No Its Not.

Headlines proclaim Mattis defies Trump’s military ban!

Mattis freezes transgender policy; allows troops to continue serving, pending study
USA Today
By Tom Vanden Brook,
August 29, 2017

WASHINGTON — Defense Secretary Jim Mattis late Tuesday announced that transgender troops will be allowed to continue serving in the military pending the results of a study by experts.

The announcement follows an order from President Trump — first announced in a tweet — declaring that transgender service members can no longer serve in the military, effectively reversing an Obama administration policy. The order also affects the Department of Homeland Security, which houses the Coast Guard.

"Once the panel reports its recommendations and following my consultation with the secretary of Homeland Security, I will provide my advice to the president concerning implementation of his policy direction," Mattis said in the statement. "In the interim, current policy with respect to currently serving members will remain in place."

It makes it sound like they are studying whether to allow trans servicemembers, well they are not.

Mattis hailed as ‘hero’ for ‘defying’ Trump on transgender policy. But did he?
Washington Post
By Fred Barbash and Derek Hawkins
August 30, 2017

Defense Secretary Jim Mattis was trending on Twitter overnight, praised by the LGBT organization GLAAD and hailed by some as a “hero” for “openly defying” Trump by “disregarding” the president’s order. Some on Twitter confessed they never thought they would be cheering on generals or ex-generals for refusing to carry out the orders of the commander in chief.

But defying orders was not what Mattis was doing.

What Mattis did Tuesday with President Trump’s ban on transgender people in the military was to freeze its  impact for the moment, at least on those currently serving.

But such a delay was pretty much authorized by Trump in his formal memorandum (as opposed to his tweet) delivered to Mattis and the Department of Homeland Security on Aug. 25. It said:

As part of the implementation plan, the Secretary of Defense, in consultation with the Secretary of Homeland Security, shall determine how to address transgender individuals currently serving in the United States military. Until the Secretary has made that determination, no action may be taken against such individuals …

That sounds an awful lot like a freeze, or at least an invitation to one. Mattis gladly accepted it.
[…]
Mattis declared in his statement that a panel of experts would be set up to “provide advice and recommendations on the implementation of the president’s direction.” Once the panel delivers some recommendations, Mattis continued, he’ll go back to the president. That could give Mattis an opening to quash the ban entirely. But he did not do that Tuesday.

Mattis could justifiably state, as he did, that far from defying the president, he was only carrying out “the president’s policy direction” and acting “as directed.”

Read what The National Center for Lesbian Rights as reported by Towleroad said,

NCLR’s Shannon Minter responded to the angle of a USA Today story reporting on Mattis’s statement:

The USA Today story is grossly misleading. Secretary Mattis did not make a decision to “buy time” or to “freeze” the current policy. The President’s August 25, 2017 Memorandum expressly provides that the new ban does not go into effect until March 23, 2018 and expressly states that no one can be discharged for being transgender in the meantime. There is nothing new at all here, and suggesting otherwise is terribly misleading.

This inaccurate reporting is playing into a patently bogus strategy to make it appear that there is going to be some new “study” that will legitimate what is already a forgone conclusion: the discriminatory banning of military service by transgender people, based on a characteristic that has no bearing on their fitness to serve. The August 25 Memorandum is perfectly clear: President Trump has ordered the military to ban transgender people from serving. That ban will go into effect in about 7 months, on March 23. That appalling decision is not (and cannot possibly be, given its timing) based on any hastily assembled, post hoc “study” that is being cooked up now in a transparent effort to provide a retroactive fig leaf for the President’s bigotry. This order is an act of pure animus toward transgender people. The military spent two years carefully reviewing all of the relevant evidence on this issue and concluded that there is no reason to exclude transgender people from military service. The cost of inclusion is literally negligible, and there is no evidence that permitting open service will have any negative impact on military readiness. The notion that there is any good faith “study” being conducted is a blatant pretext for unmitigated, vicious, baseless discrimination.

More than ever, we need reporters to fact check these stories and not simply repeat false information that is being used to set up an attempted cover for one of the most shocking acts of official discrimination the transgender community has ever experienced.

There is no new “freeze.” This is just what the August 25 [Memorandum] ordered — along with a permanent ban on enlistment, effective now, and a new ban on open service, effective on March 23, 2018.

So all Defense Secretary Mattis is doing is looking at the best way to kick us out.