Oh This Poor Dumb Trump Lawyer Trying To Defend Military Trans Ban In Court!
At least read your own filings next time maybe?
Three weeks ago, one federal Judge Ana Reyes epically scorched President Bone Spurs’ lawyers’ butts in court in the case of Talbott v. Trump, which challenges his and Secretary of Defense Beerhole’s hateful, fact-free Executive Order and memo to exclude transgender people from military service.
That hearing went so badly for the government that Chad Mizelle, the chief of staff for US Attorney General Pam Bondi, immediately trotted to file a complaint at the US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit that Judge Reyes was too mean to their poor, unprepared lawyer, and had the audacity to ask him questions about animus.
Now that Hegseth has released guidance on this policy, Wednesday was another hearing on the question of, as Judge Reyes put it, “whether the military under the equal protection rights afforded to every American under the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment, if the military […] can do that and targeting a specific medical issue that impacts a specific group that the administration disfavors.”
The DOJ showed up with a new, different lawyer this time, Jason Manion, who looks like he is 15 years old. And over the five or so hours of the hearing that ensued, he did not fare much better than Wahoo Jason Lynch did at the last hearing. Lawyers for the plaintiffs spoke for less than five minutes, and the rest of the time was DOJ lawyers getting their asses handed to them.
First of all, Judge Reyes wondered, how does the government plan to define the people who exhibit “symptoms of gender dysphoria,” which is mighty vague? Turns out the government has no guidance on that.
And, why is the government only concerned about hormone therapy for trans people, but not for any other service members who receive hormone therapy? Or take other prescribed medications, like insulin for diabetes or whatever?
“Identify for me a single other time in recent history where the military has excluded a group of people for having a disqualifying issue, because I can't think of one,” she noted. “If we were targeting actual medical issues, you wouldn't be specifically targeting transgender individuals.”
And just how many people are there serving in the military with gender dysphoria, anyway? Government lawyers did not know. “Not only do you not have the data, you have no access to get the data because the military does not track people by gender identity,” she noted. Yeah, it’s kind of hard to find evidence that trans people are single-handedly bringing down the entire US military with their disruptive pronouns, when the government does not know how many of them there even are, or how they even define who they are.
She asked government lawyers questions about three reports that the policy cited and “egregiously misquoted,” and the DOJ's position on whether or not she should rely on Hegseth's representation of them. But oops, turns out that the lawyers had not even read the reports in their own filing.
The judge was not pleased with this, and asked, if the government had cited a Beyoncé album in their anti-trans policy, would the attorney demand she ignore common sense and just listen to the album? Manion sputtered back, “I don't think you need to know the answer in regards to your Beyoncé question."
But this ain’t a Beyoncé album, it is the law, and so court was paused for half an hour so the lawyers could read what they were attempting to defend. Then the judge and lawyers painstakingly went through the studies Hegseth cited together.
And what do you know? Studies and reports Hegseth cited as references to show that transgender service members hurt troop readiness and weaken units did not say that at all, and actually said the opposite. Transgender service members were more deployable and had fewer lapses in service than people diagnosed with depression, and they are not automatically excluded from service. The government’s own reports found that transgender individuals receiving gender-affirming care experience “literally no regrets” and “very high levels of satisfaction.”
REYES: You quote the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs. Do you know who that is?
ATTORNEY: No?
REYES: He's the highest ranking uniformed military member. Feel free to ask the service member behind you if you need to verify.
Burn! And it turned out that again, the general quoted said the opposite: that being trans doesn't in itself impact deployability or unit cohesion.
“Should I defer to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff who had a stellar military career … or should I defer to Hegseth?” Who has been “secretary of Defense for about 30 days” with “no prior deployment” other than “an early military career … prior to his television career?” OUCH BUT TRUE.
And, she noted, it’s mighty confusing how Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth's public statements and posts on X contradict all of those studies that he put in his own memo. So Judge Reyes told Manion to secure a written retraction from Hegseth clarifying his public statements by Monday. We’ll keep an eye out for that!
Also, what about the cost and the argument that it’s expensive to treat transgender service members? Well, the government didn’t show up with the numbers on that either, because again, they have not been tracking who these people are, or how many there are of them. The judge asked DOJ lawyers if they knew how much the military spends on Viagra annually. When they couldn’t answer, she told them the US military spent $42 million on Viagra in 2024, and compared that to the $52 million spent on gender dysphoria treatment over 10 years. That’s a lot of drug-induced boners! “It's not even a rounding error, right?"
Meanwhile, the Pentagon is still under orders to try to identify service members who have “a current diagnosis or history of, or exhibit symptoms consistent with, gender dysphoria,” so that they can be removed from their jobs. Or they can apply for waivers if they can “show 36 consecutive months of stability in their sex assigned at birth without clinical distress or impairment of functioning, that they have never pursued medical transition, and that they are willing to adhere to the standards for their sex,” by which they mean male-identified people serving as women, living in female barracks, and so on. So you can be transgender as long as you aren’t … transgender.
Judge Reyes said she hopes to rule next week on this nonsense, while acknowledging that whatever she does the government will appeal anyway.
“I have no doubt that I am not the last step on this strange journey. I just have to do the best I can with the evidence in front of me.”
In the meantime, though, sure was nice of her to give government lawyers the ass-handing they so richly deserve.
[ABA Journal /Advocate / Kyle Cheney on BlueSky / Tiffany Vilchis on BlueSky]
"The judge asked DOJ lawyers if they knew how much the military spends on Viagra annually. When they couldn’t answer"
I mean, it's a hard question.
I sweat through a sleepless night or more before I even argue a motion in federal court, and these doofuses just waltz in without reading their own filings? It's incredible.