‘Grossly Misleading’: LGBT Legal Experts Slam Reports Defense Secretary Has ‘Frozen’ Transgender Policy

New Military Study Is ‘A Transparent Effort to Provide a Retroactive Fig Leaf for the President’s Bigotry’ Says Attorney

Legal experts on LGBT issues are pushing back hard against a Tuesday night report in USA Today titled: “Mattis freezes transgender policy; allows troops to continue serving, pending study.”

Many concerned by the Trump administration’s attack on transgender active duty service members were pleased to read the USA Today report, and those that followed (including NCRM’s), but not civil rights attorney Shannon Minter, who blasted the media.

“The USA Today story is grossly misleading,” Minter, who is the legal director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights (NCLR), which is suing the Trump administration over the president’s ban on transgender troops. “Secretary Mattis did not make a decision to ‘buy time’ or to ‘freeze’ the current policy,” Minter chastised. 

Minter says the memo President Trump signed on Friday “expressly provides that the new ban does not go into effect until March 23, 2018 and expressly states that no one can be discharged for being transgender in the meantime. There is nothing new at all here, and suggesting otherwise is terribly misleading.”

Minter goes on to slam what he says is “inaccurate reporting” that “is playing into a patently bogus strategy to make it appear that there is going to be some new ‘study’ that will legitimate what is already a forgone conclusion: the discriminatory banning of military service by transgender people, based on a characteristic that has no bearing on their fitness to serve.”

He calls Mattis’ study “a transparent effort to provide a retroactive fig leaf for the President’s bigotry,” and “a blatant pretext for unmitigated, vicious, baseless discrimination.” Trump’s ban on transgender service members, Minter adds, is “an act of pure animus toward transgender people.” 

He also called on “reporters to fact check these stories and not simply repeat false information that is being used to set up an attempted cover for one of the most shocking acts of official discrimination the transgender community has ever experienced.”

Minter is not the only attorney speaking out.

Joshua Block, a staff attorney with the ACLU’s Lesbian Gay Bisexual Transgender & HIV Projects responded to a since-deleted tweet from a Washington Post reporter. He says: “Inaccurate spin. Order already requires this ‘study.’ Discretion is about time, place, manner of separation. No discretion not to implement.”

The ACLU is also suing Trump over the transgender ban, in a separate action from NCLR’s.

Another ACLU attorney, Chase Strangio, a Staff Attorney with the ACLU’s LGBT & AIDS Project, took to Twitter also, posting his thoughts on the Mattis announcement and subsequent reports.

Strange tweeted that the USA Today “headline and article overstate what is happening here. Surgeries are still being cancelled and reenlistments denied.” And he adds that Defense Secretary Mattis “clearly has no patience or respect for the president. But his options are limited under Trump’s sweeping, monstrous directive.”

Stragio at one point does say, “This is still a good sign and we should support this action by Mattis.”

But he also warns:

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Image: DOD photo by Army Sgt. Amber I. Smith via Flickr and a CC license