In January of this year, as he did in 2017, President Trump issued a detailed executive order banning transgenders from our military. And he was correct in doing so. Transgenders are a detriment to military readiness. That’s just the blunt reality.

Yet the lawsuits immediately started flying. Even the U.S. Supreme Court ended up getting involved, and upheld the ban. On this particular lawsuit, the ruling was made abundantly clear. 

A federal appeals court in Washington, D.C., on Tuesday cleared the way for President Donald Trump’s ban on military service by individuals who identify as transgender or have gender dysphoria, staying a lower-court order that blocked War Secretary Pete Hegseth from enforcing the policy.

The 2–1 decision by a three-judge panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit sharply rebuked U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes, concluding that her ruling in March overrode military judgment and applied a standard of review the courts are not entitled to use when second-guessing force-readiness decisions. Judges Gregory Katsas and Neomi Rao, both appointed by Trump, formed the majority, while Judge Nina Pillard, appointed by former President Barack Obama, dissented.

In fact, Judges Rao and Katsas were pretty succinct in their ruling. 

“The Hegseth Policy likely does not violate equal protection. We doubt that the policy triggers any form of heightened scrutiny….Even if the Hegseth Policy contained a classification triggering some form of heightened scrutiny, decades of precedent establish that the judiciary must tread carefully when asked to second-guess considered military judgments of the political branches,” Judge Gregory Katsas and Judge Neomi Rao, both Trump appointees, wrote for the majority opinion.

“And we must do so even in cases involving sex-based or other quasi-suspect classifications. Moreover, the Supreme Court already has held that the government is likely to succeed on its contention that the Hegseth Policy does not violate equal protection,” they added.

Two things here. One, this current ruling makes it clear that a civil court is not the place for assessing judgement on what constitutes military readiness. That is the military’s role. Period. 

Second, Judges Rao and Katsas looked specifically on the merits of the case before rendering judgement. Judge Pillard did…not.

In a dissenting opinion, Judge Cornelia Pillard, an Obama appointee, said the Trump administration’s policy was rooted in “denigration and vitriol.”

“The majority’s decision makes it all but inevitable that thousands of qualified servicemembers will lose careers they have built over decades, drawn up short by a policy that would repay their commitment and service to our nation with detriment and derision,” Pillard wrote in her dissent.

“The majority grants this stay in the face of all evidence to the contrary. We should not accord deference to the military when the Department itself carelessly relied on no more than blatant animus,” she added.

Pillard said the Trump administration isn’t enforcing a medical standard but rather a “categorical exclusion of transgender people from military service—with ‘transgender’ broadly defined.”

She said defendants provided no evidence that they based their new policy on any assessment of costs, benefits, or any other factor legitimately bearing on military necessity.

Horseshit. 

Was that too blunt? I don’t care. Her opinion is definitely not rooted in case law. It is blatantly rooted in propping up the transgender cause without caring about the reality of the impact on military readiness. 

🚨BREAKING: Federal court sides with the Trump administration & says they can BAN trans people from the military.

This ruling strikes down a previous ruling from an activist judge who tried to prevent the ban from happening. pic.twitter.com/oVzfBmMjbf

— Derrick Evans (@DerrickEvans4WV) December 9, 2025

The transgender ban in the military IS enforcement of physical, mental, AND medical readiness. If you have surgical procedures to change your body, you are absolutely NOT militarily capable nor are you deployable. You cannot take your packs of pills/shots/etc with you out into the field or into combat. I am including those who are dealing with gender dysphoria and have mental health issues. 

Furthermore, those who are being treated for gender dysphoria, mental health issues, and transgender transitions are just flat out detrimental to military readiness. 

For those who are and will be crying about targeted discrimination in this ruling, get over yourselves. The military has consistently banned people from service for a multitude of health reasons. 

Hundreds of medical conditions are “disqualifying” foraccession to military service. DoD Accession  Standards at 13–54. They run the gamut from poor vision, poor hearing, asthma, and high blood pressure to various abdominal, heart, lung, neurologic, urinary, vascular, and other deficiencies. See
id. at 13–50. Many mental-health conditions are also disqualifying. These include bipolar disorders, eating disorders, substance-related disorders, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and depression or anxiety disorders under certain conditions. See id. at 50–52. The military traditionally has aligned these disqualifying mental-health conditions with those listed in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), a diagnostic and treatment manual published by the American Psychiatric Association. See Doe 2 v. Shanahan, 917 F.3d 694, 709 (D.C. Cir. 2019) (Williams, J.,concurring in the result).

I know first hand that people diagnosed with epilepsy are barred from serving. Others have been rendered non-deployable because of other health issues diagnosed while in service. 

The standard is clear. One must be physically healthy AND mentally capable to serve. The blunt truth is that issues transgenders deal with render them incapable of serving at full military readiness. 

This ruling is a good thing for our current and future military readiness.

Feature Photo Credit: West Point/Flickr/CC BY-NC-ND 2.0