A divided federal appeals court has handed President Donald Trump’s administration a mixed early win on its transgender military policy, allowing the Pentagon to keep new transgender recruits out for now but stopping the government from forcing out those already serving while a legal challenge moves forward.
In a 2-1 decision, a panel of the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit concluded the 2025 policy was unlawfully motivated “by the bare desire to harm a politically unpopular group”.
Even so, the court said the Pentagon has wide latitude to set enlistment standards. On that basis, it ruled the government may continue barring transgender people from newly entering the armed forces while a lawsuit brought by transgender current and prospective service members plays out.
“It appears to us to be a much greater hardship to end a military career than to delay the start of one,” wrote Circuit Judge Robert Wilkins, an appointee of Democratic president Barack Obama.
In dissent, Circuit Judge Justin Walker, a Trump appointee, argued that courts should not be in the business of second-guessing military judgments. Courts “have neither the expertise nor the authority to decide whether the military can exclude the plaintiffs from its ranks,” he wrote.
Jennifer Levi of LGBTQ rights group GLAD Law, who represents the plaintiffs, welcomed the ruling.
“This decisive ruling confirms that the Trump Administration has no legitimate basis to discharge transgender service members who have met every demanding standard and proven, time and again, their fitness and dedication to serve,” Ms Levi said in a statement.
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth signaled the fight is not over, indicating the government intends to take the case to the US Supreme Court.
“See you at SCOTUS,” Mr Hegseth wrote on X in response to a Fox News reporter’s post about the decision.
Pete Hegseth said the decision would be appealed
The decision partly leaves in place a 2025 ruling by a federal judge in Washington, DC, who had temporarily blocked the policy in full while litigation continued.
That judge said the measure amounted to sex discrimination and likely ran afoul of the US Constitution’s guarantee of equal protection under the law.
Mr Trump set the policy in motion with a January 2025 executive order declaring that adopting a transgender identity “conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honourable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle”.
Mr Hegseth moved quickly to implement the order, triggering a series of legal challenges.
The military ban is one piece of a broader push by the Trump administration aimed at eliminating recognition and accommodation of transgender people across American life.
Federal agencies have dropped lawsuits filed on behalf of transgender workers, ended settlements that benefited transgender students and opened investigations into hospitals and doctors for providing gender-affirming treatment to minors.
Read More: US to remove transgender troops from military, memo shows
Department of Defense data puts the active-duty force at about 1.3 million personnel.
Transgender rights advocates estimate there may be as many as 15,000 transgender service members, while government officials say the figure is in the low thousands.
The policy has already been the subject of high-court action: in May 2025 the US Supreme Court allowed it to be implemented, lifting a temporary block ordered by a judge in a separate case out of the state of Washington.
But the Supreme Court offered no explanation for that decision, and it may have turned on a procedural issue rather than the underlying legality of the policy, Judge Wilkins wrote for the DC Circuit.
