Federal judges are regarding President Donald Trump’s executive orders targeting transgender Americans with skepticism and, in some instances, outright disdain. As lawsuits against the administration unfold, judges have dismissed and questioned the legal arguments supporting these orders while pointing to the larger effect of the Trump administration’s actions: the attempted erasure of trans people as a whole. 

In the past few weeks, four judges — a Reagan appointee, a Clinton appointee and two judges appointed by former President Joe Biden — have temporarily paused enforcement of anti-trans policies proposed by the Trump White House. For now, the administration is blocked from enforcing its restrictions on gender-affirming care for trans people under 19, as well as its policy to house trans federal inmates based on their sex assigned at birth. 

Five other lawsuits against the Trump administration’s anti-trans policies are currently underway, including a challenge against the Pentagon’s ban on trans people serving in the military. On Wednesday, the federal district judge overseeing that case grilled the Justice Department on how it can justify such a ban. And, for the second day in a row, that judge appeared increasingly exasperated with the agency’s response.  

“You can’t tell me that transgender people are not being discriminated against today,” U.S. District Judge Ana C. Reyes, a Biden appointee, said in court Wednesday, after listing off the executive orders and anti-trans policies adopted by the Trump administration within the last three weeks. References to transgender people are being wiped off government websites, she said, including the National Park Service’s web page honoring the 1969 Stonewall uprising in New York City.

“It’s not even like we’re just erasing them. We are literally erasing their contributions to modern society. How is it possible to view that as anything other than horrible discrimination?” she said.

When taken as a whole, the Trump administration’s many executive orders targeting trans Americans are part of a broader effort to express hostility toward them, Reyes said Wednesday during the second preliminary injunction hearing on the trans military ban. 

“When you look at all these as a whole, as puzzle pieces of a whole puzzle … it screams animus,” she said. 

LGBTQ+ rights attorneys are arguing in court that the Trump administration is expressing animosity, or animus, toward transgender people through its policies and that that animosity was a cornerstone of his presidential campaign. In legal terms, animus is a motivation that can only be explained as a bare desire to do harm against a certain group. If Reyes finds that this policy was based on animus, she will likely strike it down — and she’s not the only judge pointing out this connection. 

Last week, in a separate case, U.S. District Judge Brendan A. Hurson — another Biden appointee — granted a temporary stop on the government’s enforcement of federal funding cuts against hospitals that provide gender-affirming care to trans youth. That order followed a hearing in which Hurson expressed alarm that Trump’s executive orders appear to deny that transgender people exist at all.

Hurson said that language used by President Trump “seems to deny that this population exists, or even has the right to exist.” The judge added that he struggles to understand how that can’t be animus. In his memorandum opinion written alongside his ruling, Hurson also took aim at the sweeping effects of the federal government’s position that it will recognize only two sexes, male and female, and that those sexes are not changeable. 

“The Court cannot fathom discrimination more direct than the plain pronouncement of a policy resting on the premise that the group to which the policy is directed does not exist,” Hurson wrote. 

In another case, a Reagan-appointed judge Tuesday temporarily blocked the government from carrying out Trump’s order to house transgender women in federal prisons with male inmates and halt gender-affirming care for incarcerated trans people. In a written statement explaining his ruling, Judge Royce Lamberth ran through a list of negative effects that the order would have — including exacerbating gender dysphoria for the plaintiffs and putting them at higher risk of physical and sexual violence.

The federal government has either not disputed those points or has failed to adequately address them, Lamberth wrote. What’s more, he said, the federal government has not made any allegations that female inmates are in any danger from being housed with the transgender women in this lawsuit. 

“The public interest in seeing the plaintiffs relocated immediately to male facilities is slight at best. And it is hard to cognize of any public interest in the immediate cessation of their hormone therapy — aside, perhaps, from whatever small sum of money the BOP may save by ceasing administration of these drugs,” Lamberth wrote. 

The Justice Department is adamant that the administration’s order to keep transgender people out of the military hasn’t impacted anyone and that it is not discriminatory. But the plaintiffs in the case, six active service members and two individuals seeking enlistment, say they are being singled out for a characteristic that has nothing to do with their fitness to serve. 

Nicolas Talbott, a second lieutenant in the Army Reserves, is one of those plaintiffs — and one of the many transgender service members whom the administration’s ban would affect. As a 31-year-old trans man assigned to a reserve unit in Pennsylvania, Talbott stands to lose his career, his income and his health insurance if trans people are banned from the military.  

He was a plaintiff in the 2017 lawsuit against Trump’s first trans military ban. That ban was first blocked by a federal court in 2017 and eventually revived by the Supreme Court, which allowed the Pentagon in 2019 to prevent many trans people from joining the armed forces.

Talbott left the courtroom on Wednesday feeling “cautiously optimistic,” he told reporters during a press briefing that afternoon. One of his attorneys, Shannon Minter, the legal director for the National Center for Lesbian Rights (NCLR), echoed that optimism. 

“We’ve got four-plus years, in some cases close to 10 years now, of transgender people serving in the military with no problems,” Minter said, adding that the government has not been able to produce concrete evidence of any issues caused by allowing trans people to serve. 

GLAD Law and NCLR argue that Trump’s executive order falsely characterizes trans people as unfit to serve in the military, without evidence, and that it discriminates based on sex and transgender status. The order mandates the Defense Department to adopt a policy that being transgender is incompatible with the military’s “high standards for troop readiness, lethality, cohesion, honesty, humility, uniformity, and integrity.”

“It’s very demoralizing. It was, you know, for lack of better phrasing, it was like a slap to the face to any transgender service member who read that order and saw what was being said about us,” Talbott said. “We have been serving honorably, with integrity, with dignity, with respect, with selfless service for a number of years.”

Reyes has indicated that she agrees. On Tuesday, during the first round of the preliminary injunction hearing on the military ban, she repeatedly asked Justice Department attorney Jason Lynch whether the order’s descriptions of trans people are demeaning.

“I mean, if I called you a liar, would you find that demeaning?” Reyes asked Lynch. 

“I assume the court is asking in a constitutionally relevant sense —” 

“No, I’m asking in a common sense way,” she said.  

“I don’t have an answer in a common sense way, your honor.” 

“Okay,” Reyes replied. “You don’t know if you can tell me that categorizing an entire group of people as dishonorable, lying, undisciplined — whether at work or at home — you can’t tell me sitting here today on behalf of the government, whether someone would consider that demeaning?” 

“I don’t have a view to express on that question, your honor,” he said.