When President Obama lifted the ban on transgender military servicein 2016, Staff Sergeant Patricia King could not have anticipated a day like January 22, 2019.
“I never expected that it would have been undone,” she told The Daily Beast, hours after the Supreme Court gave a green light to the Trump administration to implement its transgender troop ban while several legal challenges continue in federal courts.
SSG King enlisted in the army in 1999, deployed to Afghanistan three times, and came out as a transgender woman in 2016. Because she has already transitioned, she would not be forced out of the military—at least as the legal situation currently stands—but she is retiring in August anyway, after two decades of service.
“This is certainly not the way I wanted to finish my career, with this sort of thing hanging overhead,” said King.
King woke up to the news on Tuesday: Although the Supreme Court did not agree to hear a transgender troop ban case this term, it did rule in a 5-4 decision to lift two of the three injunctions on the ban while the various lawsuits continue to play out.
As the American Civil Liberties Union noted, the injunction they secured remains in place, so the ban is still blocked from going into effect until that injunction is lifted. The Department of Defense confirmed in an email to The Daily Beast that the ACLU’s injunction will prevent any changes from happening immediately.
In a statement, a Department of Defense spokesperson said that the transgender troop ban “is NOT a ban on service by transgender persons”—a claim that LGBT advocates say is deeply misleading, given that the latest iteration of the ban would still bar transgender service members from seeking transition-related medical treatment, effectively forcing those in the closet to pick between health care and discharge.
That position, advanced by Defense Secretary James Mattis last year, is a subtle evolution of the original policy that Trump tweeted out in July 2017–namely, a categorical ban on transgender military service. Read more via Daily Beast