Supreme Court Allows Trump's Ban on Trans People Serving in the Military to Go Into Effect 

On Tuesday, the Supreme Court ruled in favor of enforcing President Donald Trump’s piece-of-shit ban on most transgender people openly serving in the military as the country’s lower courts continue to litigate the issue.

The New York Times reports that the he court’s ruling will lift injunctions that had previously blocked the discriminatory policy. These had been issued by Federal District Court judges in California and Washington state, both in the Ninth Circuit. According to the Times, the Court’s position “temporarily allowed the ban to go into effect while the case moves forward.”

The court’s decision came down to a 5-4 vote with the court’s liberal jurists—Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Stephen G. Breyer, Sonia Sotomayor, and Elena Kagan—dissenting.

Trump first announced the policy in July 2017, describing it in a series of tweets as a ban on trans individuals from serving “in any capacity,” and citing as his reasons “tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail. Thank you.” The policy was later officially released by James Mattis, the Secretary of Defense and the time. The ban made exceptions for a few hundred transgender people already serving openly and those willing to work “in their biological sex,” according to the Times.

The only recently enshrined egalitarian measure was jeopardized and restricted by the Trump administration almost immediately upon its implementation, according to the Associated Press: “Until a few years ago service members could be discharged from the military for being transgender. That changed under President Barack Obama. The military announced in 2016 that transgender individuals already serving in the military would be allowed to serve openly. And the military set July 1, 2017 as the date when transgender individuals would be allowed to enlist.”