The judge said the military couldn’t enforce Trump’s order while a court reviewed it.
On Monday, a federal judge clarified that the military must adhere to a previous court order — requiring that the military disregard President Donald Trump’s executive order banning transgender service members in the military — by Jan. 1,2018.
Judge Kollar-Kotelly’s initial decision on Oct. 30 blocked the Trump administration from overturning a policy, enacted under former President Barack Obama, allowing transgender individuals to openly serve. According to The Hill, Kollar-Kotelly said the military couldn’t enforce Trump’s order while a court reviewed it.
Kollar-Kotelly cited “a number of factors” for blocking the president’s order in October:
“The court finds that a number of factors — including the sheer breadth of the exclusion ordered by the directives, the unusual circumstances surrounding the President’s announcement of them, the fact that the reasons given for them do not appear to be supported by any facts, and the recent rejection of those reasons by the military itself — strongly suggest that Plaintiffs’ Fifth Amendment claim is meritorious.»
Trump’s order came through an Aug. 25 memorandum in which Trump blocked military funding of sex reassignment surgery, and postponed the ban on transgender individuals until March of 2018.
The president left open the question of what to do with currently serving, transgender members of the armed forces.
