(Reuters) — The Supreme Court on Thursday allowed Donald Trump’s administration to bar applicants for U.S. passports from designating the sex reflecting their gender identities on the document, part of the Republican president’s crackdown on the rights of transgender-identifying Americans.

The court granted the Justice Department’s request to lift a judge’s order that had blocked the policy requiring passports to correspond only to a person’s sex assigned at birth, while a class action lawsuit challenging the administration’s action plays out.

“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 court said in a brief explanation of its order.

The order was unsigned, as is typical in decisions made by the court on an emergency basis.

The court’s three liberal justices publicly dissented from the decision. In a written dissent, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, joined by Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Elena Kagan, said the court has once again allowed a Trump administration policy to go ahead on an interim basis “in a manner that permits harm to be inflicted on the most vulnerable party.”

“In preventing transgender Americans from obtaining gender-congruent passports, the government is doing more than just making a statement about its belief that transgender identity is ‘false.’ The Passport Policy also invites the probing, and at times humiliating, additional scrutiny these plaintiffs have experienced,” Jackson wrote.

The Trump administration’s policy reverses decades of practice at the U.S. State Department, which since 1992 had permitted passport sex designations to differ from sex assigned at birth with medical documentation.

Under Democratic President Joe Biden, the State Department in 2021 allowed passport applicants to self-select a male or female sex marker without such documentation and added a third option “X” for nonbinary, intersex, and gender non-conforming applicants.

Boston-based U.S. District Judge Julia Kobick in April found that the Trump administration policy likely discriminates based on sex and is rooted in “irrational prejudice” toward transgender-identifying Americans in violation of their equal protection rights under the U.S. Constitution’s Fifth Amendment, and runs afoul of a law governing the actions of federal agencies.

The judge in June blocked its enforcement against a nationwide class of passport seekers affected by the policy.

Trump has targeted the rights of transgender people in a series of executive orders since returning to the presidency in January, including one stating that the U.S. government will recognize only two sexes, male and female. Trump has cast the gender identity of transgender people as a lie.

The administration has repeatedly asked the justices this year to intervene to allow implementation of Trump policies impeded by lower courts. The Supreme Court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, has sided with the administration in almost every case it has been called upon to review since Trump returned to the presidency in January.