The federal court judge who blocked Donald Trump’s ban on transgender military service people has now issued a court memo to clarify what the military is to do at this moment.
The judge issued the clarification memo just yesterday even though the ban was blocked back in October.
In the memo, Judge Colleen Kollar-Kotelly writes that the military is to ignore Trump’s ban and begin accepting transgender troops by January 1 of next year.
As The Hill reports, the memo states: “that [Kollar-Kotelly’s] injunction means that the military must continue to follow the policies established by former President Barack Obama‘s ‘June 30, 2016 Directive-type Memorandum,’ which allowed transgender individuals to enlist beginning on January 1.”
On top of that, Defense Secretary James Mattis is to use “a six-month deadline to assess the role of transgender troops who are currently serving in the U.S. military.”
This memo is released a week after a second U.S. court blocked the ban because it violates the U.S. Constitutions’ equal protection clause and the guaranteed rights of service members to receive medical care.
Trump officially issued the ban back in August (after first tweeting about it).
Supposedly, he did not consult any currently serving military officials about the futures of what a 2016 RAND study says is somewhere between 1,320 and 6,630 transgender service members in active duty and 830 to 4,160 members on reserve.
(Though, the only other study estimating the number of transgender service members is a 2014 UCLA study, and it estimates that there are about 15,500 transgender service members to be enlisted on active duty, in the reserves, and in the National Guard).
In addition, Trump cited some of the reasoning for the ban as a way to cut “tremendous medical costs” for transgender people going through gender-reassignment surgery.
That said, the RAND study found that only 29-129 of the transgender service members would seek out medical treatment.
