Left: Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth speaks in the James Brady Press Briefing Room at the White House, Thursday, Jan. 30, 2025, in Washington (AP Photo/Alex Brandon). Right: U.S. District Judge Ana C. Reyes during her confirmation hearings in June 2022 (U.S. Senate/YouTube).
Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth has started openly mocking a federal judge on social media — saying she is “now a top military planner” and “Commander” who should try her hand at instructing Army Rangers and Green Berets — after she blocked the Trump administration from enforcing the president’s executive order purporting to ban transgender people from serving in the military.
Hegseth, a former Army National Guard officer appointed and sworn in by President Donald Trump in January, took to X on Saturday to lambast U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes after she issued a preliminary injunction last Wednesday, March 19, halting the transgender ban. She did so on the reasoning that the plaintiffs were likely to successfully argue that the ban unconstitutionally violated equal protection by discriminating against military members based on their sex and transgender status.
The order stems from a lawsuit filed on Jan. 28 by Nicolas Talbott and seven other individuals challenging Trump’s executive order, which was signed on his first day back in office. The complaint argued that the ban on transgender service members violates the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment by discriminating against people “based on their sex and based on their transgender status.” Several additional plaintiffs were added to the suit after it was initially filed.
“Since ‘Judge’ Reyes is now a top military planner, she/they can report to Fort Benning at 0600 to instruct our Army Rangers on how to execute High Value Target Raids,” Hegseth wrote Saturday on X. “After that, Commander Reyes can dispatch to Fort Bragg to train our Green Berets on counterinsurgency warfare.”
In explaining how the military ban discriminated on the basis of sex, Reyes — a Joe Biden appointee — cited the U.S. Supreme Court’s landmark 2020 decision in Bostock v. Clayton County. The court held that the prohibition on sex discrimination in Title VII of the Civil Rights Act of 1964 included discrimination based on sexual orientation and transgender status. The majority opinion was penned by Justice Neil Gorsuch, who was appointed to the court by Trump.
Reyes said that while Bostock is cabined exclusively to Title VII, the court’s “reasoning is not.”
“The Supreme Court deduced it impossible — end stop — to discriminate against a transgender person without discriminating against that person based on sex,” Reyes wrote.
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The Trump administration has previously asserted that the court should defer to the Executive Branch on military matters, but Reyes emphasized in her ruling that the Justice Department was not seeking “judicial deference to military judgment” — rather, it was urging “judicial abdication.” The administration’s transgender band was scheduled to go into effect this month.
“The Military Ban is soaked in animus and dripping with pretext,” Reyes said. “Its language is unabashedly demeaning, its policy stigmatizes transgender persons as inherently unfit, and its conclusions bear no relation to fact,” she wrote. “The Military Ban is also unique in its unadulterated expression of animus an expression of animus that no law the Supreme Court has struck down comes close to matching.”
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Jerry Lambe contributed to this report.
