(Photo by Ted Eytan)

A U.S. District Court judge has rejected President Donald Trump’s recent order to bar transgender people from serving in the military.

In blocking the policy change, the judge wrote that it was “not genuinely based on legitimate concerns regarding military effectiveness or budget constraints, but are instead driven by a desire to express disapproval of transgender people generally.”

President Barack Obama’s administration repealed the ban on transgender individuals openly serving after a lengthy period of study in June of 2016. Slightly more than a year later, Trump reversed the policy change in a series of tweets, though the White House was unable to immediately answer questions about how it would be enacted.

Pentagon leaders waited for formal guidance, which the administration provided a month later, to implement the ban. It prohibited transgender individuals from enlisting and prevented funds from being spent on gender reassignment surgeries, while leaving the fate of current transgender service members unclear.

Service members and LGBTQ groups immediately filed a series of lawsuits.

Today’s decision comes in a case brought by GLAAD and the National Center for Lesbian Rights on behalf of eight plaintifs. In issuing a preliminary injunction to reverse most of Trump’s policy changes, Colleen Kollar-Kotelly finds that the plaintiffs are likely to win.

“The Court finds that a number of factors—including the sheer breadth of the exclusion ordered by the directives, the unusual circumstances surrounding the President’s announcement of them, the fact that the reasons given for them do not appear to be supported by any facts, and the recent rejection of those reasons by the military itself—strongly suggest that Plaintiffs’ Fifth Amendment claim is meritorious,” Kollar-Kotelly writes.

The judge did not block the ban on funding for gender reassignment surgery, finding that the court didn’t have jurisdiction on the matter since none of the plaintiffs was likely to be affected by it.

Previously:
Two Lawsuits Filed Over Trump’s Transgender Military Ban
Transgender Service Members Share Their Stories At White House: ‘Our Patriotism Shouldn’t Have An Asterisk Next To It’
Trump Administration Will Bar Transgender Individuals From Serving In The Military
Pentagon Repeals Ban on Transgender People Serving Openly In The Military