Fact Check: Is The Trump Administration Revoking Trans People’s Passports By Declaring Them ‘National Security Risks’?

Although recent reporting has sparked fears that the Trump administration could be beginning to revoke trans people's passports, these claims appear largely unsubstantiated.

Image: Wikimedia Commons

Since taking office for a second time, Trump has made targeting trans Americans’ documents a top priority. At his inauguration, he signed Executive Order 14168, which, among other things, mandated that all passports ‘accurately reflect’ a person’s ‘biological sex.’ Almost immediately, trans people nationwide—including trans actress Hunter Schafer—reported having their gender markers abruptly reverted even in cases when the rest of their documents properly aligned with their identities.

By June 2025, the ACLU had mounted a challenge against the policy and won an injunction, which allowed trans people to once again update their passports without much scrutiny. Soon after, in November, the case reached the Supreme Court, and unsurprisingly, the Trump administration’s policy was upheld. In the 6-3 unsigned shadow docket ruling, the court held that in displaying a person’s ‘biological sex’ on passports, “the Government is merely attesting to a historical fact without subjecting anyone to differential treatment.” But shortly after the decision, Transitics reported that the State Department’s website had been updated to hint at the possibility of revoking trans people’s passports, going from saying a passport containing anything other than a person’s ‘sex at birth’ “will remain valid until its expiration date” to claiming it’d only be “valid for travel until its date of expiration, until you replace it, or until we invalidate it under federal regulations.”

Following backlash, the sentence was entirely scrubbed the following Monday, but a slightly different version returned the next day. Seeing as the Trump administration had previously claimed in court that it could theoretically revoke trans people’s passports once it won the case, the site changes understandably sparked fears this would eventually come to pass. And of course, Kansas revoking trans people’s driver’s licenses in February in retaliation over a state supreme court loss 5 months prior did nothing to ease these worries. That said, it must be said the State Department itself has not hinted at this idea further since the website controversy.

However, on Monday, trans-focused news site The Needle published a story concerning a trans woman whose passport was abruptly invalidated while she was abroad. The woman, identified pseudonymously as ‘Kathleen,’ is alleged to have ties to Antifa—which the Trump designated as a terrorist organization by executive order in September—and because of that fact, the outlet claims both in the tagline and the text itself that “the State Department is likely asserting the power to deem U.S. citizens who they determine to be ideologically ‘far-left’, and who seem to be especially active in transgender advocacy, as ‘national security’ risks, and consequently revoking their passports.”

But is that true? Is the Trump administration revoking trans people’s passports for being ‘active in transgender advocacy’ by declaring them ‘national security risks'?

The answer is no. There is currently no evidence to suggest that the State Department is seeking to revoke trans people’s passports by branding them ‘national security risks.’

To understand why, it’s worth examining the article as well as the evidence it presents in support of its claim. Here, after sharing Kathleen’s story, the authors devote a significant chunk of the article to discussing passport revocations more broadly, and in two sections titled ‘Passport Policy’ and ‘Making Sense of Her Case,’ they make the case for the claim found in the tagline—that the Trump administration is revoking trans people’s passports over their advocacy.

In the first section, they start off by pointing to two examples of trans people who had their passport renewals denied during the first Trump administration: Danni Askini and Janus Rose, two prominent trans Americans who were abruptly asked to share ‘adequate’ evidence of their medical transition in order to renew their passports. After alluding to the aforementioned State Department website change, they correctly state that House Republicans have introduced a bill that would allow the federal government to revoke the passports of citizens who ‘provide material support’ to a foreign terrorist organization. However, to say the House GOP is ‘pushing’ the bill, as the article does, is a bit of an overstatement: H.R. 5244 has been stuck in committee for nearly a year and has garnered zero cosponsors.

The article then veers into discussing the current GOP rhetoric surrounding antifa and the ‘radical left.’ Drawing parallels to the Red Scare, the section concludes with the declaration that “if the administration gets its way, the State Department would have aggressive, expanded, and in force powers to revoke passports, regressing to policies not seen since McCarthyism.” Under this structure, it claims that “what happened to Kathleen and Danni would be the norm, not the exception.”

However, it must be noted that these kinds of denials have historically occurred in batches. Around the same time Askini and Rose had their renewals denied, thousands of Americans born in the Rio Grande Valley region of Texas also disclosed having their renewals abruptly denied by the State Department. According to reporting from the time, the State Department no longer believed their citizenship evidence was adequate as there was “significant incidence of citizenship fraud,” and some of the affected Americans were even “jailed in immigration detention centers and entered into deportation proceedings.”

Unlike Askini and Rose’s cases, Kathleen’s appears to indeed be an isolated incident. Since she first discovered her passport was invalid at some point in May, there have been no other known reports of trans people—or anyone else for that matter—whose passports have been suddenly invalidated. If it were part of a larger revocation spree, other affected Americans would’ve likely spoken up by now as they did then, especially if those affected had ties to advocacy organizations that are finding themselves in Trump’s line of fire.

But despite these facts, the Needle claims that their conclusion, that the revocation is due to her political affiliation, is “the conclusion supported by the most evidence.” Except, aside from the examples listed above, the only other evidence provided is essentially a process of elimination:

“We have ruled out every common reason for passport revocation, as none of them apply to her. She has no unpaid tax debt, no unpaid child support, and no pending felony charges or subpoenas issued by the U.S. government. We have also ruled out the idea that her passport was invalidated due to damage to its RFID biometric chip.”

And yet, there’s still at least one other entirely plausible explanation that hasn’t been ruled out. Earlier this year, TikTok influencer Alexis Rose reported in a series of videos that her passport had suddenly stopped working in December and that her identity had seemingly been ‘wiped’ from the passport system entirely. At the time, she speculated that the cancellation may have been due to her unapologetic pro-trans advocacy, but, after getting help from her representative, she was able to get it replaced soon after and was told it was accidentally marked lost or stolen, likely due to a clerical error. According to her, her representative also said that it’s not unheard of for a person’s information to be accidentally removed from the database after their passport is marked lost or stolen.

Around the same time, two other influencers reported experiencing a similar issue: their passports suddenly stopped working after they were marked lost or stolen without explanation. It must be noted that these other influencers did not have a record of pro-trans advocacy and did not suggest that it may have been due to their political affiliation; like Rose, both were told it was a clerical error, although the timing indicates that there may have been a systemic issue behind these reports.

Regardless of the true cause, these cases show that unexplained passport invalidations can indeed occur. And in Kathleen’s case, it’s an explanation that hasn’t been ruled out. After all, as per the article, the last time she used her passport before May was in August 2025—when she first entered the unnamed Scandinavian country to seek asylum. Because of that, there’s no way to know for sure when her passport first became invalid or whether it was among those caught in the same issue that the aforementioned influencers faced in December.

Given these facts, there simply isn’t enough evidence to suggest that the Trump administration could be beginning to “assert the power to deem U.S. citizens who they determine to be ideologically ‘far-left’, and who seem to be especially active in transgender advocacy, as ‘national security’ risks,” let alone to say that it is the ‘likely’ explanation for Kathleen’s issue. Especially considering she hasn’t reached out to the State Department about her passport because of her ongoing asylum application.

None of this is to say that something like this won’t ever happen, but to put it mildly, claiming that it is indeed happening now is extremely dangerous. Not only does it cause unnecessary panic in an already vulnerable community, but it also distracts from the issues that trans Americans are actually experiencing—including illegally implemented restrictions on trans people’s IDs, decreased access to gender-affirming care for adults, and government lists of trans people.

And in the face of that relentless onslaught, we must not allow ourselves to devote our energy to fighting against unsubstantiated threats as well. We’ve got enough to worry about.

Disclaimer: This story is intended to address the Needle’s conclusions in the second half of the article and in no way wishes to cast any doubt onto the veracity of the outlet’s extensive reporting on Kathleen’s story or on her story itself. It goes without saying that it brings me nothing but relief to know that she’s finally safe from the hardship she’s faced.