The administration of US President Donald Trump can go ahead with its plan to restrict military service by transgender people while court challenges continue, the US Supreme Court said on Tuesday.
The court split 5-4 in allowing the plan to take effect, with the court’s five conservatives green-lighting it and its four liberal members saying that they would not have.
The order from the court was brief and procedural, with no elaboration from the justices.
The court’s decision clears the way for the Pentagon to bar enlistment by people who have undergone a gender transition.
It would also allow the administration to require that military personnel serve as members of their biological gender unless they began a gender transition under less-restrictive rules dating to the administration of former US president Barack Obama.
The Trump administration has sought for more than a year to change the Obama-era rules and had urged the justices to take up cases about its transgender troop policy immediately, but the court declined for now.
Those cases are to continue to move through lower courts and could eventually reach the Supreme Court again.
However, that five justices were willing to allow the policy to take effect for now makes it more likely that the Trump administration’s policy would ultimately be upheld.
The US departments of justice and defense released statements saying that they were pleased by the Supreme Court’s action.
The Pentagon said that its policy on transgender troops is based on professional military judgement and necessary to “ensure the most lethal and combat effective fighting force.”
Lower court rulings had forced the military to “maintain a prior policy that poses a risk to military effectiveness and lethality,” US Department of Justice spokeswoman Kerri Kupec said.
Before beginning to implement its policy, the administration is expected to need to make a procedural filing in one case in Maryland challenging the plan. That request could be made this week.
Groups that sued over the Trump administration’s policy said that they ultimately hoped to win their lawsuits over the policy.
“Trump administration’s cruel obsession with ridding our military of dedicated and capable service members because they happen to be transgender defies reason and cannot survive legal review,” GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders attorney Jennifer Levi said in a statement.
Until a few years ago, service members could be discharged from the military for being transgender. That changed under the Obama administration.
The military in 2016 announced that transgender people already serving in the military would be allowed to serve openly and it set July 1, 2017, as the date when transgender individuals would be allowed to enlist.
However, after Trump took office his administration delayed the enlistment date, saying that the issue needed further study.
In late July 2017, the president said on Twitter that the government would not allow “Transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the U.S. Military.”
He later directed the military to return to its policy before the Obama administration changes.
Groups representing transgender individuals sued and the Trump administration lost early rounds in those cases, with courts issuing nationwide injunctions barring the administration from altering course.
The Supreme Court on Tuesday put those injunctions on hold, allowing the Trump administration’s policy to take effect.
The Trump administration’s revised policy on transgender troops dates to March last year. The policy generally bars transgender people from serving unless they do so “in their biological sex” and do not seek to undergo a gender transition.
However, it has an exception for transgender troops who relied on the Obama-era rules to begin the process of changing their gender.
Those individuals, who have been diagnosed with “gender dysphoria,” a discomfort with their birth gender, can continue to serve after transitioning.
The military has said that more than 900 men and women had received that diagnosis.
A 2016 survey estimated that about 1 percent of active-duty service members, about 9,000 men and women, identify as transgender.
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