Navigation
Join our brand new verified AMN Telegram channel and get important news uncensored!
  •  
Branches

Trump calls for military transgender case to go to Supreme Court and skip appeals court

The Supreme Court of the United States, March 2017. (Phil Roeder/Flickr)
November 26, 2018

Late last week, the Trump Administration issued a request to the Supreme Court to hear cases involving the transgender military ban.

Solicitor General Noel Francisco submitted the petitions to the Supreme Court, requesting that they bypass the appeals court to step in and hear three cases, citing the detriment of nationwide rulings wrongly imposed by lower courts, CNN reported on Friday.

According to Francisco, “The military has been forced to maintain that prior policy for nearly a year” despite Defense Secretary James Mattis and other experts who deemed the “prior policy, adopted by (Defense Secretary Ash Carter), posed too great a risk to military effectiveness and lethality.”

In a series of tweets on July 26, 2017, Trump first announced the ban on transgender individuals from serving in the military.

“After consultation with my Generals and military experts, please be advised that the United States Government will not accept or allow Transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the U.S. Military,” Trump said.

“Our military must be focused on decisive and overwhelming victory and cannot be burdened with the tremendous medical costs and disruption that transgender in the military would entail. Thank you,” he concluded.

The announcement came as a shock, especially through the platform on which it was announced.

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis launched a months-long review of the issue before proposing a modified, but official policy to ban those with gender dysphoria diagnoses from serving in the military.

Gender dysphoria is the official term for a condition consisting of an individual’s conflict between their perceived gender and their sex at birth. The condition is commonly associated with transgender individuals.

Mattis’ review determined that those diagnosed with gender dysphoria also experience dangerous side effects such as suicide, anxiety, depression and drug addiction, and that surgeries and therapies were not successful in alleviating these side effects.

In recent weeks, the Department of Justice advised the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals that the department would pursue an emergency hearing to remove the nationwide injunction of Trump’s ban.

The 9th Circuit is notorious for overturning President Trump’s policies.

It was the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals that upheld the lower court’s ruling to block Trump’s ban this past July.

The court determined that the Administration’s ban “would upend, rather than preserve, the status quo” that “allows transgender service members to serve in the military in their preferred gender and receive transition-related care,” the National Review reported at the time.

In a statement made Saturday, House Democratic Leader Nancy Pelosi criticized Francisco’s request, vowing to fight.

“The President’s ban is a cruel and arbitrary decision designed to humiliate transgender Americans who have stepped forward to serve our country,” she said. “This bigoted ban weakens our military readiness and our country, and shows this president’s stunning lack of loyalty to those who risk all to defend our freedoms.”