Transgender military service wins court OK
WASHINGTON — A federal court in Washington has blocked President Donald Trump’s directive that prohibited transgender people from serving in the U.S. military, a significant setback to the White House, although it continued to block use of federal funds for gender reassignment surgery for military personnel.
U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly’s ruling Monday restored the Obama-era policy allowing transgender troops to serve openly in the armed forces. The ruling comes three months after Trump first used social media to declare them banned from military service.
“As far as the court is aware at this preliminary stage, all of the reasons proffered by the president for excluding transgender individ-
uals from the military in this case were not merely unsupported, but were actually contradicted by the studies, conclusions and judgment of the military itself,” Kollar-Kotelly wrote in a 76-page decision.
In 2016, the Obama administration placed protection of gender rights on par with race, religion, color, sex and sexual orientation as part of a broader Pentagon initiative to bring the military in line with society.
Transgender troops could serve openly, and individuals were to be allowed to enlist openly for the first time by Jan. 1, 2018.
The Pentagon was blindsided in July when Trump abruptly declared on Twitter that the military would not “accept or allow” transgender troops to serve “in any capacity.”
It was not only a retreat for the Pentagon’s effort to drop discriminatory hurdles, but also an about-face for Trump, who repeatedly vowed during the presidential campaign to support gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender people.
The president’s ban immediately drew rebukes from war veterans and LGBT advocacy groups; lawsuits were filed in California, Maryland and Washington state. The National Center for Lesbian Rights and GLBTQ Legal Advocates and Defenders also sued the administration in Washington in August.
The administration had insisted the case be dismissed on the grounds that the Pentagon had launched a six-month review to study the effects of a ban before it could be fully implemented. The Pentagon had until Feb. 21 to submit final plans on implementing the ban’ including how it would handle thousands of transgender service members now in uniform.
Those individuals could stay in the armed forces, the administration argued.
It said active-duty service members — including the six unnamed members and two recruits represented by the National Center for Lesbian Rights and GLBTQ Legal Advocates and Defenders — would not be affected.
Kollar-Kotelly’s ruling disagreed with that claim.
“The court finds that a number of factors — including the sheer breadth of the exclusion ordered by the directives, the unusual circumstances surrounding the president's announcement of them, the fact that the reasons given for them do not appear to be supported by any facts, and the recent rejection of those reasons by the military itself — strongly suggest that plaintiffs’ Fifth Amendment claim is meritorious,” she wrote.