The Supreme Court cleared the way Thursday for the Trump administration to stop issuing passports that include gender identity markings selected by applicants.

The emergency order, which will remain in place as the case makes its way through the lower courts, marked the latest victory for President Donald Trump before the Supreme Court.

The case, Trump v. Orr, stems from a Trump administration policy to change gender requirements for passport holders. The policy has been blocked since June, when a federal court temporarily stopped the administration from enforcing it while the court case continued.

No vote count was given, as is typical in such cases, but the majority offered four paragraphs of reasoning for granting the administration’s request.

“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 justices who sided with the Trump administration wrote in an unsigned order.

Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson wrote a dissent, and she was joined by the court’s two other liberals, Justices Elena Kagan and Sonia Sotomayor. Jackson wrote that it had become “routine” for the Trump administration to seek emergency relief from the justices after lower courts block its policies, adding: “As is also becoming routine, this court misunderstands the assignment.”

She said that the government had found “an obliging audience” for its efforts to change the passport rules among the Supreme Court justices.

Jackson explained that she would have rejected the government’s request because “the documented real-world harms to these plaintiffs obviously outweigh the government’s unexplained (and inexplicable) interest in immediate implementation of the passport policy.”

Jon Davidson, senior counsel for the American Civil Liberties Union’s LGBTQ & HIV Project, which challenged the Trump administration policy, said in a statement that the court ruling was “a heartbreaking setback for the freedom of all people to be themselves, and fuel on the fire the Trump administration is stoking against transgender people and their constitutional rights.”

The case arose in the early days of Trump’s second term as a legal challenge to an executive order signed by the president on his first day back in office. That order prompted the State Department to rescind long-standing policies allowing transgender people to update gender markers on their travel documents.

The State Department began allowing transgender people to obtain passports with updated sex markers in the 1990s, so long as they provided evidence of having undergone gender transition surgery.

That requirement was rescinded in 2010, under then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and the department began asking only that transgender passport applicants provide a doctor’s letter affirming that they had received “appropriate clinical treatment for gender transition.”

In 2021, the State Department issued the first passport with a gender-neutral marker — an “x.” The following year, the Biden administration announced a policy allowing passport applicants to select any gender marker.

The ACLU challenged the Trump administration’s reversal of the passport policy, bringing a lawsuit in federal court in Massachusetts on behalf of seven people who claimed they had not been able to obtain passports that matched their gender identity because of the new policy, or that they would be harmed by the policy when renewing their passports.