The Trump administration asked the Supreme Court to allow the Defense Department to remove transgender service members, according to court documents filed Friday.
Government lawyers are seeking to overturn an appeals court decision that allowed a group of transgender service members to continue their military duties amid pending litigation. The Justice Department called the ruling “gravely erroneous” and said the decision warranted a Supreme Court review.
“The authority of the U.S. military to determine who may serve in the Nation’s armed forces is a matter of exceptional importance,” the administration’s petition said.
President Donald Trump issued an executive order shortly after his inauguration last year that instructed Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth to bar transgender people from serving in the military — part of a wider federal effort to significantly roll back transgender rights.
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Transgender service members and prominent LGBTQ+ rights groups swiftly moved to legally challenge the military ban in January 2025, arguing that it was discriminatory and violated the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment. Hegseth, who opposes LGBTQ+ people serving in the military, followed through with the directive the next month.
Various lower-court rulings have tested the ban’s enforceability.
In June, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit upheld a district judge’s order that blocked the Pentagon from removing a group of transgender service members from service while their cases proceeded through federal court.
Judge Robert Wilkins wrote in his majority opinion that there was “direct evidence” that “animus motivated” Hegseth’s policy. Compared to the restrictions placed on transgender service members in Trump’s first term, Wilkins wrote, the administration’s policy “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,” Wilkins, a Barack Obama appointee, wrote in the June decision.
In his minority dissent, Judge Justin Walker said the president and Congress have the authority to decide who can be excluded from the military, rather than the Constitution.
“I understand the impulse behind the majority’s unprecedented intervention into military affairs,” Walker, a Trump appointee, wrote. “But because the plaintiffs are service members not civilians, and because we are judges not generals, I respectfully dissent.”
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