US President Donald Trump has suffered a partial legal setback in his push to exclude transgender people from the military.
The Trump administration may not remove the plaintiffs who brought the case from active military service, a federal appeals court in Washington said on Monday. The wider ban remains in place for now, however, giving the administration time to appeal.
The ruling partly upheld a lower court decision that found the exclusion of transgender people from military service violated the constitutional guarantee of equal treatment under the law.
The appeals court said the policy, named after Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, "appears to be driven by the bare desire to harm a politically
unpopular group: persons who identify as transgender."
Transgender people do not identify with the sex assigned to them at birth.
The World Health Organization removed transgender and gender-diverse identities from its classification of mental disorders in 2019, reflecting a more modern understanding of gender identity.
An earlier Pentagon policy had banned discrimination based on gender identity.
In 2025, at Trump's direction, the US Department of Defense ordered that transgender people be largely excluded from military service, including those already serving.
Trump had already pushed to exclude transgender people from the military during his first term. During the election campaign, he also pledged to stop what he called "transgender insanity."
Since returning to office, the Republican has introduced a series of measures targeting transgender people.
