In late 2025, a rumor spread online that U.S. President Donald Trump's administration enacted a policy effectively assuming every passport applicant is a transgender person unless proven otherwise. The claim circulated following a Nov. 6 Supreme Court decision paving the way for the Trump administration to require a person's passport to match their sex assigned at birth.
Posts on Reddit and Facebook claimed the State Department was considering all passport applicants "trans until proven cis," using the short form of cisgender, a term for people whose internal sense of gender matches the sex they were assigned at birth. A Snopes reader sent in the post below for verification:
The allegation originated from a Substack newsletter called Transitics, which posted a story with the headline "Under Trump's Passport Policy, the State Department Must Assume Every Applicant is Trans. Yes, Really." The author of the newsletter argued that in order for the Trump administration to successfully implement its passport policy, State Department employees must subject all applicants to an extensive investigation into their sex assigned at birth — which she said means officials have effectively decided to assume applicants are "trans until proven cis."
The author of Transitics is Aleksandra, a 19-year-old trans student majoring in political science at a university in the Midwest. She asked that we not use her last name for fear of abuse from "right-wing trolls," an issue she said she has already experienced. In a phone call with Snopes, Aleksandra said she stood by her story and cited court filings noting that the State Department may use various documents to validate a passport applicant's sex assigned at birth.
"I don't have any policy documents because the State Department — they will never release this process," she said. "I do want to stress that if this process is proven, this will look really bad, because that is a complete waste of resources."
Given that it was not clear how widespread the State Department's investigations into passport applicants' sex markers were, we have not rated this claim. The State Department and U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services did not respond to detailed inquires about the process for determining a passport applicant's sex marker.
Snopes previously examined the faulty science behind Trump's executive order asserting, contrary to modern medical understanding, that only two sexes exist — the basis for the State Department policy in question.
Official policy on passport sex designations
Under former President Joe Biden's administration, the State Department
However, according to court documents filed in lawsuits against the Trump administration's policy on sex marker designations, the State Department
The State Department asserts that the determination of an applicant's sex assigned at birth "can generally be adjudicated using a birth certificate," but the Department may also conduct further investigation into an applicant's sex assigned at birth by looking to other documents or by calling the applicant.
As supporting evidence for her claims, in her interview with Snopes, Aleksandra cited the aforementioned excerpt and additional court documents noting the State Department's use of secondary documents to determine sex (see Page 4
The State Department's web page on "Sex Marker in Passports" also noted that previous passports were among the other documents officials might use to determine someone's sex assignment: