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Secretary of War Pete Hegseth appeared ready to take the legal battle over transgender servicemembers to the highest court in the land as he responded to a recent federal appeals court decision.
“See you at SCOTUS,” Hegseth wrote on X, in response to a 2-1 ruling that has blocked the Trump administration from removing more than two dozen transgender-identifying rank-and-file servicemembers from their posts amid ongoing court proceedings.
Last year, Hegseth won big in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit as judges decided that the U.S. military had the authority to bar transgender-identifying men and women from serving, arguing that the presence of those who experience gender dysphoria poses a risk to the rank-and-file.
This decision came after President Trump signed an executive order in 2025 aimed at defining military service as fit for only those “mentally and physically fit for duty.”
According to The New York Times, this week’s federal ruling on the issue applies only to 28 plaintiffs in the case at this time. It does not lift the ban on transgender individuals seeking to join the military presently.
Writing for the majority, Judge Wilkins on Monday argued that barring transgender individuals from entering the military was based seemingly on a “desire to harm a politically unpopular group” and said that the ban was unconstitutional:
“Some of those disqualifications are completely unexplained and have no reasonable justification. The sharp contrast to the Mattis Policy, adopted in the first Trump Administration, which allowed servicemembers who were transgender or who had suffered from gender dysphoria to remain in the military, appears to be driven by the bare desire to harm a politically unpopular group: persons who identify as transgender. As such, at this preliminary stage, I conclude that the Hegseth Policy is both arbitrary and based upon animus, and for those reasons the Policy violates Plaintiff-Appellees’ constitutional right to equal protection of the law.”