However, the Supreme Court granted the DOJ’s request for a stay on the preliminary rulings, allowing the administration to begin kicking openly transgender troops out of the armed services and to deny transgender people the opportunity to enlist. The preliminary rulings include one out of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington in the lawsuit brought by OutServe-SLDN and Lambda Legal and joined by the State of Washington challenging the constitutionality of the proposed ban.
"For the past two-and-a-half years, thousands of qualified, transgender individuals have made our nation's armed forces better, in every measurable quality, with their authentic service," OutServe-SLDN Executive Director Andy Blevins said. "The Court's decision to allow the Trump-Pence Administration to institute their wanting and discriminatory practices while the litigation proceeds is disappointing -- our siblings-in-arms deserve better. We look forward to continuing our representation of these proud and selfless patriots, and reminding this Administration that military policy cannot be defined by baseless and discriminatory rationalizations."
OutServe-SLDN and Lambda Legal filed the lawsuit, Karnoski v. Trump, in August 2017, on behalf of nine individual plaintiffs and three organizational plaintiffs – the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), Seattle-based Gender Justice League, and the American Military Partner Association (AMPA). The State of Washington later joined the lawsuit. The district court in, December 2017, granted the plaintiffs’ motion for a preliminary injunction preventing implementation of the ban, which DOJ chose not to challenge on appeal, and the court reaffirmed that preliminary ruling in April 2018 after the Trump administration released an implementation plan. The administration appealed that latter ruling to the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals, which heard oral argument on October 10, 2018.
“The Supreme Court’s decisions today are perplexing to say the least: on the one hand denying the Trump administration’s premature request for review of lower court rulings before appellate courts have ruled and rebuffing the administration’s attempt to skirt established rules; and yet on the other allowing the administration to begin to discriminate, at least for now, as the litigation plays out,” Lambda Legal Counsel Peter Renn said. “For more than 30 months, transgender troops have been serving our country openly with valor and distinction, but now the rug has been ripped out from under them, once again. We will redouble our efforts to send this discriminatory ban to the trash heap where it belongs.”
In addition to Karnoski v. Trump, the administration also asked the Supreme Court to review the preliminary rulings in Stockman v. Trump and Doe v. Trump, lawsuits also challenging the ban filed by the National Center for Lesbian Rights (NCLR) and GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders (GLAD). Doe v. Trump was filed in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia that DOJ appealed to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia. Stockman v. Trump was filed in the U.S. District Court for the Central District of California and is also on appeal to the Ninth Circuit. Last week, the District of Columbia Court of Appeals dissolved the preliminary injunction in Doe v. Trump, but the preliminary injunctions in Karnoski v. Trump and Stockman v. Trump, as well as in a fourth case out of the U.S. District Court for the District of Maryland, remain in effect.
Read more about Karnoski v. Trump here: https://www.lambdalegal.
