A divided federal appeals court in Washington, D.C. has blocked Donald Trump’s administration from removing transgender service members from the U.S. military, a major victory for trans troops who have been subjected to “demeaning” and “disparaging” orders from the president and the Pentagon, judges wrote.
The administration’s “arbitrary” policy is fueled by the administration’s “animus” towards trans people, according to Monday’s 2-1 ruling.
“Some of those disqualifications are completely unexplained and have no reasonable justification,” Judge Robert Wilkins wrote for the court. The policy is instead “driven by the bare desire to harm a politically unpopular group: persons who identify as transgender,” according to the ruling.
“As a result, this is not a case where we are left to speculate why the government drafted such broad, undifferentiated classifications,” he wrote. “Unless we are going to fall for the old Groucho Marx line — ‘who are you going to believe, me or your lying eyes?’— we have direct evidence in this case that animus motivated the classifications.”
Though the judges determined that the administration unlawfully removed trans service members, the ruling will allow the Pentagon to continue denying new trans recruits while the legal challenge is ongoing.
The decision largely upholds a March 2025 ruling from District Judge Ana Reyes, who found the policy “unabashedly demeaning” and “soaked in animus” without any basis in fact.
Monday’s appeals court decision also follows a months-long legal battle waged by more than two dozen active-duty service members and recruits who argue that the administration’s orders are plainly discriminatory in violation of their 14th Amendment right to equal protection under the law.
Trump’s directive, issued shortly after taking office last January, claims the “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.”
The Department of Defense later ordered military officials to “immediately” review medical records for trans service members to begin removing them from all branches of the armed forces.
That order followed a Supreme Court decision that temporarily allowed the administration to bar trans people from entering all branches and to remove currently serving trans service members despite a series of court rulings that found the president’s directive plainly discriminatory.
Appellate court judges analyzed a series of policy memos and other statements from officials who sought to defend the policy’s legitimacy against their countless public statements “disparaging” trans people, they wrote.
The judges could not “ignore the disparaging statements repeatedly made by the decisionmakers,” Wilkins wrote.
“What has been clearly and repeatedly explained are the foundational premises of the Hegseth Policy: persons with a ‘false gender identity’ are unfit for the military, and persons with a history of gender dysphoria are also unfit because they lack ‘honesty, humility, . . . and integrity,” he wrote.
“All of these things, when taken together, demonstrate that the government’s stated reason for issuing the Hegseth Policy as based solely upon gender dysphoria was pretextual, and that instead, the Hegseth Policy was premised, at least in part, on a non-legitimate state interest to harm the politically unpopular group of transgender persons,” according to the ruling.
Since taking office, the president has issued a series of directives targeting trans Americans, including an executive order that erases federal recognition of trans people and other measures that restrict gender-affirming healthcare and ban trans athletes from competing in women’s sports.
Hundreds of federal surveys have also scrubbed questions tied to sexual orientation and gender identity, according to UCLA Law School’s Williams Institute.
This is a developing story
