The Trump administration can go ahead with its plan to restrict military service by transgender men and women while court challenges continue, the Supreme Court said Tuesday.

In this Oct. 10, 2017, file photo, the Supreme Court in Washington, at sunset. [File Photo: AP]

The high court split 5-4 in allowing the plan to take effect, with the court's five conservatives greenlighting it and its four liberal members saying they would not have. The order from the court was brief and procedural, with no elaboration from the justices.

As a result of the court's decision, the Pentagon can implement a policy so that people who have changed their gender will no longer be allowed to enlist in the military.

The policy also says transgender people who are in the military must serve as a member of their biological gender unless they began a gender transition under less restrictive Obama administration rules.

The Trump administration has sought for more than a year to change the Obama-era rules and had urged the justices to take up cases about its transgender troop policy immediately, but the court declined for now.

Those cases will continue to move through lower courts and could eventually reach the Supreme Court again. The fact that five justices were willing to allow the policy to take effect for now, however, makes it more likely the Trump administration's policy will ultimately be upheld.

Until a few years ago service members could be discharged from the military for being transgender. That changed under the Obama administration.

The military announced in 2016 that transgender people already serving in the military would be allowed to serve openly. And the military set July 1, 2017, as the date when transgender individuals would be allowed to enlist.

AP's Supreme Court Reporter Mark Sherman explains how we got here.

"The president tweeted that transgender people should not be allowed to serve in the military in any capacity," said Sherman.

"That tweet gave rise to lawsuits and those lawsuits produced orders from the court."

In late July 2017 the president tweeted that the government would not allow "Transgender individuals to serve in any capacity in the U.S. Military." He later directed the military to return to its policy before the Obama administration changes.

The Trump administration's revised policy on transgender troops dates to March 2018.

The policy generally bars transgender people from serving unless they do so "in their biological sex" and do not seek to undergo a gender transition. But it has an exception for transgender troops who relied on the Obama-era rules to begin the process of changing their gender.

Those individuals, who have been diagnosed with "gender dysphoria," a discomfort with their birth gender, can continue to serve after transitioning. The military has said that over 900 men and women had received that diagnosis. A 2016 survey estimated that about 1 percent of active duty service members, about 9,000 men and women, identify as transgender.