A Clinton judge is allowing a lawsuit against the Trump transgender troop ban to continue forward, as the Trump administration sought to get the lawsuit booted out of court:
THE HILL – A federal judge on Monday rejected the Trump administration’s request to dismiss a lawsuit against the transgender military ban and lift the injunction blocking the ban from taking effect.
In an opinion issued Monday, U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly wrote that the transgender troop policy outlined by Defense Secretary James Mattis in March was not different from President Trump’s plan to ban transgender people from the military.
“Instead, at a fundamental level, the Mattis Implementation Plan is just that — a plan that implements the president’s directive that transgender people be excluded from the military,” wrote Kollar-Kotelly, an appointee of former President Clinton.
“Nothing in this Memorandum Opinion represents a final adjudication of whether defendants’ actions were constitutional. The court merely holds that whatever legal relevance the Mattis Implementation Plan might have, it has not fundamentally changed the circumstances of this lawsuit such that plaintiffs’ claims should be dismissed for lack of jurisdiction, or that the need for the court’s preliminary injunction has dissipated.”
The opinion came in a lawsuit filed by the National Center for Lesbian Rights and GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders (GLAD) on behalf of five unnamed service members and two recruits.
No new policy on the matter can go into effect, as courts in each case have issued preliminary injunctions that require the Pentagon to continue allowing open service while the lawsuits work their way through the court system.
No nuance…
In her opinion Monday, Kollar-Kotelly wrote that while the Mattis plan is written with more nuance than Trump’s original tweet, it still bans transgender people from serving.
“Under the Mattis Implementation Plan, those transgender persons who are not summarily banned are only allowed in the military if they serve in their biological sex. But by definition — at least the definition relevant to Plaintiffs’ claims in this lawsuit — transgender persons do not identify or live in accord with their biological sex,” she wrote.
“Accordingly, the Mattis Implementation Plan effectively translates into a ban on transgender persons in the military. Tolerating a person with a certain characteristic only on the condition that they renounce that characteristic is the same as not tolerating them at all.”
In March, Trump signed a memo sent to the White House by Mattis, which banned most transgender people from serving in the military “except under certain limited circumstances.”
After that, the Trump administration sought to have lawsuits against the policy dismissed and the preliminary injunctions lifted, arguing the cases are no longer relevant since Mattis’s policy is not a blanket ban.
This whole thing is nutso. The military should be able to decide whether people with mental disorders should or shouldn’t be allowed in. We don’t need the courts giving these type of mandates to the military just because the last president thought transgenders should be part of it.
Yes I know, they don’t see it that way. ‘Transgenderism is normal in our society and if you don’t like them, you’re the one who has a problem!’
The problem is, no matter what the military says, that it will eventually be forced to lower its standards to accommodate unqualified people if we go down this road with the courts. I can totally see why the Trump administration sought to get this lawsuit thrown out.