Another federal judge in D.C. issued a preliminary injunction barring the Defense Department from implementing Trump’s executive order banning transgender people from enlisting or serving in the military.
U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes found the ban is “soaked in animus” and violates the equal protection clause because it discriminates based on transgender status and sex.
“Its language is unabashedly demeaning, its policy stigmatizes transgender persons as inherently unfit, and its conclusions bear no relation to fact,” she wrote, adding that the government failed to produce evidence about how many transgender service members there are, or how transgender status impacts their military readiness.
“Transgender persons have served openly since 2021, but Defendants have not analyzed their service. That is unfortunate. Plaintiffs’ service records alone are Exhibit A for the proposition that transgender persons can have the warrior ethos, physical and mental health, selflessness, honor, integrity, and discipline to ensure military excellence,” Reyes wrote.
At a hearing Friday, the government argued, as it had previously, that the order is focused on people with the medical condition “gender dysphoria.”
Reyes pointed to a Feb. 27 tweet by Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth declaring that “Transgender troops are disqualified from service without an exemption.”
“I am not going to abide by government officials saying one thing to the public — saying what they really mean to the public — and coming in here to the court and telling me something different, like I’m an idiot,” Reyes told the DOJ attorney assigned to this case. “I am not an idiot.”
The Justice Department later called Reyes’ injunction “the latest example of an activist judge attempting to seize power at the expense of the American people who overwhelmingly voted to elect President Trump.”
