A Federal Judge Just Blocked Donald Trump's Transgender Military Ban
In an order-by-tweet that caught many people—including some preeminent members of the Department of Defense—by surprise, President Donald Trump announced in July that transgender men and women would no longer be allowed to serve in the military, reversing an Obama-era policy that allowed transgender recruits to openly serve.
Now, a federal judge has blocked parts of Trump’s proposed ban saying that transgender service members who have brought litigation forward against Trump “have established that they will be injured by these directives, due both to the inherent inequality they impose, and the risk of discharge and denial of accession that they engender.”
After introducing the ban on Twitter, Trump handed down an official directive outlining the policy in late August. Under his proposal, transgender recruits would be banned from the military, medical treatment funding for current transgender troops would be completely cut off, and Defense Secretary James Mattis would have power to expel transgender service members. In late August, Mattis put a temporary freeze on the ban when he announced that he would wait to put the policy into effect until a team of experts completed a study determining the effects it would have on current service members.
In a ruling handed down on Monday, Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly blocked parts of Trump’s ban related to “accession and retention.” In short, the aspects of Trump’s proposal that affected the recruitment and retention of transgender troops were struck down by Kollar-Kotelly’s decision. She did not, however, offer a ruling on the directive prohibiting funding for “sex reassignment surgical procedures,” saying that her court does not have jurisdiction over that aspect of the ban.
With Kollar-Kotelly’s decision, the military will now “revert to the status quo” in regard to transgender service members—meaning former President Obama’s serve-openly policy will live on.