The Trump administration’s assault on minority communities took a new form last summer, when the president asserted on Twitter that transgender individuals would be banned from serving in the U.S. Armed Forces. A number of lawsuits erupted against that ban in the time since and culminated in that ban being blocked. This week, a federal judge in Washington, D.C., shot down Trump administration efforts to lift that block.
The Trump administration’s claim is that the basis for legal challenges has been removed because the president’s initial tweetstorm morphed into restrictions that supposedly do not constitute a unilateral ban on transgender service members. Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly asserted, however, that there had been no change going from the president’s Twitter announcement of the ban to its formal establishment that warranted the lifting of an injunction keeping the ban from going into effect.
The implementation plan developed after the president’s initial tweetstorm demands that transgender people who make it through new restrictions serve in the military only in their biological sex.
Judge Kollar-Kotelly explained:
‘Accordingly, the [Secretary of Defense James] Mattis Implementation Plan effectively translates into a ban on transgender persons in the military. Tolerating a person with a certain characteristic only on the condition that they renounce that characteristic is the same as not tolerating them at all.’
She handed down her ruling keeping an injunction blocking the ban in place as part of a legal case that lawyers with the National Center for Lesbian Rights and GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders (GLAD) brought against the Trump administration.
GLAD’s transgender rights project director Jennifer Levi praised Kollar-Kotelly’s move:
‘The Trump administration’s arguments to dismiss our lawsuit and move forward with the trans military ban are full of sweeping generalizations and false stereotypes about transgender people. It’s clear Judge Kollar-Kotelly isn’t buying it — and neither should anyone else.’
The stereotypes driving the Trump administration’s arguments first appeared in the president’s tweets announcing his intent to ban transgender people from serving in the U.S. military.
Trump claimed that allowing transgender people to openly serve in the military would force “tremendous medical costs and disruption” on the U.S. government. Trump is happy with massive costs when they suit him, pushing for billions and billions of dollars for a border wall.
In addition, the notion that transgender people could cost the military some massive sum is bogus. The RAND Corporation concluded in a study that medical services for transgender troops would cost “an amount that will have little impact on and represents an exceedingly small proportion of (Active Component) health care expenditures … and overall [Department of Defense] health care expenditures.”
Before the Trump administration got involved, transgender recruits were finally poised to be accepted into the U.S. military in mid-2017 following a policy change set in motion late in the Obama administration under Defense Secretary Ashton Carter.
Under Trump, when the military was finally set to begin accepting transgender recruits in June 2017, Defense Secretary Mattis delayed the change, casting his decision as simply having “approved a recommendation by the services.”
Trump’s tweets meant to formalize that the military would never accept transgender recruits at all came almost a month later, but the Trump administration was overruled and made to accept them at the start of 2018.
Featured Image via YouTube screenshot
