A Tuesday Supreme Court ruling has given President Donald Trump the go-ahead to enforce his ban on transgender people serving in the military.
The conservative-led high court said in a singe-paragraph emergency order that it would lift an injunction that was placed on the trans ban while the judiciary considered challenges to its legality. As is typical in an emergency ruling, the order offered no explanation of the decision.
The court’s three liberal justices—Elena Kagan, Sonia Sotomayor, and Ketanji Brown Jackson—dissented from the decision.
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Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth praised the ruling, writing on X shortly after it came down, “No More Trans @ DoD.” Trump, meanwhile, posted an article about the development on Truth Social.
The order does not rule on the legality of Trump’s ban, which came in the form of an executive order a week into his term. The president claimed that being transgender “conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in one’s personal life.”
The Pentagon began to enforce Trump’s order in February, issuing a new policy that said it would remove trans soldiers from the military. A 2018 independent study estimated that there are around 15,000 trans active duty service members.
Seven such soldiers, along with an advocacy group, sued over the legality of Trump’s order, arguing, for one, that it violated the Fourteenth Amendment’s equal protection clause.
In late March, just as Hegseth was set to start dismissing trans soldiers, federal district judge Benjamin Settle blocked the ban.
“There is no claim and no evidence that Shilling herself is dishonest or selfish, or that she lacks humility or integrity,” the George W. Bush nominee wrote, referring to one of the plaintiffs, Navy Commander Emily Shilling. “Yet absent an injunction, she will be promptly discharged solely because she is transgender.”
Trump’s Justice Department went to the Supreme Court to protest the loss. “The district court’s injunction cannot be squared with the substantial deference that the Department’s professional military judgments are owed,” it argued in a petition.
Now, the court has acquiesced. The Trump administration will be allowed to enforce its ban until the Ninth Circuit U.S. Appeals Court, which had refused to undo the injunction while it weighed the case, makes a ruling.
Since entering office, Trump has waged war on trans people and what he calls “gender ideology”—and not just in the military. Trump has sought to move trans women to men’s prison blocks, defund gender-affirming medical care, and block school teachers from calling trans students by their preferred names.
