Justice Department lawyers insisted in appellate court on Tuesday that the Trump administration is not banning transgender people from the U.S. military — just two days after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth explicitly said the opposite.
That contradiction didn’t come up when government lawyers tried to defend President Donald Trump’s executive order in January that proclaimed “expressing a false ‘gender identity’ divergent from an individual’s sex cannot satisfy the rigorous standards necessary for military service.”
The lawyers argue that the order still allows transgender people to serve in the military, as long as they identify as their sex at birth — and that the president, as commander-in-chief, has the authority to determine what’s best for the military regardless.