Former Army Secretary Eric Fanning pushed back Thursday against the Trump administration’s motion to dismiss a federal lawsuit filed by transgender troops, saying its effort to roll back a year-old Pentagon policy of open service is harming the military.
“Any time you take a group and imply … that they are different or set apart for reasons unrelated to their ability to serve and meet the requirements, it’s harmful for the force,” Fanning told the Washington Examiner. “It’s harmful to the individuals, but it is harmful to the force as a whole.”
The Department of Justice filed a motion late Wednesday night asking a D.C. district court to throw out a suit filed against President Trump and Defense Secretary Jim Mattis by five active-duty troops, a Naval Academy student, and an ROTC student who are all transgender.
The Doe v. Trump case is the first of four federal lawsuits filed against Trump after he declared a ban on transgender military service in a series of tweets. Trump has since ordered Mattis and the Pentagon to come up with a plan by February to roll back the Obama administration policy put in place last year allowing transgender troops to serve openly and receive medical treatment.
Fanning, along with Obama-era Air Force Secretary Deborah James and Navy Secretary Ray Mabus, filed statements with the court in August supporting the Doe v. Trump lawsuit.
“Frankly, my preference is the courts, the Congress and the American public are all aligned on issues. But each of those elements is an important tool in the fight to advance civil rights,” Fanning said. “Right now … I think of all those elements the courts are the one that can move the fastest to sort of put a stop on this because this is having an impact today on people in uniform.”
Fanning, who served under former President Barack Obama as the first openly gay service secretary, also told the Washington Examiner about his initial reaction to President Trump’s unexpected Twitter announcement in July declaring a ban on transgender service in any capacity.
“I was also shocked at how far the president went in his tweets to say that there is no place for transgender Americans in uniform including those who are already serving,” he said. “That is an incredibly disruptive thing to take people who are already serving, they’ve been recruited they’ve been trained, they are in jobs, many of them deployed, and to pull them out of the force.”
He said it’s likely most uniformed military leaders did not want to revisit the issue.
“The uniformed leadership most of them I think believe, ‘Look, we debated this, we decided this, we made a decision, it’s not right to go back. We have other things to worry about that we need to focus on,'” Fanning said.
