The U.S. Supreme Court ruled Tuesday that the Trump administration can move forward with a ban on transgender military service members for now, lifting a lower court injunction against the policy after a judge ruled it was an “unsupported, dramatic and facially unfair exclusionary policy.”
The court did not explain its decision other than to say the order would expire if the justices ultimately take up the case on the merits and issue a ruling striking it down.
Litigation continues in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit.
Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Ketanji Brown Jackson indicated they would have denied Trump’s request for a stay.
During Trump’s first term, the high court took a similar course, lifting an injunction against a ban on transgender service members after it was challenged. President Joe Biden ended the policy and thousands of transgender members of the military have provided active service over the past four years.
The Pentagon has estimated more than 4,200 active service members have a diagnosis of gender dysphoria which is the military’s metric for tracking the number of transgender troops. Advocacy groups have put the actual number of trans service members much higher, around 15,000.
The Supreme Court’s decision means the military can begin discharging service members who are transgender and cease enlistment of transgender people.
The Trump administration argued that the president is owed broad deference in running the military and shaping the force, framing its policy as a “medical” exclusion. Solicitor General John Sauer claimed that gender dysphoria presented problems for unit cohesion and lethality; two federal judges found little evidence to support those claims.
At the end of April, the Trump administration made a new emergency request seeking an immediate stay of a nationwide injunction blocking the ban on openly transgender military service members.
Circuit Court Judge Benjamin Settle, a George W. Bush nominee, when issuing the preliminary injunction in the case on March 27, had written the Trump administration’s policy on transgender soldiers would be a “de facto blanket prohibition” that seeks “to eradicate transgender service.”
The case was filed by a group of seven transgender service members and one transgender person who wishes to enlist in the United States Marine Corps.
In a statement, advocates for the seven active-duty service members who brought the lawsuit called the ruling a “devastating blow.”
“By allowing this discriminatory ban to take effect while our challenge continues, the Court has temporarily sanctioned a policy that has nothing to do with military readiness and everything to do with prejudice,” said Lambda Legal and the Human Rights Campaign Foundation which are providing legal representation for the transgender troops.
“Transgender individuals meet the same standards and demonstrate the same values as all who serve. We remain steadfast in our belief that this ban violates constitutional guarantees of equal protection and will ultimately be struck down,” the foundation said.
During a trip to Stuttgart, Germany, in February, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth was asked by a service member at U.S. Africa Command why “four exceptional transgender soldiers” he’d served alongside over severn years needed to be removed.
Hegseth responded: “It’s an ongoing review, with our foot forward on readiness and deployability, readiness and deployability, which is what we have looked at. And there are any number of scientific ways that you can explain that letter as to why there are complications with trans soldiers in that with readiness and deployability.”