Whatever opinion you hold on the banning of transgender Americans from military service, I need you to understand that it is the news and my primary job at Assigned Media is, believe it or not, reporting the news. So… with that in mind… I am going to report on some new shit that has come to light on the subject of transgender Americans being banned from military service, and JUST LIKE ALWAYS, I need everybody to be really cool and normal at me about it.
Thank you in advance.
On January 27, 2025, Donald Trump issued Executive Order 14183, “Prioritizing Military Excellence and Readiness,” in which he described trans Americans as incapable of honesty, humility or integrity, and stated that trans people’s gender identity “conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful and disciplined lifestyle, even in one’s personal life.”
Shortly thereafter, the Pentagon under Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth began identifying trans military personnel for contract termination. A series of lawsuits followed, filed by trans troops who preferred to keep their jobs instead of being fired under blatantly discriminatory orders from the president and SecDef, until the Supreme Court (in a stunning and uncharacteristic display of judiciary malfeasance) decided that the Pentagon could go ahead and expunge the United States military of those pesky trans people while lower courts continued to argue the legality and constitutionality of such a maneuver.
I’ve been reporting on this nightmare for over a year, now, and my most recent update on the general situation (in which Judge Ana Reyes recommended both parties should convene to decide whether or not the suit warranted an upgrade to class action that would cover more trans servicemembers, for which a hearing should be forthcoming on June 29) was met with a lot of extremely normal responses, so that’s cool.
On Monday, a three-judge panel from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia released a 107-page ruling stating that Trump’s trans troop ban was likely unconstitutional, but the only explicit good to come from this ruling is that the trans service members named as plaintiffs in this specific lawsuit (which also passed through Judge Reyes’ court last year) cannot be fired from their jobs in the U.S. armed forces. That injunctive relief, left untouched by the panel’s majority opinion, does not apply to any other trans service members who have been fired for being trans, or any trans Americans who have never enlisted but would like to.
“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,” wrote Judge Robert Wilkins for the majority, confirming that Donald Trump “declared transgender people as categorically unfit for military service explicitly because of their gender identity.”
The lawsuit will continue to play out in lower courts for who knows how long, and if it should be taken up by the Supreme Court eventually, I would not expect a favorable outcome for trans service members. The current conservative majority Supreme Court has proven they are prepared to gleefully approve almost any anti-trans measures the presidency throws their way via shady and unexplained shadow docket decisions. No matter how many federal judges correctly assess that Trump’s ban is unconstitutional, a clear violation of trans Americans’ right to equal protection under the law, the end of the road may always look the same: John Roberts’ ideologically motivated, anti-justice Supreme Court telling us all that the exclusion of trans troops is fine, for… reasons.
So, here’s what I think: Transgender Americans should largely not want to enlist. The American military is, in general, a tool of imperialist conquest and extreme violence against innocent foreign entities. We’re talking about an organization that, under President Barack Obama (and during unpopular wars started by President George W. Bush), made children in the Middle East afraid of cloudless, sunny days, because that’s when the drones operate best. The United States military, under Trump, has illegally invaded a South American nation to extreme rendition a foreign leader they did not like, and illegally invaded yet another Middle Eastern nation to explode little girls. Why would anybody want to be a part of that evil death machine?
At the same time, I am reluctant to happily accept the exclusion of trans Americans from any avenue of life and liberty available to cisgender Americans. Allowing the federal government to ban us from any space that cis people are free to go is a horribly dangerous concession that will cost us dearly in the long run.
I guess what I’m saying is, at least in this instance, everything sucks and there is no truly good outcome to be found.
Happy Pride, folks!
Aly Gibbs (She/They) is a trans writer who reports on news important to the queer community.
