Supreme Court Allows Trump Ban On Transgender Members Of The Military To Be Enforced

Yahoo

06-05-2025

In a blow to transgender service members across the U.S. military, the Supreme Court on Tuesday granted the Trump administration's request to allow its ban on transgender troops to be enforced while litigation is pending.
In the brief order in the case known as Shilling v. United States, the justices did not expand on their decision. The order only noted that Justices Sonia Sotomayor, Elena Kagan and Kentanji Brown Jackson would have denied the Trump administration's emergency request to lift nationwide injunctions placed on the ban by lower courts.
In January, President Donald Trump issued an executive orderpurporting to improve military readiness by banning service members who expressed a gender identity different from the one assigned to them at birth.
In an apparent dig at former President Joe Biden's decision in 2021 to rescind the ban on transgender troops that Trump instituted in his first term, Trump's executive order this year claimed that the U.S. Armed Forces had been 'afflicted with radical gender ideology.'
Until Biden's executive order, the Supreme Court had allowed Trump's ban on transgender troops to go into effect as litigation unfolded.
Trump's executive order in January did not mention the word 'transgender'; instead, it claimed without any supporting evidence that 'expressing a false 'gender identity' divergent from an individual's sex' means that the person cannot 'satisfy the rigorous standards necessary for military service' including 'lethality, cohesion, honesty, humility, uniformity and integrity.'
Following Trump's order, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth issued a policy in February that used similar language, banning anyone who had been diagnosed with gender dysphoria or had undergone evaluation for it from serving. Gender dysphoria is defined as the distress a person feels when their physical body doesn't match up with their gender identity. Per Hegseth's memo, anyone impacted by the ban would be fired by late March unless they could secure a waiver to stay enlisted.
A series of civil lawsuits from transgender troops — many of them highly decorated — popped up in numerous states as a result. Among the first was one filed in Washington state by U.S. Navy Commander Emily Shilling, a transgender woman who has spent 20 years in the military, served tours of combat in Iraq and Afghanistan and has passed rigorous physical and psychological evaluations.
Shilling, joined by five other transgender service members, claimed the new policies lacked any legitimate function, and worse, were steeped in unfounded prejudice.
Transgender service members were being punished for expressing their gender, and that expression, Shilling's lawyers argued, is a guaranteed First Amendment right.
Justice Department lawyers have argued the ban is not targeting transgender people but only those diagnosed with gender dysphoria. But when U.S. District Judge Benjamin Settle put an injunction on the ban, he noted that though Trump's order and Hegseth's memo 'scrupulously' avoided using the word 'transgender,' 'common sense and binding authority defeat the government's claim that it does not discriminate against transgender people.'
In practice, the ban amounted to 'a de facto blanket prohibition on transgender service,' Settle wrote, because the Defense Department had failed to show that it took studies or data on the reliability of transgender service members into any real consideration when crafting its policy, whether that data was 'positive, neutral or negative,' Settle wrote.
This point was driven home by another judge presiding over a similar lawsuit brought by trans service members in Washington, D.C.
Over a series of hearings in the case Talbott v. Trump this spring, U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes pored over claims the Defense Department used to craft its policy around troops with gender dysphoria. Reyes told the government it had 'cherry picked' information to fit its narrative that trans service members were untrustworthy or incapable of serving as well or better than their cisgender counterparts. The government's narrative, she said, 'screams animus,' a term for hostility to a given class of people.
Lawyers for the Trump administration have replied by alleging a lack of deference by the courts to the U.S. military.
When he first asked the Supreme Court to halt the injunction on the trans military ban, Solicitor General John Sauer — once a personal lawyer to Trump — said the district courts had 'usurp[ed] the Executive Branch's authority to determine who may serve in the Nation's armed forces.'
The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit has yet to decide whether the nationwide injunction granted by Reyes should be put on hold or not. A ruling is imminent.