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Posts Tagged ‘5th Amendment equal protection’

Passport Denial Violates Transgender Man’s Equal Protection Rights

Posted on: November 29th, 2020 by Art Leonard No Comments

U.S. District Judge Gloria M. Navarro ruled on November 23 that the State Department violated the 5th Amendment Equal Protection rights of Oliver Bruce Morris, a transgender man, by refusing to issue him a passport identifying him as male unless he could provide a doctor’s certification of clinical treatment for gender transition.  Morris v. Pompeo, 2020 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 219009 (D. Nevada).  Judge Navarro rejected Morris’s claim that the denial violated his due process rights, and abstained from deciding his Administrative Procedure Act claim on the ground that the relief ordered by the court – to process the passport application without requiring the physician’s letter – had mooted that claim.

Morris, who was identified as female at birth but has identified as male for several years, has health insurance but it doesn’t cover gender transition surgery.  He has been receiving hormone treatment, which is covered by his insurance, under the care of a licensed practical nurse.  He is identified as male on his driver’s license, and obtained a legal name change from a Nevada court.

Morris applied for a 10-year passport in October 2018. “On the application’s checkbox for ‘Sex,’” wrote Judge Navarro, “Plaintiff checked the ‘M’ box, indicating male. Plaintiff included three identity documents in his application: a Nevada driver’s license, which indicates his sex is male; an original copy of his birth certificate, which indicates his sex is female; and a court-ordered name change, indicating that he legally changed his name from “Chanesse Olivia Morris” to “Oliver Bruce Morris” on June 27, 2018.”

Evidently the bureaucrats at the State Department were stymied by the inconsistency between the driver’s license, the name-change court order, and the birth certificate, concerning Morris’s gender.  He received a letter asking him to “verify his sex,” wrote Judge Navarro. “The letter explained, ‘[i]n order to issue you a passport card reflecting a sex different from the one on some or all of your citizenship and/or identity evidence, please send us a signed original statement on office letterhead from your attending medical physician.’ The letter enumerated the information Plaintiff’s physician would have to certify under penalty of perjury, including, ‘[l]anguage stating that you have had appropriate clinical treatment for transition to the new sex.”

Now Morris was stymied, since he is not under a physician’s care, which would not be covered by his health insurance for this purpose.  As a person of limited means, he was being assisted on this application be a legal services attorney, who sent a letter on his behalf “explaining he would not provide the requested certification because he could not afford gender transition treatment, and the requirement violated his constitutional rights.”  The State Department sent several “final notices” repeating the request for a physician’s letter before denying the application due to Morris’s failure to “verify” his sex.  Nevada Legal Services attorneys Christena Georgas-Burns and David A. Olshan then filed suit on his behalf.

The complaint claims that the denial of the passport violated Morris’s 5th Amendment Due Process rights, alleging that he has a constitutional right to refuse medical treatment for gender transition, and his Equal Protection rights, arguing that because cisgender people are not required to provide a physician’s verification of their sex in order to get a proper passport, such a requirement cannot be posed to transgender people.   He also alleged that the barriers the State Department has erected in his case are outside the scope of its authority under the Administrative Procedure Act.  The government moved for summary judgment on the APA claim and to dismiss the constitutional claims, and Morris countered with a motion for summary judgment on all his claims.

The court rejected Morris’s Due Process claim, reasoning that the government is not requiring Morris to submit to surgical treatment in order to get a passport, as they would be happy to issue him a passport with a sex designation consistent with his birth certificate.  That sounds a bit nonsensical, since a passport with his male name and picture and a female sex designation would undoubtedly lead to problems should he try to use it as identification, especially in international travel.  Perhaps his Due Process claim would have gotten further by relying on the right to autonomy and self-identification mentioned by the Supreme Court in Lawrence v. Texas, but that theory was not argued on the summary judgment motion by Morris.  Be that as it may, however, the court’s acceptance of his Equal Protection claim renders the loss on the Due Process claim harmless in this context.

As to the Equal Protection claim, Judge Navarro’s ruling on Morris’s summary judgment motion treated his claim as an as-applied claim rather than a facial unconstitutionality claim, because of the particular proof issues in deciding the plaintiff’s summary judgment motion on a claim of discrimination that merits heightened scrutiny.  There is caselaw in the 9th Circuit – specifically, the circuit’s ruling in Karnoski v. Trump, 926 F.3d 1180, 1201 (9th Cir. 2019) – holding that the federal government faces heightened scrutiny when it is challenged for applying a policy in a way that discriminates against a transgender person.  (In Karnoski, the court was considering President Trump’s transgender military service ban, as concretized by Defense Secretary Jim Mattis in a policy implemented in April 2019.)  Morris’s complaint alleges facts sufficient to sustain a claim of unequal treatment.  Under heightened scrutiny, the government bears the burden on summary judgment of providing an “exceedingly persuasive justification” for imposing its requirement of a physician’s statement to verify a person’s sex and certifying clinical transitional treatment as a prerequisite to getting a passport consistent with the person’s gender identity.

Judge Navarro found that the government’s summary judgment motion was not accompanied by such proof, as it consisted of generalized statements about the importance of the passport as an identity document. “Here,” she wrote, “the Government frames its purported interest too broadly and fails to provide evidence that the interest is exceedingly persuasive. Defendant asserts interests in verifying passport applicants’ identities and ‘[i]ssuing passports that accurately state the bearer’s identity[.]’ There is little doubt that the State Department has an interest in accurately representing the identities of U.S. citizens to foreign nations. However, the only facet of identity at issue here is a passport applicant’s sex or gender. Defendant has provided no explanation, let alone any evidence, of why the State Department has an important interest in verifying a transgender passport applicant’s gender identity, nor a cogent explanation of why the Policy requiring a physician’s certification increases the accuracy of issued passports. Assuming, arguendo, that Defendant has a substantial interest in verifying transgender applicants’ gender identities, he has not shown why a doctor’s certification substantially furthers the interest with respect to transgender applicants given that not all transgender persons receive or require physician treatment.”

In other words, the court implicitly accepts the plaintiff’s argument that one’s gender identity and appropriate sex designation on a passport is not an artifact of genitalia.  One can be a transgender person and entitled to recognition as such without undergoing gender confirmation surgery.  The requirement for a physician to certify “clinical” treatment for transition is not supported by an “exceedingly persuasive” explanation here.

“Given that Plaintiff has prevailed on his equal protection claim,” wrote Judge Navarro, “the Court orders Defendant to review Plaintiff’s passport application without requiring a physician’s certification of Plaintiff’s gender. If Plaintiff’s application is otherwise sufficient under the relevant State Department regulations, Defendant shall issue Plaintiff a 10-year passport. As the Plaintiff has succeeded on his as-applied challenge, the Court declines to address whether the Policy is facially unconstitutional.”  And, as noted above, having provided Morris exactly what he is seeking under his constitutional claim, the court found it unnecessary to rule on the merits of his APA claim.

Thus, the government’s motion to dismiss the constitutional claims was granted as to the Due Process claim and denied as to the Equal Protection claim, and the Plaintiff’s motion for summary judgment was granted as to the Equal Protection claim and denied as to the Due Process claim, while the APA claim was dismissed as moot.

Judge Navarro was appointed to the district court by President Barack Obama in 2010.

Federal Court in Trans Military Case Refuses to Delay Discovery Further

Posted on: February 10th, 2020 by Art Leonard No Comments

On Friday, February 7, US District Judge Marsha Pechman issued yet another in a series of Orders on discovery in Karnoski v. Trump, 2020 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 21813 (W.D. Wash.), one of the four challenges to the constitutionality of Trump’s transgender military service ban in its current incarnation, referred to as the Mattis Plan.

Pechman, backed up by a 9th Circuit panel, has determined that the ban discriminates based on gender identity and is subject to heightened scrutiny under the 5th Amendment’s equal protection requirement, and judging from this opinion she is clearly getting fed up by the Justice Department’s delay strategy in the case.

Since the Supreme Court stayed Judge Pechman’s preliminary injunction (and ultimately, all the preliminary injunctions were lifted), the Mattis Plan went into effect last April while the litigation continues, including clear discrimination against applicants and service members due to their gender identity. The Justice Department’s strategy now is to avoid a merits ruling against the government by stretching out discovery as long as possible.

The district courts have already determined that various deliberative process privilege claims asserted by the government are invalid in this suit, where the question boils down to whether the Mattis Plan is an expression of ideology, pure and simple, or rather is based on objective facts. Only discovery of internal communications and sources allegedly relied upon in formulating the policy can reveal the answer to the degree necessary to constitute proof in a court. But they keep stalling.

Judge Pechman issued an order late last year compelling certain disclosure by a date specified in December. Rather than comply, the Justice Department moved for “clarification” and a “stay pending appeal.” That is, they want to keep off responding as long as they can, and then get the court to delay further while they appeal every discovery ruling to the 9th Circuit, building in several more months for delay.

Pechman is having none of it: Her February 7 order provides some “clarification” and denies the stay. “Because Plaintiffs have overcome the deliberate process privilege for these documents and this dispute has been pending for nearly two years, the Court will not issue a stay for an unspecified amount of time while Defendants decide whether to appeal,” she wrote. “This is an ongoing process and until the process is complete it is wasteful to appeal one segment at a time.” She also pointed out that the government missed a 14-day deadline if it wanted her to reconsider her prior discovery order. She ordered the government to produce all the documents covered by the order by February 14.

Karnoski and co-plaintiffs are represented by Lambda Legal and Outserve-SLDN (so named when the case was filed, now the Modern Military Association).

Federal Court Narrows Discovery in Trans Military Case, but Rejects Government’s Broad Privilege Claims

Posted on: September 20th, 2019 by Art Leonard No Comments

U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, ruling in the first of four pending lawsuits challenging the current version of the military policy on transgender service, issued a wide-ranging ruling on September 13 attempting to settle some of the remaining problems in deciding what information the plaintiffs are entitled to obtain through discovery as the case continues. The case, renamed since President Trump was removed as a defendant and James Mattis quit as Defense Secretary, is now called Jane Doe 2 v. Mark T. Esper, 2019 WL 4394842, 2019 U.S. Dist. LEXIS 156803 (D.D.C., September 13, 2019)

The decision makes clear that the court has rejected the government’s argument that the so-called “Mattis Plan,” implemented in April 2019 after the Supreme Court voted to stay the preliminary injunctions that had been issued by the district courts, is entitled to virtually total deference from the court, thus precluding any discovery into how the Mattis Plan was put together, allegedly by a task force of experts convened by Defense Secretary James Mattis in response to the president’s request for a plan to implement the total ban on transgender service that he announced by tweet in July 2017.

When Trump came into office, transgender people were serving openly in the military as a result of a policy announced at the end of June 2016 by President Obama’s Defense Secretary, Ashton Carter.  The Carter policy lifted the existing ban on open transgender military service, but delayed lifting the ban on enlistment of transgender people for one year.  The first move by the Trump Administration concerning this policy was an announcement by Secretary Mattis at the end of June 2017 that he would not lift the enlistment ban until January 2018 in order to make sure that all necessary policies were in place to evaluate transgender applicants for enlistment.

A few weeks later, catching just about everybody by surprise, President Trump tweeted his announcement of a total ban on transgender people serving.  This was followedby a White House memorandum in August 2017, delaying enlistment of transgender people indefinitely, but allowing those already in the military to continue serving until March 2018 while Secretary Mattis came up with an implementation plan to recommend to the president.

Starting in August 2017 and continuing into the fall, four law suits were filed in federal district courts around the country challenging the constitutionality of the ban as announced by the President.  Federal district judges issued preliminary injunctions in all four lawsuits while denying the government’s motion to dismiss them, setting the stage for discovery to begin.  Discovery is the phase of a lawsuit during which the parties can request information, testimony and documents from each other in order to build a factual record for the decision of the case, and under federal discovery rules, anything that may be relevant to decide the case may be discoverable, subject to privileges that parties may assert.

In February 2018, Secretary Mattis released a report, purportedly compiled by a task force of senior military personnel and experts whom Mattis did not identify, discussing transgender military service and recommending a policy that differed in many respects from the absolute ban Trump had announced.  Under this proposed policy, the enlistment ban would be relaxed for transgender people who have not been diagnosed with gender dysphoria and are willing to serve in their gender as identified at birth.  The policy would allow transgender people who were serving to continue doing so.  Those who were transitioning as of the date the policy was implemented would be allowed to complete their transition and serve in their desired gender.  Otherwise, transgender personnel would have to serve in their gender as identified at birth, and would be separated from the service if they were diagnosed with gender dysphoria.  Nobody would be allowed to initiate transition while in the military once this policy was implemented.  There was no guarantee that transgender personnel would be allowed re-enlist at the end of their term of enlistment unless they met the same standards as a new applicant.  In short, the proposed policy would allow some transgender people to serve, but not all who were otherwise qualified, and would place certain restrictions on those who were allowed to continue serving.

Trump’s response to the recommendation was to revoke his prior policy announcements and to authorize Mattis to implement what became known as the Mattis Plan.  However, all the preliminary injunctions were still in place, so the government concentrated on getting the injunctions dissolved or withdrawn and getting the district judges to dismiss the cases on the ground that the policy they were attacking no longer existed.  The district judges resisted this move, some appeals were taken to the courts of appeals, and ultimately the Mattis Plan was implemented more than a year after it was proposed to the president, when the Supreme Court cut through the procedural difficulties and ruled, without a written opinion, that the Mattis Plan could go into effect while the lawsuits continued.

The focus of the lawsuits now switched to challenge the constitutionality of the Mattis Plan, and the parties went back to battling about discovery after it was clear that the district courts would not dismiss these lawsuits merely because one plan had been substituted for another.  Although some transgender people can serve under the Mattis Plan, the Plan still discriminates both against transgender people who have been diagnosed with gender dysphoria and against those who have not by requiring them to forego obtaining a diagnosis and transitioning if they want to serve.

One of the issues for Judge Kollar-Kotelly was deciding whether the government was correct to argue that because the Mattis Plan resulted from a Task Force study and recommendation process, it was entitled to standard military deference, under which courts disclaim the power to second-guess the personnel policies the military adopts.  The government focused particularly on a concurring opinion in the D.C. Circuit panel opinion that had quashed the preliminary injunction in this case, which arguably supported the view that plaintiffs were not entitled to discovery of documents and testimony related to the “deliberative process” by which the Mattis Plan was devised.

The judge responded that this was the central issue of the case: whether the Mattis Plan is entitled to standard military deference.  She found that the concurring judge, Stephen Williams, was alone in his view, as the other two members of the D.C. Circuit panel, faithful to Supreme Court precedents, had not opposed discovery, find that the deference question turned on whether the Mattis Plan is “the result of reasoned decision-making” that relates to military readiness concerns.  If, as the plaintiffs suspect and have argued all along, Trump’s motivation in banning transgender military service was motivated by politics, not by any evidence that the Ashton Carter policy had harmed the military by allowing unqualified people to serve, it would not be the result of “reasoned decision-making “and thus not entitled to deference.

Agreeing with the plaintiffs, Judge Kollar-Kotelly wrote that she could not decide the appropriate level of deference (or non-deference) without access to information about how the Mattis Plan was devised.  Thus discovery should continue ,focused on that.  However, she rejected the plaintiffs’ argument that they should be allowed to conduct discovery on Mattis’s initial decision to delay enlistments for six months, or on the process by which Trump formulated the July 2017 total ban announced in his tweet and elaborated in the White House’s August 2017 memorandum. Those, she found, are no longer relevant when the focus of the lawsuit has shifted to the constitutionality of the Mattis Plan.

As to that, however, the judge ruled that the government’s attempt to shield access to relevant information under the “deliberative process privilege” was not applicable to this case.  Just as the current state of the record is inadequate to determine the level of deference, discovery of the deliberative process by which the Mattis Plan was devised is necessary to determine whether it is the “result of reasoned decision-making.”

The judge reviewed a checklist of factors created by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals in earlier cases to determine whether the deliberative process privilege should be set aside in a particular case, and found that the plaintiffs’ requests checked all the necessary boxes.  The information is essential to decide the case, it is not available elsewhere than from the government, and the court can use various procedures to ensure that information that needs to be kept confidential can be protected from general exposure through limitations on who can see it, known as protective orders.  Furthermore, the parties can apply to the court for determination of whether any particular document need not be disclosed in discovery on grounds of relevance.

The government was particularly reluctant to comply with the plaintiffs’ request for “raw data and personnel files.”  The plaintiffs sought this in order to determine whether the factual claims made in the Task Force Report are based on documented facts, especially the claims in the Report that allowing persons who have been diagnosed with gender dysphoria to serve will be harmful to military readiness because of limitations on deployment during transitioning and geographical limitations on deployment due to ongoing medical issues after transition.  Critics have pointed out that the Report seems to be based more on the kind of propaganda emanating from anti-transgender groups than on a realistic appraisal of the experience in the military since Secretary Carter lifted the former ban effective July 1, 2016.  Since transgender people in various stages of transition have been serving openly for a few years, there are medical and performance records that could be examined to provide such information, but the government has been refusing to disclose it, claiming both that it raises privacy concerns and that disclosure is unnecessary because the Mattis Plan is entitled to deference as a military policy.

The judge found that it should be possible for these records to be discovered by redacting individually identifying information and imposing limitations on who can see the information and how it can be used.  Thus, the privacy concerns raised by the government should not be an impediment.  And this information, once again, is very relevant to the question whether the statements about the service qualifications of transgender people are based on biased opinions rather than facts, thus discrediting the claim that the policy is the result of reasoned decision-making.

The Trump Administration’s strategy in this, as in many other ongoing lawsuits concerning controversial policy decisions, has been to fight against discovery at every stage and to appeal every ruling adverse to them, including trying to “jump over” the courts of appeals to get the Supreme Court to intervene on the government’s behalf, now that Trump has succeeded in fortifying the conservative majority on the Court with the additions of Justices Gorsuch and Kavanaugh.  It would not be surprising if the government seeks to appeal Judge Kollar-Kotelly’s ruling to the D.C. Circuit once again to put off (perhaps permanently) the day when they will have to give up the identities of the Mattis Task Force members and open the books on how this policy – obviously political in its conception and implementation – was conceived.

Of course, if the White House changes hands in January 2021, a Democrat president could reverse the ban in any of its forms with a quick Executive Order restoring Secretary Carter’s policy from 2016.  As the four lawsuits continue to be bogged down in discovery disputes, that may be the way this story eventually ends.  If Trump is re-elected, the story continues to drag out while the Mattis Plan stays in place.

The plaintiffs are represented by a growing army of volunteer big firm attorneys and public interest lawyers from GLAD (GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders) and the National Center for Lesbian Rights.