Transgender troop ban allowed by Supreme Court

The Supreme Court in May allowed Trump’s transgender military service ban to take effect while litigation continues, after a district court had temporarily blocked it nationwide.

Trump administration lawyers have argued the ban on transgender troops is no different than other policies disqualifying people from military service over medical conditions that can affect military readiness, such as epilepsy or schizophrenia. The policy disqualifies people based on a diagnosis or history of gender dysphoria as defined by psychiatric professionals.

An appeals court heard arguments over the ban in May. The three-judge panel on the Ninth Circuit pressed the Trump administration on why the seven transgender servicemembers at the heart of the lawsuit, all of whom are actively serving in the military, should be discharged despite each one individually serving without a problem.

“When we talk about unit cohesion and good order and discipline, that affects everyone” in the military, said Abhishek Kambli, the DOJ lawyer defending the transgender military ban.

Kambli also pushed back on questions about whether the ban was hastily implemented at the start of Trump’s presidency, noting that the Pentagon had built its policy off a similar one put in place under then-Defense Secretary James Mattis during Trump’s first term.

In 2019, the Supreme Court upheld that transgender ban, which allowed transgender troops who were already serving to remain in the military but otherwise included similar reasoning for banning the enlistment of new ones.

Trump’s transgender passport policy rule upheld as ‘historical fact’

The president issued an executive order at the beginning of his term in January, reversing a Biden-era policy that allowed people to select their listed sex on passports, along with allowing an X designation, and reverting to the long-standing policy of listing the biological sex of the passport holder on the document.

The move was met with a lawsuit and a subsequent injunction in April, which blocked the new rule from taking effect, as ordered by U.S. District Judge Julia Kobick.

Kobick claimed in her ruling that the order was “part of a coordinated and rapid rollback of rights and protections previously afforded to transgender Americans” and said that “such targeting of a politically unpopular group runs afoul of our Nation’s constitutional commitment to equal protection.”

The Trump administration appealed the injunction to the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit, which upheld the lower court’s ruling halting the policy, leading the Justice Department to submit the case to the Supreme Court’s emergency docket.

The people who sued the administration over the policy claim it violated the Equal Protection Clause and discriminated against transgender people, while the Justice Department has maintained it is about presenting factual information on government documents.

“Private citizens cannot force the government to use inaccurate sex designations on identification documents that fail to reflect the person’s biological sex—especially not on identification documents that are government property and an exercise of the President’s constitutional and statutory power to communicate with foreign governments,” Solicitor General D. John Sauer wrote in his petition to the Supreme Court’s emergency docket.

The justices sided with the administration 6-3, lifting the block on the passport rule while the case continues in lower federal courts. The unsigned majority opinion stated that the policy is not discriminatory, but instead requires the listing of a “historical fact” about the passport holder.

“Displaying passport holders’ sex at birth no more offends equal protection principles than displaying their country of birth—in both cases, the Government is merely attesting to a historical fact without subjecting anyone to differential treatment. And on this record, respondents have failed to establish that the Government’s choice to display biological sex ‘lack[s] any purpose other than a bare … desire to harm a politically unpopular group,’” the majority ruling in the Nov. 6 order said.

The ruling marked the second victory on transgender policy issues for the Trump administration this year on the Supreme Court’s emergency docket. It also continued the broader trend of higher courts largely reversing lower courts’ injunctions of Trump policies.

Trump-backed transgender sports laws under review at the Supreme Court in January

While the pair of lawsuits over transgender sports laws before the Supreme Court in January are not directly related to Trump orders, the two state laws at the center of the cases mirror Trump administration policies and have the administration’s backing.

On Jan. 13, 2026, the Supreme Court will hear arguments in Little v. Hecox and West Virginia v. B.P.J., where laws in Idaho and West Virginia, respectively, limiting women’s sports to biological women will be under scrutiny. The laws are similar in substance to the president’s February executive order aiming to keep biological men out of women’s sports.

The pair of cases will examine whether the laws either violate the 14th Amendment, as in the Hecox case, or if they violate Title IX or the Equal Protection Clause, as in the B.P.J. case. In Hecox, both the federal district and appeals courts ruled that the law was unconstitutional, while in B.P.J., a federal district court sided with West Virginia in upholding the law, but a federal appeals court later struck down the law.

The Justice Department will receive time to argue in favor of both state laws during oral arguments in January, hoping to notch another legal win with transgender policies via a ruling that upholds the state laws.

“In short, the laws of West Virginia and Idaho place trans-identifying athletes on sports teams on the same valid, biology-based terms as everyone else. That is the definition of equal treatment. It is not gender-identity discrimination at all, much less sex discrimination,” the Justice Department said in a brief to the Supreme Court.

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“However else Title IX or the Equal Protection Clause may apply to trans-identifying individuals, they certainly do not require granting these men and boys a preferential exemption from biology-based rules, let alone when that would come at the expense of competitive fairness and safety for women and girls—the very people Title IX was enacted to protect,” the brief continued. “In holding the opposite, the courts below relied on a set of rationales that have no basis in law or fact.”

The Supreme Court has not offered any insight into how it will rule in the transgender sports cases, but it has not handed LGBT activists many wins in recent years. Earlier this year, the high court ruled 6-3, upholding a Tennessee law that banned transgender procedures for minors, a significant loss for LGBT activists.