The Court’s Justices voted 5-4 for the ban, first proposed by President Donald Trump in a 2017 tweet, to go into effect despite the lower courts still working through legal attempts to stop it.
It’s estimated around 15,000 of America’s 1.3 million active duty troops are transgender, but the new legislation will block anyone diagnosed with gender dysphoria from serving with limited exceptions.
Individuals without the condition can serve, but only if they do so according to the sex they were assigned at birth – in short, restoring the previous ‘Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell’ policy which allowed transgender people to serve if they hid their identity.
The White House says there is “too great a risk to military effectiveness and lethality” to allow transgender people to serve openly – a policy which was enacted under Trump’s predecessor Barack Obama in 2016.
But LGBT activists say the move is cruel and irrational. “It undermines military readiness and perpetuates the fear across the transgender and allied communities that this government will not protect them, not even those who would sacrifice everything to protect our nation,” Laura Durso, Vice President of the LGBT Research and Communications Project at the Center for American Progress, said.
Personally, I think if you’re willing to risk your life for your country, then you should be allowed to defend it.
Unless you’ve got bone spurs in your heels.
