A judge blocked the Trump administration on Tuesday from carrying out an executive order that bans people with gender dysphoria from serving in the military, saying the government was unjustly discriminating against people based on their sex and transgender status.
U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes wrote in a scathing 79-page memorandum that President Donald Trump’s executive order on transgender service members and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s subsequent policy directive on them violated the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment.
“The cruel irony is that thousands of transgender servicemembers have sacrificed—some risking their lives—to ensure for others the very equal protection rights the Military Ban seeks to deny them,” Reyes, a Biden appointee, wrote.
Attorneys with the Department of Justice had argued in court that Trump’s and Hegseth’s orders did not prevent transgender people from serving in the military. Instead, they said, it shut out only people with gender dysphoria and prohibited service members from using any pronouns other than those corresponding to their sex.
Reyes said her preliminary injunction will not go into effect until March 21 to give the DOJ time to appeal it. The case could be on an eventual track to the Supreme Court.
The injunction from Reyes perhaps came as expected after the judge had reamed out two separate DOJ attorneys in two different hearings ahead of issuing it. She said in the hearings that the attorneys were not addressing their “animus” toward transgender people and that they were ill-prepared to make their case. The DOJ issued a complaint to the appellate court after the first hearing, saying Reyes’s behavior was “egregious” and that she had clear bias against the DOJ.
In her order, Reyes highlighted that the plaintiffs who brought the case, a group of active-duty transgender military members, had a slate of awards for their services.
“Plaintiffs, they acknowledge, have ‘made America safer,’” Reyes wrote. “So why discharge them and other decorated soldiers? Crickets from Defendants on this key question.”
The judge also highlighted Hegseth’s X activity, saying that while he “studiously” avoided the word “transgender” in his policy directive, he did use it on X, marking the latest instance of Trump administration officials’ X posts being used against them in court.
DOJ attorneys argued in a hearing that “people” use “shorthand” on X, to which Reyes shot back that the head of the Pentagon was not the same as her “friend Jane on the street” and that she would take Hegseth’s words seriously, whether on X or elsewhere.
Trump has made efforts to root out what he describes as gender ideology across the government. Using alternative pronouns, letting men compete in women’s sports, or offering medical gender transition procedures to minors denies the “biological reality” of sex, Trump has said.
JUDGE SCOLDS TRUMP DOJ IN TRANSGENDER MILITARY CASE AND DOWNPLAYS HEGSETH’S SERVICE
In the military, Trump argued that “adoption of a gender identity inconsistent with an individual’s sex conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle.” Reyes said that was not grounded in logic.
“Defendants’ position does not urge judicial deference to military judgment. It urges judicial abdication. No. The law does not demand that the Court rubber-stamp illogical judgments based on conjecture,” Reyes wrote. “In fact, it requires the opposite because the executive does not enjoy a ‘wholesale license to discriminate in matters of military policy.’”
