The Supreme Court’s Republican-appointed majority has agreed to let the Trump administration implement its new passport policy, which has been opposed by a group of transgender and nonbinary Americans.

“Displaying passport holders’ sex at birth no more offends equal protection principles than displaying their country of birth — in both cases, the Government is merely attesting to a historical fact without subjecting anyone to differential treatment,” the majority wrote Thursday.

The latest ruling in favor of the Trump administration came over dissent from the court’s three Democratic appointees. “The documented real-world harms to these plaintiffs obviously outweigh the Government’s unexplained (and inexplicable) interest in immediate implementation of the Passport Policy,” Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote in dissent, joined Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan. She said the majority “has once again paved the way for the immediate infliction of injury without adequate (or, really, any) justification.”

Under previous government policy, transgender passport applicants could choose male or female to correspond to their gender identity or sex assigned at birth, and intersex, nonbinary and gender nonconforming applicants could choose “X” instead of male or female. The new policy restricts passport applicants to their sex assigned at birth and to male or female, following President Donald Trump’s executive order titled “Defending Women from Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.”......

Opposing the administration, the plaintiffs told the high court that they were only seeking “the same thing millions of Americans take for granted: passports that allow them to travel without fear of misidentification, harassment, or violence.” They said the administration’s preferred policy deprives them “of a usable identification document and the ability to travel safely.”