was nominated by Joe Biden in August 2022, and was finally confirmed by the Senate in November 2023.
Kobick was an elementary school teacher from 2005 to 2007. Later while working as an attorney, in 2017, Kobick was part of the legal team that sued the Trump administration for its rollback of the Affordable Care Act’s contraceptive coverage mandate. In another case in 2022, Kobick defended Massachusetts’ mask mandate during the COVID-19 pandemic.
BREAKING: Julia Kobick, a Biden-appointed U.S. District Judge, has issued an order BLOCKING the Trump administration’s policy requiring that individuals use their biological sex (male or female) on their passport.
UNREAL pic.twitter.com/RNjoZ8Di5A
— Libs of TikTok (@libsoftiktok) June 17, 2025
US District Judge Julia Kobick has just extended the scope of an April injunction that initially affected six individuals to a nationwide order blocking the Trump administration from refusing passports that reflect transgender and nonbinary gender identities.
Background: pic.twitter.com/ueuN0EgMFl
— Amee Vanderpool (@girlsreallyrule) June 17, 2025
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