A United States district judge on Monday blocked Donald Trump from enforcing a ban on transgender people serving in the military.
The ruling, which prevents the military from discharging current service members for being trans, is the first judicial response to the numerous lawsuits pending against Trump’s transgender troop ban.
The order will block the ban while the lawsuit brought by the National Center for Lesbian Rights, GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders, and several transgender service members, proceeds before the US district court for Washington DC.
“We are enormously relieved for our plaintiffs and other transgender service members,” Shannon Minter, head of the National Center for Lesbian Rights, told the AP. “Their lives have been devastated since Trump first tweeted he was reinstating the ban. They are now able to serve on equal terms with everyone else.”
Trump first announced a ban on military service for transgender people in a series of tweets on 26 July. In August, he formally directed the secretary of defense and the secretary of homeland security to bar transgender recruits and to cease covering sex reassignment surgical procedures through military healthcare programs.
His memorandum directed the defense secretary, James Mattis, to decide, by March 2018, whether current trans service members ought to be expelled based on their deployability – their ability to serve in a war zone, participate in exercises or live for months on a ship.
The US district judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly said the plaintiffs – eight transgender men and women who are members of military academies or the ROTC – were likely to succeed on the merits of their case.
“As a form of government action that classifies people based on their gender identity, and disfavors a class of historically persecuted and politically powerless individuals, the president’s directives are subject to a fairly searching form of scrutiny,” she said.
Kollar-Kotelly also cleared the way for the Pentagon to resume planning to accept new transgender recruits, Minter said, on 1 January 2018.
The Monday order left the ban on insurance coverage for surgical procedures in place. But even under Trump’s order, the Pentagon can continue to cover such procedures “to the extent necessary to protect the health of an individual who has already begun a course of treatment to reassign his or her sex”.
Studies and advocates place the number of transgender people currently serving in the armed forces between 1,300 and 11,000.
Barack Obama ordered a longtime ban on transgender service lifted after an inquiry led by his defense secretary, Ashton Carter, concluded the ban’s reversal was unlikely to have a negative impact on military readiness.
Transition-related surgery, which has been cited by critics as costly and disruptive, would reduce the deployability of no more than 130 service members every year and make up no more than 0.13% of spending on healthcare for active duty military members, according to a study Carter commissioned by the Rand Corporation.
