On Monday afternoon, the U.S. Court for the District of Columbia temporarily blocked the Trump administration’s efforts to ban transgender individuals from military service.
In her 76-page opinion, Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly said that a new policy greatly limiting sex-reassignment surgeries for military personnel is permitted. But she issued an injunction against President Trump’s directive to bar transgender individuals from the military.
https://ecf.dcd.uscourts.gov/cgi-bin/show_public_doc?2017cv1597-61
For now, Kollar-Kotelly ordered the military to revert back to the most-previous service guidelines that were approved last year by the Obama administration. And she didn’t believe the Trump administration case would succeed on Fifth Amendment grounds when it came to accession and retention orders related to transgender service members. (Accession orders allow someone to service in the military, while retention orders allow someone to be discharged from service.)
“The Court finds that Plaintiffs are likely to succeed in demonstrating that the Accession and Retention Directives’ exclusion of transgender individuals from the military is unconstitutional,” Kollar-Kotelly wrote. “At the outset, the Court reiterates precisely what is at issue in this case: a policy banning the accession, and allowing the discharge, of an entire category of individuals from the military solely because they are transgender, despite their ability to meet all of the physical, psychological, and other standards for military service.”
In addition, Kollar-Kotelly stated other reasons for the injunction.
“The Court finds that a number of factors— including the sheer breadth of the exclusion ordered by the directives, the unusual circumstances surrounding the President’s announcement of them, the fact that the reasons given for them do not appear to be supported by any facts, and the recent rejection of those reasons by the military itself—strongly suggest that Plaintiffs’ Fifth Amendment claim is meritorious,” Kollar-Kotelly said.
