Within his first week back in the White House, President Donald Trump moved to bar transgender-identifying individuals from the U.S. armed forces. The policy was quickly challenged in federal court and blocked by Judge Ana Reyes of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, an appointee of Trump’s immediate predecessor, Joe Biden. Intervention from the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the policy to take effect, but a divided panel of the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit is now shielding a small cadre of active-duty U.S. servicemembers who identify as transgender, teeing up a likely confrontation at the U.S. Supreme Court.

Although the ruling, published Monday, is narrow, only siding with active-duty plaintiffs involved in the case, the Trump administration is likely to seek its reversal on appeal in an effort to combat the broad use of judicial restrictions courts have imposed on the administration over the past 16 months. At least 20 plaintiffs are named in the case, but not all are active-duty U.S. servicemembers.

The president’s policy, first clarified in an executive order entitled “Prioritizing Military Excellence and Readiness,” suggested that allowing transgender-identifying individuals to serve in the military weakens U.S. military effectiveness and lethality and poses a risk to national security. “Recently … the Armed Forces have been afflicted with radical gender ideology to appease activists unconcerned with the requirements of military service like physical and mental health, selflessness, and unit cohesion,” the president wrote, characterizing gender dysphoria and transgender identification as “medical conditions or physical defects that may reasonably be expected to require excessive time lost from duty for necessary treatment or hospitalization,” which the Department of War (previously the Department of Defense) has long held disqualify candidates for recruitment from military service. “Consistent with the military mission and longstanding DoD policy, expressing a false ‘gender identity’ divergent from an individual’s sex cannot satisfy the rigorous standards necessary for military service.”

Reyes promptly barred the policy from going into effect in March of 2025, arguing that the policy is likely unconstitutional and arbitrary in its targeting of transgender-identifying individuals. The D.C. Circuit halted Reyes’s order, but another federal judge on the other side of the country, Judge Benjamin Settle of the U.S. District Court for the Western District of Washington, issued a nearly identical injunction, citing heavily from Reyes’s flawed order. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit allowed Settle’s injunction to stand, but the Supreme Court didn’t. Instead, the high court halted the injunction, noting that it had found a similar policy put in place under Trump’s first term to be constitutional and that adverse rulings against the policy were therefore likely to be reversed by the Supreme Court. Almost immediately, the Trump administration began the process of discharging U.S. servicemembers who identify as transgender.

The D.C. Circuit court, however, has zeroed in on what it considers a key difference between the first Trump administration’s policy and the updated policy. Monday’s ruling will allow the administration to bar transgender-identifying individuals from entering the military, but it also orders that active-duty figures already serving in the military who identify as transgender cannot be removed while litigation on the case proceeds. The purpose of the Trump administration’s policy, which the court referred to as the “Hegseth Policy,” in association with Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, is “to target applicants and servicemembers who express what the Administration believes is a ‘false gender identity,’” ruled Judges Robert L. Wilkins, appointed by Barack Obama, and Judith Rogers, appointed by Bill Clinton. They argued that the policy “goes far beyond disqualifying persons currently or recently suffering from gender dysphoria. Some of those disqualifications are completely unexplained and have no reasonable justification.”

The pair of Democratic-appointed judges argued that the first Trump administration’s similar policy was constitutionally sound because it did not require the removal of active-duty U.S. servicemembers who identify as transgender but only blocked the acceptance of new ones. The new guideline, they wrote, “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, [we] 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.”

Judge Justin Walker, a Trump appointee, dissented. “Once we abstract away from the politically charged subject-matter — as we must — this is a straightforward legal case,” Walker wrote. “We have neither the expertise nor the authority to decide whether the military can exclude the plaintiffs from its ranks. The Constitution assigns that authority to Congress and the Commander in Chief,” he continued. “That black hole of futile claims has swallowed up assertions of free speech. And free exercise. And due process. And the right to counsel. And, as here, equal protection. In each of those cases, the Supreme Court said that the military can deprive its members of rights that the Constitution may well guarantee to civilians.” Walker added, “Like today’s majority, I cherish those rights, and so I understand the impulse behind the majority’s unprecedented intervention into military affairs. But because the plaintiffs are service members not civilians, and because we are judges not generals, I respectfully dissent.”

The Trump administration is expected to appeal the decision to the Supreme Court, where the matter of discharging active-duty U.S. servicemembers who identify as transgender — as well as their mental and physical fitness for military service — will have to be addressed.