Today, Lambda Legal asked the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland to block enforcement of the Trump administration’s discriminatory policy denying accurate passports to seven transgender U.S. citizens. Lambda Legal asked the court to stop the U.S. Department of State from applying the passport policy to the seven Plaintiffs in Lambda Legal’s lawsuit, six of whom have received inaccurate sex markers following their request to seek to renew their passport that already had the correct sex marker, to update the sex marker to the correct one, or to update their legal name only.
“The inaccurate passports given to our clients amounts to actions that are arbitrary, cruel, and, frankly, dangerous,” said Lambda Legal Senior Attorney Carl Charles. “Our clients, and indeed thousands of transgender people across the country, are experiencing similar and serious harms, and have concluded that international travel is effectively impossible. Inaccurate and conflicting identity documents forcibly share private information, exposing our clients, and many other transgender, nonbinary, gender non-conforming, and intersex people to discrimination, harassment and, in some cases, violence.”
On April 25, 2025, Lambda Legal filed a federal lawsuit on behalf of seven transgender U.S. citizens, one of whom identifies as nonbinary, challenging the discriminatory passport policy that resulted from the flood of discriminatory and arbitrary executive orders issued in the first 100 days of the Trump administration. Four of the plaintiffs are filing pseudonymously.
The named plaintiffs include Zander Schlacter, a transgender man and New York-based textile artist and designer, and two transgender women, Jill Tran of Maryland and Lia Hepler-Mackey of California, both recent college graduates. The pseudonymous plaintiffs include one nonbinary person, Kris Koe, a full-time university student and part-time tutor and grocery clerk living in Connecticut, and three transgender men, Peter Poe, a Maryland-based college student, David Doe, a Pennsylvania lawyer, and Robert Roe, a U.S. Foreign Service Officer living in Europe.
Plaintiffs experienced a similar outcome when they applied to renew a passport which already had a correct sex designation, to update the sex designation on their existing passport, or to update their legal name only. In each case, and despite supplying the required documents, they all received passports that reflected the State Department’s decision about their “biological sex.”
“The anti-transgender animus is clear and intentional,” Charles said. “We have a Foreign Service Officer potentially unable to report to a new posting, a lawyer now prevented from visiting his spouse’s elderly parents whose health is declining, and a college student forced to take a long-planned trip to visit his father’s birthplace with a passport that tells anyone who looks at it that he is transgender against his wishes. The harm they are facing is clear. As we pursue our litigation to overturn this discriminatory policy, it is imperative that our plaintiffs be allowed to live their lives freely with travel documents that correctly reflect who they are.”
Read today’s filing here.
Read more about our lawsuit, Schlacter v. U.S. Dept. of State, here.