The U.S. Supreme Court gave the okay to the Trump administration to go ahead and enforce a ban on transgender troops while the legal battle rages on. The court decided to put a hold on a preliminary injunction that was stopping the ban from being implemented, which was issued back in March by U.S. District Judge Benjamin H. Settle of the Western District of Washington. Settle had previously stated that the ban on transgender individuals serving in the military might be violating their rights under the Fifth Amendment, including equal protection and procedural due process, as well as their First Amendment right to express their gender identity different from what they were assigned at birth.
Three justices, Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson, were not really feeling the government’s emergency application to keep the ban in place. They were like, “Nah, we would have denied that, thanks.” Various news outlets have been covering this development, including The New York Times, USA Today, Reuters, SCOTUSblog, and CNN. The Trump administration argued that Settle’s injunction was not cool because it didn’t respect the military’s professional judgments. They also brought up previous Supreme Court orders that allowed a similar ban to go into effect during Trump’s first term.
The ban was put in place through two executive orders issued by President Donald Trump in January. The first order canceled out a policy from the Biden administration that allowed transgender individuals to openly serve in the military. The second order stated that the armed forces had to stick to high standards of mental and physical health. The plaintiffs in this case include seven transgender service members, a transgender man looking to enlist, and the Gender Justice League, an advocacy group. They’ve got Lambda Legal and the Human Rights Campaign representing them in this fight. In a press release on May 6, they expressed their disappointment in the court’s decision, calling the ban discriminatory and not related to military readiness.
