Judge blocks President Trump’s passport policy targeting transgender people
A judge has blocked the Trump administration from implementing a policy that would deny transgender and nonbinary Americans the right to choose a gender mark on their passports.
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An appeals court has ruled that the Pentagon’s move to remove transgender soldiers from the military violates their rights and that the policy is “arbitrary and based on hostility.”
Two of the three judges on the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit agreed that the Trump administration’s sweeping ban on transgender service members from military ranks last year was unconstitutional.
Justice Robert Wilkins, appointed by former President Barack Obama, wrote in the majority opinion that the policy “appears to be driven by a naked desire to harm a politically unpopular group: people who identify as transgender.”
Justice Justin Walker, an appointee of President Donald Trump, dissented, writing in the minority opinion that striking down Pentagon policy would amount to an “unprecedented intrusion into internal military operations.”
The ruling applies only to the Pentagon’s efforts to expel transgender people serving in the military. This would effectively ban transgender people from enlisting in the military.
The ruling came after a group of transgender service members sued the Trump administration over the policy, which Trump implemented shortly after his second term in office. Since then, the Pentagon has identified and fired thousands of transgender service members and barred others from joining.
A federal judge put the policy on hold in March 2025, saying it was “steeped in hostility and dripping with pretext,” but the Supreme Court ruled it could go into effect two months later.
Pentagon Secretary Pete Hegseth officially issued a ban on transgender people serving in the military in February 2025, effectively reinstating the ban enacted during President Trump’s first term. Meanwhile, former President Joe Biden abolished the program days after taking office in 2021.
In a memo issued last year, Hegseth said people experiencing symptoms of gender dysphoria “are unable to meet the rigorous standards required for military service.” He links the ban on transgender service members to a sweeping push to stamp out what he calls “woke” policies throughout the military.
Jennifer Levi of GLAD Law, an LGBTQ rights group representing the plaintiffs, praised the decision.
“This decisive ruling confirms that the Trump administration has no legitimate basis for discharging transgender service members who have met all rigorous standards and proven time and time again their fitness and dedication to military service,” Levi said in a statement.
“See you at SCOTUS,” Hegseth wrote in an X post after the ruling, using the Supreme Court’s acronym.
The military has about 1.3 million active-duty members, according to Pentagon data. Transgender rights groups say there are as many as 15,000 transgender soldiers in the military, but authorities say the number is in the low thousands.
Contributed by: Reuters.
