The U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit delivered a major win for the Trump administration on Tuesday when it blocked a preliminary injunction against the administration’s transgender military policy, finding that the district court “afforded insufficient deference to the Secretary’s considered judgment.” The ruling, Talbott v. U.S.A., allows the policy to take effect while the appeals process continues.

“The Hegseth Policy reflects the considered judgment of the Secretary of Defense and military leaders in the Defense Department,” wrote D.C. Circuit Judge Gregory Katsas, in an opinion for the three-judge panel joined by Judge Neomi Rao, both appointed during Trump’s first term.

In addition, “The government identifies several legitimate military interests that the Hegseth Policy advances,” they found, including “military readiness,” “unit cohesion and good order,” “the military’s sex-based standards for physical fitness,” and “cost issues.”

The third judge of the panel, Obama-appointed Judge Cornelia Pillard, dissented from this view. “Every factor in this case weighs against granting a stay pending appeal,” she wrote. “Defendants have failed to introduce evidence that the Hegseth Policy serves any purpose other than the indulgence of animus. … On the other side of the ledger, plaintiffs and the public are already suffering substantial and irreparable harm as the military has begun to carry out the Hegseth Policy.”

Legal drama has attended the issue of people with gender dysphoria in the military since the first Trump administration, after the outgoing Obama administration in 2016 first relaxed a longstanding policy to allow gender dysphoric individuals in the ranks. In 2018, the Trump administration reinstated the previous ban against their serving, a change that drew multiple lawsuits. The administration prevailed in court on a preliminary basis, but the courts issued no final determination before the Biden administration came in and once against reversed the policy in 2021.

In February, the second Trump administration reinstated the ban on people with gender dysphoria serving in the military, reviving the longstanding policy that had been reversed under the Obama and Biden administrations.

In issuing the new (and old) policy, Department of War Secretary Pete Hegseth insisted that the Pentagon’s “mission requires Service members to abide by strict mental and physical standards. The lethality, readiness, and warfighting capability of our Force depends on Service members meeting those standards. … The Department must ensure it is building ‘One Force’ without subgroups defined by anything other than ability or mission adherence. Efforts to split our troops along lines of identity weaken our Force and make us vulnerable.”

In the weeks following Hegseth’s announcement, left-wing activists filed multiple lawsuits, leading to orders by judges in the D.C. district court and the Western District of Washington that separately blocked the policy. In March, the Ninth Circuit denied an emergency appeal without elaboration, but the Supreme Court paused the Washington injunction in May, allowing the policy to take effect.

Meanwhile, the injunction out of the D.C. district court was on hold while the case was appealed. In a controversial order, D.C. District Judge Ana Reyes insisted that “the Logic of Bostock Applies to the Equal Protection Analysis” and that “Transgender Persons are a Quasi-Suspect Group,” entitling them to equal protection, although neither the D.C. Circuit nor the Supreme Court had ever held any such thing.

Reyes took no pains to hide her bias in a 79-page order. “The Military Ban is soaked in animus and dripping with pretext,” she wrote. “Its language is unabashedly demeaning, its policy stigmatizes transgender persons as inherently unfit, and its conclusions bear no relation to fact.”

Having read the colorful opinion, the appellate court assessed that it “gave no sound reason for overriding the Secretary’s considered judgment.”

“Hundreds of medical conditions are ‘disqualifying’ for accession to military service,” explained the D.C. Circuit. “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. … 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.” The argument against the Trump military transgender policy had to argue that it was inherent discrimination to place gender dysphoria on this long list of disqualifying conditions.

Furthermore, the court found that the Trump administration’s new requirements “advance many military objectives. Among other things, they ensure that service members can complete required training, serve in harsh or remote environments, and perform their duties as safely as possible. … The standards also reduce the risk that service members will ‘require excessive time lost from duty’ for medical reasons.”

The court also noted that “Several studies and reviews undergird the Hegseth Policy.”

Finally, they cited the Supreme Court’s reasoning in Skrmetti, that prohibiting gender transition procedures for minors “classifies on the basis of medical use” and is therefore not sex-based discrimination. “The same reasoning would seem to cover the Hegseth Policy, which classifies based on the medical condition of gender dysphoria,” they wrote.

The D.C. Circuit’s ruling allows the military to implement its policy on a temporary basis, while further litigation continues. They issued a “stay pending appeal” of the district court’s preliminary injunction, which means that they temporarily paused the lower court’s temporary ruling. Thus, the ruling is far from final, but at least the Circuit Court did speak to the substance of the case, finding that the Trump administration “made a strong showing that it will prevail on the merits.”