Transgender troops react to Trump military restrictions
President Donald Trump has issued an executive order restricting transgender people in the military.
WASHINGTON – The Supreme Court will allow President Donald Trump’s ban on transgender people serving in the military to take effect while court challenges continue.
In a win for the president’s efforts to curb rights for transgender people, the court on Tuesday agreed to the administration’s request for intervention after lower courts paused the ban.
The court’s three liberal justices said they would have rejected the request.
The Justice Department said the courts improperly second-guessed the Pentagon’s assessments of the risks of transgender servicemembers rather than giving the military the “substantial deference” its judgments are owed.
The administration also argued the policy is “materially indistinguishable” from a partial ban the Supreme Court allowed to go into effect during Trump’s first administration.
But the transgender servicemembers challenging the new policy said it’s more expansive. Under the previous rules, for example, servicemembers who had already transitioned were not removed and did not have their health care denied.
Plus, there’s now years of experience showing transgender servicemembers have improved, not harmed, military readiness, lawyers for the servicemembers argued.
And they said the ban is “based on the shocking proposition that transgender people do not exist.”
The administration has declared that there are only two sexes, male and female, and a person’s sex cannot be changed.
Trump’s ban paused in March by federal judge
Trump’s ban was paused on March 27 by a Seattle-based federal district judge. A three-judge panel of the San Francisco-based 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals backed that decision.
The Justice Department says letting transgender people serve “undermines military readiness and lethality.” U.S. District Judge Benjamin Settle, who was appointed by former President George W. Bush, said there’s no evidence to support that.
“The government’s arguments are not persuasive, and it is not an especially close question on this record,” Settle said.
Judge says ban is `soaked with animus’
A federal judge in Washington, D.C., reached a similar conclusion on March 18 in a related challenge by transgender members of the military. U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes’ order temporarily blocking enforcement of the policy is on hold while it’s being reviewed by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit.
Reyes, who said the ban was “soaked with animus and dripping with pretext,” was appointed to the bench by former President Joe Biden.
The executive order Trump signed soon after taking office said the “adoption of a gender identity inconsistent with an individual’s sex conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle.”
To implement the order, the Pentagon has barred transgender people from joining the military, stopped paying for some hormonal treatment and sex reassignment surgery and prepared to remove transgender servicemembers from the ranks.
Estimates on the number of transgender troops vary from about 10,000 to 14,000 of the nearly 2 million active-duty and reserve forces. About 1,000 of them required treatment. A Pentagon-commissioned study determined that allowing transgender people to serve had minimal cost and effect on the readiness of troops to fight.