The ACLU is celebrating because a Biden-nominated District Court Judge in Massachusetts has ruled that President Donald Trump lacks the authority to make passports align with reality. For now, the mentally ill fantasies of the six plaintiffs appearing before that judge will continue to live on in official government identification documents. However, one can’t really blame the judge, because Justice Neil Gorsuch paved the way in the utterly misbegotten Bostock v. Clayton County.

I don’t have Julie E. Kobick’s decision before me, because I’m locked out of PACER, but I have been able to piece together the gist of her ruling from celebratory articles at The New York Times and NPR.

The plaintiffs are six people who suffer from body dysphoria—that is, their brains refuse to recognize the reality of their bodies. They’re not as extreme as the man who thinks he’s a “genderless reptile” (and has the body modification to “prove” it), nor have they had their eyes gouged out to align with a blind identity.

Image created using AI.

Or maybe, if they had their reproductive organs removed (i.e., breasts, uterus, ovaries, penis, and testicles), toxic chemicals pumped into their bodies, and various bizarre surgeries (e.g., vaginoplasty, phalloplasty, laryngoplasty, chondrolaryngoplasty.), their body dysphoria is indeed extreme. My point is that body dysphoria is a mental condition, not a physical reality.

Passports are intended to represent physical reality, so that the government can identify a person. I can wear brown contact lenses and dye my hair black because I feel those colors represent the “real” me, but I must still tell the State Department that my eyes are blue and my hair gray. That’s not my feeling about my reality; that’s actual reality.

However, reality took a back seat to ideology during the Biden years. Within months of his taking office, his State Department, without even the benefit of a presidential Executive Order, announced a new rule:

Americans will be allowed to declare their self-identified gender on their U.S. passports without providing medical documents under a new State Department rule announced on Wednesday, the final day of Pride Month.

The necessity of functional identification documents bowed to the fantasies of mentally ill people and sexual fetishists. Part of their mental illness is that everyone must validate their warped views, and the Biden administration thought that was a great idea.

Upon regaining the White House, Trump immediately put a stop to this nonsense. In an Executive Order entitled “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government,” Trump declared that all the terms associated with biological sex, including the very word “sex” itself, would refer to...well, biological sex. To that end, all government-issued identity documents are to “accurately reflect the holder’s sex”—that is, biological reality.

So, of course, the ACLU sued in a carefully selected court and—quelle coincidence!—drew a hard-left, Harvard-educated, Biden-appointed judge. Ms. Kobick knew what to do. Per the New York Times, she concluded,

“The plaintiffs have been personally disadvantaged by the government — they can no longer obtain a passport consistent with their gender identity — because of their sex assigned at birth,” wrote Judge Kobick, who was nominated by former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. “The passport policy does indeed impose a special disadvantage on the plaintiffs due to their sex and the court therefore concludes that it discriminates on the basis of sex.”

NPR further reports Kobick’s claim that the government utterly failed to prove its case in this first go-round:

“The Executive Order and the Passport Policy on their face classify passport applicants on the basis of sex and thus must be reviewed under intermediate judicial scrutiny,” Kobick wrote. “That standard requires the government to demonstrate that its actions are substantially related to an important governmental interest. The government has failed to meet this standard.”

If you’re scratching your head about this, yes, Kobick said that the government’s interest in identifying documents that actually reflect reality is overridden by a mentally ill or sexually perverse person’s feelings. As an aside, every human on earth has an interest in objective reality because, on a global scale, fantasy must always yield to the hard truth of the real world.

However, one cannot entirely blame Kobick’s ideological madness for her holding. After all, in the Bostock decision, Justice Gorsuch paved the way for her.

Gorsuch obviously knows that the concept of so-called transgenderism did not exist in 1964 and would have been ridiculed if mentioned, and that members of Congress writing the Civil Rights Act made it clear that the term “sex” referred to women. Nevertheless, he wrote that the word “sex” in the Civil Rights Act must be interpreted to mean whatever “gender identity” a deviant person claims for him or herself. Although Kobick wasn’t ruling on the Civil Rights Act, Gorsuch handed her the keys to the cuckoo kingdom.

The fact that “sex” means whatever the heck someone wants it to mean, of course, highlights that we have reached a surreal point in American politics. In 2025, crazy people set the standards, and judges take for themselves the power of both the executive and legislative branches to bend to their insane desires.

We no longer have a constitutional system. Instead, the lunatics have taken over the asylum. Unless the Supreme Court reins in the lower courts and returns us to a governance connected to reality, not perverse fantasies, I fear that things will go very badly for America.