The U.S. Supreme Court sided with the Trump administration, overturning a lower court injunction that had prevented the Pentagon’s transgender military ban from going into force, enabling Trump’s order and associated measures to proceed.
The Supreme Court verdict gives the White House a significant win even though it did not address the case’s fundamental merits or President Donald Trump’s Jan. 27 executive order barring transgender service members from the United States military. The president celebrated the ruling with a post on his Truth Social account of a report summarizing the court win.
Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan, and Ketanji Brown Jackson would have dismissed the administration’s appeal, upholding the lower court ruling.
Shilling v. United States is a lawsuit challenging Trump’s executive order prohibiting transgender military troops, Fox News noted.
The executive order would direct the Defense Department to revise its guidance on “trans-identifying medical standards for military service” and “rescind guidance inconsistent with military readiness.”
The Trump administration has claimed that further postponing the policy will jeopardize US military readiness, as it expressed to the Supreme Court in a brief late last month.
“Absent a stay, the district court’s universal injunction will remain in place for the duration of further review in the Ninth Circuit and in this Court – a period far too long for the military to be forced to maintain a policy that it has determined, in its professional judgment, to be contrary to military readiness and the Nation’s interests,” U.S. Solicitor General D. John Sauer told the court, urging justices to grant the stay.
Trump administration officials have stated that transgender military policy “furthers the government’s important interests in military readiness, unit cohesion, good order and discipline, and avoiding disproportionate costs.”
The case was promptly challenged in federal court.
Seven transgender military members sued the administration in a Seattle federal court and in Washington, D.C., where U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes grilled Trump administration lawyers in a dizzying line of questioning that invoked shelters, Jesus, and Miss Pac-Man, among other things, before asking the government to push its planned implementation deadline.
