LGBT

Court Blocks Trump’s Transgender Service Ban

Written by SK Ashby

The U.S. District Court for the Fourth Circuit in D.C. has temporarily blocked Trump's ban on transgender military service for a variety of reasons that will be difficult for Trump regime lawyers to argue.

In her ruling, Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly wrote that the plaintiff are likely to succeed because the Trump regime has presented virtually no evidence to justify the ban.

The judge agreed with the plaintiffs' assertion that the president's directives were "not genuinely based on legitimate concerns regarding military effectiveness or budget constraints, but are instead driven by a desire to express disapproval of transgender people generally."

She went on to say that the president's reasons for seeking to ban transgender personnel in July "do not appear to be supported by any facts" and had been rejected by the military.

Critically, the judge also wrote that the transgender service ban could also lead to heightened scrutiny and discrimination against cisgender service members who do not conform to typical gender stereotypes. In other words, the judge wrote that discrimination against transgender people is no different than discrimination against cis men and women who don't look or act like society's idea of typical men or women. The judge connected this basic gender discrimination to transgender discrimination.

In addition to actually coming up with some sort of evidence the justify the ban, government lawyers will also have to persuade the Court of Appeals that this is not gender discrimination.