Editorial

On transgender soldiers, court restores humanity that Trump scorned

In its flimsy justification, misstatement of facts and utter dearth of basic humanity, President Donald Trump’s out-of-the-blue order to ban transgender individuals from the United States military in July was just plain mean.

On Monday, a particularly refreshing ruling by United States District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly put the purge on hold and laid out in plain language why it is not constitutional. We suspect even a right-leaning Supreme Court will agree.

When Trump’s first tweetstorm about this hit during the summer, reaction in the Bay Area and across the country was strong. Transgender individuals and the people who know, respect and rely on them — whether in the neighborhood, at the office or on a parched battlefield on the other side of the world — were floored.

So were the nation’s military leaders. They didn’t see it coming, didn’t agree with it and frankly didn’t need this disruption when they’re fighting — how many wars now? With Niger, we’ve lost count.

When the official ruling came down in August, they were faced with not only stopping recruitment of transgender men and women at a time when they need all the good recruits they can get, but also with ridding their ranks of thousands of fine service men and women, including decorated heroes and members in command positions.

This ruling gives them a reprieve. If Trump fights to restore the discriminatory ban, we suggest the generals wait it out, focus on what’s important and hope the Supreme Court sees things the way they do.

The one reason Trump gave for the ban was the cost of medical care for transgender soldiers. A military study in 2016 dismissed these costs as insignificant —projected to be about a tenth of 1 percent of the Defense Department’s health care budget — but Kollar-Kotelly made the right call here: She did not block the ban on funding gender reassignment surgery. That can be a separate fight. Making a whole class of U.S. citizens ineligible for military service needs to be the focus.

The judge held that the equal protection clause of the Constitution is at issue. She wrote that “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.”

Our quibble with this is the “unusual circumstances surrounding the president’s announcement” part. Sadly, this president’s usual circumstance of announcing momentous policy decisions is Twitter. @realDonaldTrump. OMG.

But for the rest, she’s spot on. Unlike the president’s legally murkier travel ban, which the Supreme Court has mostly upheld, the clarity of right and wrong with regard to the Constitution in this discrimination case is clear.

— Bay Area News Group,

Digital First Media