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REACTION, from p.7
fully — until President Trump unleashed his incendiary barrage of uninformed tweets.” Aaron Belkin, director of the Palm Center, a research institute focused on policy questions regarding sexual minorities in the military, issued a statement saying, “In service to the ideological goals of the Trump-Pence base, the Pentagon has distorted the science on transgender health to prop up irrational and legally untenable discrimination that will erode military readiness. There is no evidence to support a policy that bars from military service patriotic Americans who are medically fit and able to deploy.” The advocates clearly aim to characterize Mattis’ conclusions as an after-the-fact rationalization of a policy Trump first announced in a tweet storm last July with no apparent reliance on military advice. The president’s motivation, instead, seems to have been to placate House conservatives unhappy about funding for gender reassignment surgery who threatened to withhold their votes from a military spending bill. In four different federal courts, judges issued temporary injunctions against implementation of Trump’s policy, finding that it did not seem grounded in any mili-
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IDAHO, from p.18
gender people are unarguably a politically vulnerable minority.” Dale continued, “This is especially true in Idaho, where transgender people have no state constitutional protections from discrimination based on their transgender status in relation to employment decisions, housing, and other services. Therefore, transgender people bear all of the characteristics of a quasisuspect class and any rule developed and implemented by IDHW should withstand heightened scrutiny review to be constitutionally sound.” This would mean that any new requirement imposed by the state and challenged by transgender plaintiffs would have to be supported by an important government interest that the requirement substantially advances. Under this GayCityNews.nyc | March 29 – April 11, 2018
tary expertise — and was at odds with Pentagon findings late in the Obama administration that transgender service was not inconsistent with military readiness and imposed no significant cost in terms of health care spending. Two federal appeals courts declined to block two of the injunctions the Justice Department had challenged. Mindful that Trump’s effort to reverse the Obama policy on transgender troops flew in the face of the conclusions of a lengthy Pentagon review, Mattis argued that review was largely based “on a study prepared by the RAND National Defense Research Institute; however, that study contained significant shortcomings. It referred to limited and heavily caveated data to support its conclusions, glossed over the impacts of healthcare costs, readiness, and unit cohesion, and erroneously relied on the selective experiences of foreign militaries with different operational requirements than our own.” Advocates will pour through the Mattis memo to counter his revisionism on the issue, but the legal challenges to the new policy now face an important new obstacle: the court’s traditional deference to military expertise in Pentagon’s personnel policy, something that hobbled challenges to the Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell policy for years.
standard, it is unlikely that a surgical requirement would withstand judicial review, since many states — and countries — have come to agree that such a requirement poses an unnecessary barrier to the ability of many transgender people to obtain appropriate official documentation, without serving any significant public purpose. Dale issued an injunction giving the state up to one month to “begin accepting applications made by transgender people to change the sex listed on their birth certificates,” and specifying that the new certificates “must not include record of amendment to the listed sex” and should use the new legal name of the applicant. The plaintiffs are represented by Lambda Legal attorneys Peter Renn and Kara Ingelhart, with pro bono local counsel Monica G. Cockerille of Boise, Idaho.
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