TWIBS: Spineless SCOTUS Happy to Bend Over for Bigotry
Trump asked SCOTUS to jump, and they asked, “How high?” The Supreme Court delivered a simpering single page approval for the Trump admin’s purge of trans people from the US military and presumably hoped for a treat and a good boy from the president, and now thousands of people will lose their livelihoods for no reason.
Humor by Alyssa Steinsiek
This Week in Barrel Scraping (TWIBS) is Assigned Media’s oldest column! Every Friday, Alyssa Steinsiek digs deep from the well of transphobia and finds the most obnoxious, goofy thing transphobes have said or obsessed over during the week and tears it to shreds.
Despite the Supreme Court’s current Republican majority (justices are meant to be impartial and their party affiliation should not affect the way they do their jobs, but in practice this is almost never the case), many have expressed relief that the court doesn’t seem to be interested in shamelessly rubber stamping Trump’s many wants the second they hit the bench. It seems that with issues of transgender people’s rights, however, that may not be the case.
On Tuesday, the Supreme Court of the United States granted a shockingly speedy stay of the preliminary relief that would have ensured trans service members kept their jobs while court battles are fought over the state’s right to discriminate against them.
Trump signed one of his many first week anti-trans executive orders on January 27th, titled “Prioritizing Military Excellence and Readiness.” The text of the document says that our Armed Forces are “afflicted with radical gender ideology to appease activists,” and furthermore purports that “adoption of a gender identity inconsistent with an individual’s sex conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in one’s personal life.”
An extremely unproblematic statement to be sure, one that’s definitely not loaded with prejudicial malice. None whatsoever.
Unfortunately for Trump and co, two federal judges read statements like these as somewhat hostile, and perhaps even biased. Judge Ana Reyes and Judge Benjamin Settle issued preliminary injunctions against the executive order, ensuring that trans service members could keep their jobs while the legality of the order to fire them was worked out in court. These orders are always temporary, and very specific standards must be met for a judge to issue an injunctive order.
Per Cornell Law School, the standards for a preliminary injunction are “whether the plaintiff is likely to succeed on the merits, whether the plaintiff is likely to suffer irreparable harm without the injunction, whether the balance of equities and hardships is in the plaintiff's favor, and whether an injunction is in the public interest.”
It’s pretty clear that these cases meet each of those qualifications. Both Judge Reyes and Judge Settle believed that the order to fire trans troops and refuse to let trans Americans serve in the military would fail to stand up to scrutiny in court, likely because they are blatant violations of the equal protection and due process guarantees of the Fifth Amendment; trans service members would obviously suffer irreparable harm by having their careers taken away and livelihoods ruined; and, given that the Justice Department couldn’t express a single factual reason trans troops would compromise military readiness, an injunction was clearly in the public’s interest.
Dissatisfied with Judge Reyes’ and Judge Settle’s mandated temporary relief, the Trump administration hurried to the big guns, begging the Supreme Court to let them fire all the transgenders and sort out whether or not that’s constitutional after the fact. Without deigning to explain their reasoning, the Supreme Court ruled six to three (liberal justices in disagreement) to pause the relief, paving the way for Trump and co to purge the Armed Forces of trans service members.
Though the justices couldn’t be fucking bothered to explain themselves in the one-page document they issued to ruin tens of thousands of lives on a whim, we can make some easy guesses based on the administration’s arguments to the Supreme Court: that federal courts shouldn’t have the right to overrule the executive branch with regards to military readiness; that the Supreme Court in 2019 allowed the first Trump administration to enforce a “materially indistinguishable” policy; and that the ban doesn’t target transgender people, but people with gender dysphoria. Some might argue that this is a difference without distinction, but proponents of the ban could point to sweeping medical disqualification factors like asthma.
But it doesn’t matter! Because the court and its justices are happy to provide a rubber stamp in record time (less than two weeks between the filing of the request and the issuing of the stay), so long as the issue at hand involves we vile gender traitors.
Truly, my heart goes out to the many trans people who will lose their jobs and access to medical care and housing in the coming weeks and months as the Pentagon ensures not a single enlisted soul is afflicted with radical gender ideology.
Alyssa Steinsiek is a trans woman journalist who reports on news relevant to the queer community and occasionally posts on BlueSky.
