A federal judge has blocked the Pentagon from implementing its policy to make gender dysphoria a disqualifying condition for military service in a 79-page ruling issued Tuesday. The colorful opinion openly embraced controversy, departed from precedent, and hardly attempted to crouch behind an emaciated façade of neutrality.

“The Military Ban is soaked in animus and dripping with pretext. Its language is unabashedly demeaning, its policy stigmatizes transgender persons as inherently unfit, and its conclusions bear no relation to fact,” declared Judge Ana C. Reyes of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia. “Indeed, the cruel irony is that thousands of transgender servicemembers have sacrificed — some risking their lives — to ensure for others the very equal protection rights the Military Ban seeks to deny them.”

With such colorful quotes, readers of Reyes’s opinion will learn far more about what she thinks than about what the law says.

After spending the first Trump administration engaging in lawfare against the administration, the Uruguay-born Reyes was nominated to the D.C. District Court by President Joe Biden, on the recommendation of D.C. Congressional Delegate Eleanor Holmes Norton (D), who boasted that Reyes would be the first Hispanic and first LGBTQ-identifying judge on the D.C. District Court.

Biden first nominated Reyes on May 19, 2022, but the Democrat-controlled Senate failed to act on the nomination for the rest of the year, suggesting that her nomination was controversial even among Democrats. After the Congress adjourned, Biden re-nominated Reyes in January 2023, and the Senate approved her nomination on February 15, 2023 in a 51-47 vote.

Given her history, it is unsurprising that Reyes willingly embraced controversy with her innovative legal reasoning. Her opinion argues both 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. Reyes reached these conclusions despite admitting that neither the U.S. Supreme Court nor the U.S. Court of Appeals for D.C. had ever reached such a conclusion.

In other words, Reyes’s minimalistic legal reasoning was not bound by controlling precedent (although it was informed by contradictory rulings from other federal circuits). Reyes acknowledged her duty to defer to the military on matters of readiness, and she recognized the gravity of imposing a preliminary injunction, but these considerations did not dissuade her from reaching a contrary decision.

Perhaps most striking was Reyes’s reasoning for finding that “transgender persons are a quasi-suspect group.” One requirement for this designation is that a group must be politically powerless, a demonstrably false proposition for anyone who remembers the Biden White House apologizing to pro-transgender activist groups last summer.

Yet Reyes sought to establish this claim by noticing how the Pentagon’s transgender policy changed depending on which party was in power. “Being kicked around like a football by whatever team has possession is the opposite of meaningful political power,” argued Reyes. Yet this very evidence demonstrates the outsized political power transgender activists enjoy in one political party; true powerlessness would involve both parties ignoring them.

Reyes also relied on military “experts” to trash the Trump transgender policy — experts who were really just political operatives. For instance, she wrote: “Former Deputy Undersecretary of Defense for Personnel and Readiness Shawn Skelly has ‘significant concerns about the immediate and long-term harms’ of the Hegseth Policy and ‘the ways in which it conflicts with established military policy and practices.’” Skelly is a trans-identifying man, a longtime activist for transgender inclusion in the military, and a political appointee of President Biden.

Again, Reyes wrote, “Alex Wagner, the former Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Manpower and Reserve Affairs, notes that the ‘rushed and haphazard manner’ in which Defendants ‘issued and implemented’ the Military Ban is ‘highly unusual.’” Wagner was a political appointee to the Pentagon in both the Obama and Biden administrations, who was brought in specifically to promote Obama’s pro-LGBT agenda. In a 2017 interview, Wagner stated, “There’s an old adage that ‘people are policy,’ and there’s no question that President Obama made it real at DoD.”

Trans-identifying military personnel challenged the Trump administration’s transgender military policy as soon as the administration’s intentions were clear. But Reyes declined to block it until the policy was completed and publicly announced. The Pentagon policy set a March 26 deadline (next week) for the military services to begin separating around 4,240 servicemembers with gender dysphoria. Reyes postponed the enforcement of her ruling until Friday, March 21, giving the Trump administration time to appeal.

“The Court knows that this opinion will lead to heated public debate and appeals,” Reyes concluded. “In a healthy democracy, both are positive outcomes.”

This is a bizarre distortion of the facts. Healthy democracies hold vigorous public debate over policy matters that are decided by legislators, not over the opinions of a judge holding a lifetime appointment. It is even healthy for democracies to provide due process for legal challenges on appeal, but it is not healthy for judges to expect litigants to appeal their biased verdict even before issuing a ruling.

In fact, Reyes’s ruling sought to undermine the effects of a healthy democratic process, by which American voters in November 2024 elected Donald Trump as president, in part to reverse the pro-transgender nonsense pushed on the military over the past four years.