Story by Mariah Timms
A federal judge on Tuesday blocked the Pentagon from implementing President Trump’s executive order that excludes transgender individuals from serving openly in the military, the latest legal setback for one of the administration’s policy priorities.
Judge Ana Reyes in Washington, D.C., ruled that the order likely violated the constitutional guarantee of equal protection and issued a preliminary injunction that halted it while litigation continues. The White House in January directed the military to adopt a policy that said transgender individuals are unable to meet the “high standards for troop readiness, lethality, cohesion, honesty, humility, uniformity, and integrity.”
Reyes, an appointee of President Joe Biden, said the ban was motivated by animus and stigmatized transgender individuals as inherently unfit to serve.
“The cruel irony is that thousands of transgender servicemembers have sacrificed—some risking their lives—to ensure for others the very equal protection rights the Military Ban seeks to deny them,” Reyes wrote in a 79-page ruling.
Current and prospective transgender service members challenged the executive order as discriminatory. They argued the president ignored a number of studies showing that their participation had no meaningfully negative impact on military readiness.
The government defended the policy, saying that military leadership has the broad authority to decide medical criteria for service members.
Reyes’s ruling is set to go into effect Friday. The White House didn’t immediately respond to a request for comment.
The Pentagon released new guidance to military officials in late February barring from service anyone with a diagnosis, symptoms or history of gender dysphoria, a psychological condition in which one feels that their gender identity doesn’t match their assigned sex at birth. The new rules would also affect anyone who has or has attempted to transition from their birth sex.
The policy does include a narrow exemption for individual transgender service members where there is a “compelling Government interest…that directly supports warfighting capabilities.” To qualify, however, the person must have never attempted to transition, be willing to live with the gender expression and service requirements of their birth sex and show no symptoms of gender dysphoria for three years.
In her Tuesday ruling, Reyes called it an exemption “in name only.”
The judge repeatedly pressed the government to explain how that policy didn’t amount to a total ban on openly serving as transgender, expressing skepticism there was a meaningful category of transgender people who could fit the exemption.
“Can you and I agree this is essentially a null set, that this was designed to exclude all transgender people?” Reyes asked a Justice Department lawyer at a hearing earlier this month.
Reyes’s ruling came after a series of lengthy hearings and extensive written legal arguments examining the challengers’ case and the government’s order.
She had declined to issue a restraining order or injunction until the new policy had been completed and made public in late February. The policy had indicated that the process of identifying or removing transgender service members wouldn’t begin before March 26.
The president has promised a dramatic rollback of transgender rights and moved quickly to deliver on that pledge after returning to the White House. In addition to the military action, Trump also signed an executive order to restrict gender therapies for minors, which has been blocked by federal judges in Maryland and Washington as challenges against the directive proceed. Gender therapies for minors are restricted in about half of the U.S. The Supreme Court is currently considering a case from Tennessee to decide whether states can maintain such limits.
Court proceedings are continuing against other Trump directives that would reverse Biden-era changes that made it easier for people to change their gender markers on passports and other documents and on housing policies for transgender federal inmates.
Trump also tried during his first term to rescind an Obama-era policy allowing openly transgender people to serve in the military. A federal judge blocked that, finding that the order wasn’t based on legitimate concerns about military effectiveness. A watered-down version went into effect in late 2019, although transgender individuals continued to serve in the interim. Trump’s new order is more sweeping than his 2017 push.
The Biden administration had rescinded Trump’s policy and allowed openly transgender individuals to enlist and receive medical care. Estimates on the number of transgender military service members vary; a 2016 Defense Department study by the Rand nonprofit research organization estimated between 1,320 and 6,630 transgender individuals were on active duty, out of a total of about 1.3 million service members.
WSJ