Six transgender military service members and a potential recruit have filed a lawsuit against President Donald Trump’s anti-trans military ban, marking the second legal challenge against it in just over a week. The lawsuit, filed by Lambda Legal and the Human Rights Campaign, says that Trump’s ban violates the plaintiffs’ constitutional rights to free speech, equal protection and due process.
The plaintiffs include three senior Naval officers and three senior enlisted service members in the Army and Air Force who represent over 105 years of military service and millions in military training. These individuals say that immediate discharge from the military would cause them financial and personal harm, including the loss of essential benefits like health care coverage for their children and spouses, allowances for secure housing, years worth of retirement funds, and promised money to further their higher education.
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“Our country needs ready, able, and willing service members to stand up and protect our freedoms,” the lawsuit states. “But the 2025 Military Ban turns them away and kicks them out—for no legitimate reason. Rather, it baselessly declares all transgender people unfit to serve, insults and demeans them, and cruelly describes every one of them as incapable of ‘an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in one’s personal life,’ based solely because they are transgender. These assertions are, of course, false.”
The lawsuit’s two other plaintiffs are a trans man named Matthew Medina who wants to join the Marines and the Gender Justice League, a Washington State-based LGBTQ+ rights organization.
Medina, a 23-year-old New Jersey resident, was raised in poverty “under difficult circumstances” and wants to join the military to help support his mother raising his 12-year-old sister and to get a college education so he can secure his future success. He also hopes to find “role models and support in the brotherhood of the Marines,” the lawsuit states.
He has been preparing to join the military for the past year by consulting with a recruiter, completing his application documents, and working to meet tattoo removal and physical fitness requirements.
Trump issued his ban without any “meaningful process”
The lawsuit also notes that former President Barack Obama lifted the military’s initial ban on trans military members on June 30, 2016. About a year before lifting the ban, the then-Secretary of Defense Ashton Carter commissioned the non-profit, non-partisan research organization the RAND Corporation to conduct a study on the implications of lifting the ban.
The RAND Corporation’s study found that the cost of trans-related medical care is exceedingly small relative to the Department of Defense’s overall healthcare costs, that trans people do not harm military readiness, and that foreign militaries have successfully enlisted trans military service members without any negative effects on effectiveness, readiness, or unit cohesion.
Then-Secretary Carter; the Joint Chiefs of Staff, a group of senior military leaders in the Defense Department; and the secretaries of each of the military’s branches all looked over the RAND study alongside personnel, training, readiness, and medical specialists throughout the Defense Department. Together, they concluded, “open service by transgender service members . . . is consistent with military readiness and with strength through diversity,” Carter said.
However, during his first presidential term, Trump overturned this decision through a series of three tweets on July 26, 2017 without any seemingly meaningful process to explain why.
In response, attorneys general from 17 states and the District of Columbia joined a letter denouncing Trump’s ban as “blatant discrimination” that violates “fundamental constitutional and American values.” Additionally, 56 retired generals and admirals issued a public statement on August 1, 2017, warning that Trump’s ban would downgrade military readiness.
The American Medical Association, American Psychological Association, and American Psychiatric Association all opposed the ban as well, agreeing that there was no medical reason to do so.
While a few lawsuits challenged Trump’s initial ban, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the ban to continue while the lawsuits against it played out in lower courts. These lawsuits were dismissed as moot when, in 2021, then-President Joe Biden repealed Trump’s ban.
How Trump’s new ban harms military veterans and the nation’s defense
The new lawsuit lists its defendants as Trump, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth, and the acting secretaries of the Air Force, Army and Navy.
It says that these individuals discriminated against trans people based purely on sex “without even a legitimate justification, let alone the important, exceedingly persuasive, or compelling one required.” It says the ban “burdens and chills” the plaintiffs’ exercise of free speech, making them deny their trans identity in their professional and private lives.
Furthermore, the lawsuit says the ban provides no adequate procedural protections or avenue for redress and punishes plaintiffs “for doing precisely what the prior policy invited and induced them to do — disclose their transgender status and take medical and other steps to transition” — and gives them the “stigma of having been labeled as presumptively unworthy of continued service.”
“Banning ready, willing, and able service members does not further the objectives of the United States Armed Forces,” the lawsuit states. “The military needs more recruits to maintain readiness and fill its ranks. But the 2025 Military Ban turns them away and forces current decorated service members to hide their identity, quit, or be separated from the military.”
The lawsuit marks the second challenge against Trump’s new ban. The first case was filed in federal court last Tuesday by GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders (GLAD Law) and the National Center for Lesbian Rights (NCLR). That lawsuit was filed on behalf of six active service members and two individuals seeking enlistment.
It’s entirely likely that the current conservative-leaning Supreme Court will either allow Trump’s ban to continue as lower courts handle these challenges or issue an expedited ruling affirming Trump’s right to adjust military policy as the military’s commander-in-chief.
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