The U.S. Supreme Court has issued a stay of injunctions against Trump's transgender military ban, allowing the ban to take effect as the case proceeds.
It was a 5-4 decision. Justices Ginsburg, Sotomayor, Kagan, and Breyer would have denied the stay.
The Washington Post reports: ‘Trump surprised even his own military advisers in July 2017 when he announced a sweeping ban on transgender people's military service via Twitter. He cited what he viewed as the “tremendous medical costs and disruption.” The administration's order reversed President Barack Obama's policy of allowing transgender men and women to serve openly and receive funding for sex-reassignment surgery. Attorneys for active-duty service members went to court to block the policy shift, which could subject current transgender service members to discharge and deny them certain medical care. The court rulings were met with another policy revision from then-Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis, who issued a plan to bar those from the military who identify with a gender different from their birth gender and who are seeking to transition. Mattis's plan makes exceptions, for instance, for about 900 transgender individuals who are already serving openly and for others who would serve in accordance with their birth gender.'
Lambda Legal responded: ‘“The Supreme Court's decisions today are perplexing to say the least: on the one hand denying the Trump administration's premature request for review of lower court rulings before appellate courts have ruled and rebuffing the administration's attempt to skirt established rules; and yet on the other allowing the administration to begin to discriminate, at least for now, as the litigation plays out,” Lambda Legal Counsel Peter Renn said. “For more than 30 months, transgender troops have been serving our country openly with valor and distinction, but now the rug has been ripped out from under them, once again. We will redouble our efforts to send this discriminatory ban to the trash heap of history where it belongs.” Lambda Legal and OutServe-SLDN filed the lawsuit, Karnoski v. Trump, in August 2017, on behalf of nine individual plaintiffs and three organizational plaintiffs – the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), Seattle-based Gender Justice League, and the American Military Partner Association (AMPA). The State of Washington later joined the lawsuit.'
