A Biden-appointed federal judge, Ana Reyes, clashed with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth in a Wednesday hearing, ordering him to delete an X post about his transgender military service policy by Monday.
The directive came amid a legal battle over the Pentagon’s push to restrict transgender troops, with Reyes—D.C.’s first LGBT federal judge named in 2023—grilling Hegseth over a February 27 post stating, “Pentagon says transgender troops are disqualified from service without an exemption.”
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The confrontation unfolded in Washington, D.C., District Court as Reyes challenged Hegseth’s public framing of a policy rooted in President Trump’s January 27 executive order.
That order tasked the Pentagon with updating “trans-identifying medical standards” to prioritize “military readiness,” allowing waivers in rare cases.
Transgender activist groups sued, claiming it violates the Fifth Amendment equal protection.
Reyes, who once argued that biological sex isn’t binary, pressed DOJ lawyers defending the policy: “Do you really think you can say one thing in public and then come here to court and say something else entirely?”
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DOJ attorneys countered that Hegseth’s post was “shorthand” for a nuanced rule, not a blanket ban, but Reyes shot back, “I’m not going to speculate that he was just being sloppy.”
Her demand follows a February DOJ complaint accusing her of “hostile and egregious misconduct” for probing an attorney’s religious views in court, raising bias concerns.
The Pentagon stayed mum on the litigation, leaving Hegseth’s next move—and the policy’s fate—hanging.
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