A federal court ruled against Donald Trump’s transgender military ban earlier today.
A three-judge panel on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia ruled 2-1 in Talbott v. USA that the ban on transgender people serving openly in the military is a policy designed to target a group of people based on their gender identity, upholding a March 2025 ruling from out federal Judge Ana Reyes that the policy likely violates the Constitution.
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The ruling does not mean that trans people will be allowed to join the military again since the Supreme Court ruled last year that the ban could be implemented while the lawsuits against it work their way through the legal system.
Judge Robert Wilkins, a Barack Obama-appointee, wrote for the court that the ban “appears to be driven by the bare desire to harm a politically unpopular group: persons who identify as transgender.” Wilkins was joined by Bill Clinton-appointee, the AP reports.
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Judge Justin Walker, who was appointed by Donald Trump, dissented, arguing that judges have “neither the expertise nor the authority” to determine who can join the military.
Donald Trump signed an executive order in January 2025 banning transgender people from serving in the military. The order said that trans people are, by definition, unable to meet the military’s “high standards” and that having a gender identity that does not align with one’s sex assigned at birth is proof that a person cannot be “honorable, truthful, and disciplined.”
Within two months, Reyes ruled against it, saying it violates trans servicemembers’ Fifth Amendment due process rights and “invokes derogatory language to target a vulnerable group.”
“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 Joe Biden appointee, wrote.
“This is such a sigh of relief,” said Army Reserves 2nd Lt. Nicolas Talbott, the lead plaintiff in the case, at the time. “This is all I’ve ever wanted to do. This is my dream job, and I finally have it. And I was so terrified that I was about to lose it.”
The government appealed the decision, leading to today’s appeals court decision.
But in May 2025, the Supreme Court heard an appeal to an injunction against the trans military ban and ruled against it, allowing the Department of Defense to implement the ban while several lawsuits challenging it worked their way through the legal system.
The Supreme Court ruled, along party lines, that Trump wasn’t banning a class of people but instead just people who are diagnosed with gender dysphoria, the condition that describes stress generated by dissonance between one’s gender identity and sex assigned at birth. Many trans people get diagnosed with gender dysphoria in order to access gender-affirming healthcare, like hormone replacement therapy.
Judge Wilkins in today’s decision responded to that reasonsing, writing that Trump’s trans military ban “target[s] applicants and servicemembers who express what the Administration believes is a ‘false gender identity.’”
He wrote, according to the Tampa Free Press, that the trans military ban goes beyond other medical policies that exclude people from military service due to their medical histories by also banning people who have transitioned in the past. Moreover, Wilkins wrote that the administration didn’t provide any factual evidence that people diagnosed with gender dysphoria can’t serve honorably.
“The government abandoned all pretext of trying to craft sex-based classifications that were ‘sufficiently related’ to the legitimate government interests in ‘lethality, meritocracy, accountability, standards, and readiness,’” he wrote. “Those interests were dismissed as irrelevant—having the correct gender identity is all that matters.”
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