The Trump Administration is asking the Supreme Court to hear arguments on its transgender military ban, hoping that the conservative-leaning court will allow the ban to go through and end injunctions placed on the policy by lower-court judges, according to CNN.
Justice Department lawyers filed petitions on Friday in three separate cases regarding the administration's controversial ban on transgender military service members. The ban in question is the second-such attempt by the Trump administration to bar trans people from serving. After the first attempt was immediately met with injunctions, the administration rewrote its policy while keeping the general idea in place. The reworked policy was met with the same response: its rollout was stopped by judges in district courts.
The Trump administration is now asking that the Supreme Court rule on the matter before the case can be heard by appellate courts. The request, called "certiorari before judgment," has been used before by the Trump administration to seek a final ruling on their attempts to end the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals program. The Supreme Court declined to hear the case before the appellate courts in that case.
The Trump administration argues in their filings that "'making accommodations for gender transition' would 'not [be] conducive to, and would likely undermine, the inputs—readiness, good order and discipline, sound leadership, and unit cohesion—that are essential to military effectiveness and lethality.'"
The push for the military ban is Donald Trump's latest attempt to roll back gains made by the trans community under President Barack Obama. His administration has attempted to define gender as the sex a person was assigned at birth, and ended protections for transgender workers and prisoners.
