Supreme Court Accepts Trump’s Word That Trans Troops Are Threat to National Security
By a vote of 5-4, the Supreme Court today allowed the Trump administration to enforce its ban on transgender people serving in the military, while lawsuits over the ban percolate through the court system.
The impact of the decision will be immediate: approximately 9,000 members of the military are eligible to be discharged, effective today, despite their records of service and the recommendations of their commanding officers.
To be clear, today’s decision is not a final one. The question before the Court was whether the ban can be enforced while the three lawsuits about it proceed. It’s still possible that the appellate courts hearing those cases will strike down the ban, or that the Supreme Court itself will do so later on. Moreover, the Court declined to leapfrog over the appellate courts and hear the case immediately, as the government had requested.