DOJ will not seek emergency Supreme Court stay of injunctions allowing enlistment of transgender troops
Clears way for new transgender enlistments starting January 1, 2018
It’s official: as of 12:00 a.m. January 1, 2018, the U.S. military will be open to transgender recruits—a change in policy that had been set in motion by Former Defense Secretary Ashton Carter in 2016.
Last night, the Department of Justice announced that it would not ask the Supreme Court to stay several injunctions requiring the military to go forward with Carter’s plan—at least until a “study” that President Trump ordered is completed.
As Larence Hurley reports for Reuters:
Transgender people will be allowed for the first time to enlist in the U.S. military starting on Monday as ordered by federal courts, the Pentagon said on Friday, after President Donald Trump’s administration decided not to appeal rulings that blocked his transgender ban…In September, the Pentagon said it had created a panel of senior officials to study how to implement a directive by Trump to prohibit transgender individuals from serving. The Defense Department has until Feb. 21 to submit a plan to Trump.
In 2016, the military began allowing transgender individuals to serve openly, but crucially, the change applied only to current service-members. Carter fixed July 1, 2017 as the date when new transgender recruits would be allowed to join.
But on the eve of that deadline, Defense Secretary James Mattis delayed Carter’s proposed change until 1/1/2018. In July, Trump tweeted his opposition to transgender individuals serving in the army, and a month later, the White House issued a memorandum instructing Mattis to, among other things, indefinitely suspend Carter’s still-unimplemented policy.
The ACLU and other groups sued to prevent the Department of Defense from further postponing the acceptance of new transgender recruits.
On October 30, a federal judge in Washington D.C. prohibited the military from listening to Trump by delaying the enlistment of transgender individuals beyond January 1. Challengers obtained three similar injunctions from district courts within the Fourth and Ninth Circuits. It’s almost as if the ACLU knows that there are certain places where the Trump administration always loses.
The district court opinions all make similar arguments, but since the D.C. one was entered first, I’ll explain that one. The judge, Clinton-appointee Colleen Kollar-Kotelly, reasoned that transgender individuals constitute a “quasi-suspect class” because they are politically weak and face persecution. She further argued that Trump’s directive preventing their accession is “a form of discrimination on the basis of gender,” citing a series of lower court decisions that have held similarly.
Since the Supreme Court’s decision in Craig v. Boren (1976), “classifications by gender” have been subject to intermediate scrutiny, meaning the government must show that the classification (1) furthers an important government interest and (2) does so by means that are substantially related to that interest. Kollar-Kotelly held that Trump’s memorandum was “inextricably intertwined with gender classifications” but did not substantially further the goals of military preparedness and cohesion. “There is absolutely no support for the claim that the ongoing service of transgender people would have any negative effective on the military at all,” she concluded.
The government had asked the Fourth, Ninth and D.C. Circuits to stay the district rulings. The Fourth and D.C. Circuits said no, and the Ninth Circuit has not yet ruled.
Explaining its decision to hold off on requesting SCOTUS review, the DoJ said that the Department of Defense will be releasing an “independent study of these issues in the coming weeks.” I would guess that the DoD is trying to cobble together evidence to refute the judge’s assessment that accepting new transgender recruits is harmless. And government lawyers figure there’s no point in seeking SCOTUS intervention now if their case might become much stronger in a month. There are certainly four votes against the government, and the DoJ clearly isn’t confident that Kennedy will side with them right now.
The DoJ last night also dropped its appeals of the preliminary injunctions from the district courts, which suggests the government foresees a Supreme Court stay as its only avenue to relief before the merits are litigated.
In any event, the Trump administration has lost this case for the foreseeable future.
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Comments
40+% suicide rate, 100% mutilation rate….yeah good times were had by all……
Especially with the military getting flak for high suicide rates.
Undeployable. Constant train of meds/hormones required. Mentally unstable. You just don’t recruit someone like this, whether the are trans or not!
These people have mental health issues. The Left wants to give them lethal weapons and training in how to use them. Brilliant.
they are not deployable to a muslim majority area.
if captured, i don’t even want to know what horrors they will
be subject to.
will require separate training quarters
what sort of ‘fraternization’ issues will have to be dealt with ?
what experiences do current he/she have ?
Remarkably, there are Muslim nations where transgender is looked on rather benignly. There are, of course, conflicting fatwas. As usual.
I suppose, if you include Great Britain as a muslim nation…
By this judges logic, then the Army and Marines should not ban asthmatics or say, have any weight or height requirements.. or even age requirements. It appears that drawing any line anywhere on people SHOULD be Verbotten, no? Idiotic liberal judges and their idiocy.
Warning…there is a fat farm at MCRD. Enter at your own risk.
Is there any other animal that engages in gender deception to trick members of its own species into believing it is the opposite of its biological gender? If so, does it have an evolutionary purpose? In other words, how does pretending you are the opposite of your biologic gender advance the species’ genetic pool?
To me, it seems like an evolutionary dead end. If you are a male pretending to be female in order to trick a male into mating with you, well, good luck advancing your genetic line.
I don’t get it. And I don’t get how this helps the military win on the battlefield.
Heavy purse? Pussy hat?
Win, who said anything about winning. Medals are given to all participants of any given war.
posthumously
“It’s almost as if the ACLU knows that there are certain places where the Trump administration always loses.”
Yes, it’s called judge shopping. Every court decision against a Trump executive order, be it immigration, transgenders, or anything else, has come from either (or both) the 4th and 9th circuit, with help from the DC circuit. Those are the circuits Obama managed to stack. I do hope DOJ has not given up on this and is only waiting for the DOD report, otherwise, as RobM says, the federal courts will have taken over the recruiting process for the military like they have so much else. If people who are mentally ill have a constitutional right to serve in the military, so do people with vision problems, weight or age problems, or any other medical condition. And, of course, it means that the president is no longer de facto commander in chief of the military and that a court could, if it wishes, countermand a president’s order to deploy troops on the ground that he hasn’t proven that not doing it would harm anybody. The federal court system is the most corrupt institution in America.
Forlorn hope troops?
Those images of those transgendered “soldiers” are going to give me nightmares.
Good evening, Ah….(Gulp)….Ladies?
….ah….those are DUDES just dressed up to look like women….or so they taught me in my “How to Gender ID” in my Hooking Up For Straights Class…you know like. “take a good look at that Adam’s Apple” and “my, aren’t those wrists too big for a women” and stuff like that….LOL!
I’ve asked this before here and I’ll ask it now. How does allowing “transgendered” (misnomer word) people into the military enhance our military readiness? That’s the only question anyone should ask when evaluating a rule for the military.
Transgender people will be allowed for the first time to enlist in the U.S. military
Why would they do that? The whole idea of this little con—as I understand it, which is not very well—is to get Uncle Sam to pay for the extensive medical treatments.
In other words, enlist first, transition later. There’s no point at all to transitioning first, then enlisting.
The military/transsexual correlation seems undeniable. Every single such person personally known to me is now ex-military. A very small sample, certainly, but I strongly suspect a causal relationship. If so, the way to stop this abuse of the American taxpayer might be for the military to stop paying for it. Let them enlist if they wish, but exclude certain elective procedures from the bureaucratic definition of “health care”.
According to the interview, the person has to be transitioned before joining the armed forces….so I guess we’d just be on the hook for the hormones and stuff….
Who knows if that’s the way it would really work.
There seems to be a real hard sell of this “Trans-movement”.
The US military isn’t a meals-on-wheels charity, mideast urban renewal project, or experimental social club for the mentally unstable. The US military has one job: blow things up and kill enemy soldiers.
I feel sorry for these deluded cross-dressers. I truly do. It must be horrible to suffer from a mental illness such as body dysphoria. They have my pity, but these high maintenance individuals are not deployable, and have no place in a dynamic, stressful, lethal, constant readiness environment like the military – even in a state-side support capacity.
This madness must end.
How do they pass the physical and how many of these people and trying to enlist in the military?
While it’s an awful idea on so many levels, it doesn’t get you far to go down the “physical fitness” route. IIRC, there’s at least one transgender SEAL (he’s a guy going to the “other side”).
An army of bradley mannings.
What could go wrong?
Bradley Manning was a traitor! Chelsea Manning is a patriot!
/s
This is just complete and utter bullshit.
This is not about them being ‘transgender’. This is about them FORCING OTHER PEOPLE to rearrange their lives to accomodate their mental delusions.
This is ludicrous. These MENTALLY ILL idiots require millions of dollars of medical treatment, constant medication, are totally non-deployable, and will totally crush the morale of any unit they’re assigned to – ESPECIALLY if they’re an officer.
At least the bullshit about women in combat arms is thoreticlaly justifiable as long as they are forced to conform to the same physical standards as the males (my objection is mainly that we all known goddamn well that they’ll LOWER the standard because not enough women will make the cut), but this is just ludicrous. There is no point at which ANY of these mental basket cases will be useful in combat.
Olinser. Your comment is dead on!
Your comment is dead on!
The main objection to women in combat is that we as a society do not condone violence towards women. It’s an advanced civilization thingy.
I think I can see the angle on this. Maybe.
Post-op transgenders can be refused entry because of their susceptibility to post-op complications and the inability to be deployed within X days of surgery.
Pre-op transgenders can be allowed in, but not allowed transgender surgery through the US Military (see above) until they have completed their term of service and gone off the reserves (in which case, the need for surgery is fairly moot)
Serving in the military used to be out of necessity. Then it was the man’s burden. Then it became the patriotic thing to do. Now it’s your right to join. And don’t let anybody tell you otherwise; standards and good order and discipline be damned.
The military discriminates all the time; age, weight, height, intelligence, health issues. Obama was way wrong on this one.
Well, I certainly feel safer.
One step closer to the draft.
The obama legacy. Ugh.
That’s one fine looking group of ladies!! /s
Guy 1: “Would you like to go on a blind date”?
Guy 2: “What does she look like”?
Guy 1: “Um….She’s got a great personality”!!!!
“constitutes discrimination by the military”
Yes, the military discriminates on the basis of gender, height, weight, handicap etc.
There is no right to serve in the armed forces.
Putting a weapon into the hands of mentally unstable person behaving like a teenage girl because if hormone therapy is probably the stupidest thing I have ever seen.