'Ridiculous!' Trump admin ignites another firestorm with passport fight

The Trump administration’s latest fight on gender ideology is igniting a firestorm from critics online who accuse the administration of being “gender obsessed.”

On Friday, Trump officials petitioned the Supreme Court to roll back a Biden-era policy that allowed passport applicants to choose “male,” ‘female,” or “X” for their gender, according to a report Friday from The New York Times. The Trump administration had already tried to roll the policy back before being blocked by a federal judge in June.

“Private citizens cannot force the government to use inaccurate sex designations on identification documents that fail to reflect the person’s biological sex – especially not on identification documents that are government property and an exercise of the president’s constitutional and statutory power to communicate with foreign governments,” wrote Solicitor General D. John Sauer in the petition to the Supreme Court.

Critics, however, are calling out the Trump administration for what they characterize as a misplaced sense of priorities. Doris Bivings, a Democratic voter with nearly 27,000 followers on X, wrote in an online post of the decision: “this is ridiculous."

Others, like George Ouzounian, an author and blogger who established a sizable following in the early 2000s for his opinion website “The Best Page in the Universe,” pointed out what he considered to be the flaw in the Trump administration’s efforts.

“I'm sure it'll cause no confusion when this person travels with ‘F’ marked on his passport,” Ouzounian, who goes by “Maddox,” wrote on X to his more than 40,000 followers, alongside an image of a transgender man.

And some simply pointed to what they considered to be the Trump administration’s “obsession” with gender, such as X user “Twilight2000,” a self-described teacher and writer with nearly 2,000 followers.

“This administration's obsession with transgender persons is ridiculous!” they wrote in an online post on X. “Denying passports to transgender and non-binary people? [What’s] wrong with these gender obsessed republicans?”