The Trump administration‘s assault on the LGBTQ community scored a victory Tuesday when the Supreme Court voted that the White House’s ban on transgender individuals serving in the military could go into effect. This however could very well be a temporary measure as the SCOTUS clarified that the ban would be put in place until the appeals process on the matter was settled in the lower courts.
According to SCOTUS Blog’s Amy Howe, the voting at the SCOTUS level saw Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan voting against the stay of lower court injunctions barring the ban from being implemented. Meanwhile the conservative side of the High Court declined to consider the constitutionality of the ban as they moved forward in the ruling.
Via BuzzFeed News:
Until recently, all courts to consider the question had ruled against the actions of President Donald Trump and, later, former defense secretary James Mattis to first outright ban and then severely limit transgender military service. On Jan. 3, however, the US Court of Appeals for the DC Circuit reversed a district court’s injunction against the Mattis policy.
That ruling — while a setback for advocates of transgender military service — had no immediate effect due to the multiple other injunctions against the policy.
Tuesday’s order, however, put stays in place halting enforcement of the injunctions — and allowing enforcement of the ban for the first time since Trump tweeted his plans in the summer of 2017. Transgender people had been allowed to serve since an Obama administration decision in 2016, and transgender people have been allowed to join the military since the beginning of 2018.
Today’s ruling comes after the Trump administration decided to gut federal guidelines protecting transgender students in schools and roll back protections for transgender inmates within the United States prison system.
Donald Trump originally justified his stance on the ban by stating that “Our military must be focused on decisive and overwhelming victory and cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail”.
This of course simply isn’t true.
According to the Pacific Standard, which cites a commissioned study from the RAND Corporations by former secretary of defense Ash Carter, “covering transition-related health care for active, transgender personnel will cost between $2.4 million and $8.4 million, or between 0.04 percent and 0.13 percent of the military’s active-service health-care budget.”
As of 2016, there are approximately 8,980 service members who identified as transgender, according to CNN.
