The Trump administration is trying to get the U.S. Supreme Court to immediately take up and consolidate three cases challenging his ban on transgender troops. The move comes as a surprise, and despite having lost in lower courts, and not yet at the point where SCOTUS is their only next step, as The Washington Post reports.
The administration, as MSNBC’s Pete Williams reports, is attempting to declare an emergency, allowing it to discharge trans service members, refuse new trans recruits, and refuse some medical care, despite currently having active and openly transgender troops in its ranks with not ill effects.
Courts have prevented the administration from enacting its ban.
“The decisions imposing those injunctions are wrong, and they warrant this Court’s immediate review,” Solicitor General Noel J. Francisco wrote in his plea to the Supreme Court.
Buzzfeed adds that the Justice Department’s filing cites current Pentagon policy, namely, “that ‘the Mattis policy reflects the military’s reasoned and considered judgment that ‘making accommodations for gender transition’ would ‘not [be] conducive to, and would likely undermine, the inputs—readiness, good order and discipline, sound leadership, and unit cohesion—that are essential to military effectiveness and lethality.'”
But federal judges and activists disagree.
“There is absolutely no support for the claim that the ongoing service of transgender people would have any negative effect on the military at all,” U.S. District Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly wrote in her ruling. “In fact, there is considerable evidence that it is the discharge and banning of such individuals that would have such effects.”
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