A federal judge stopped a hearing about Donald Trump’s ban on transgender military service members in its tracks Wednesday, calling for a recess from proceedings to invite the Department of Justice’s lawyer to actually read up on the policy they were defending.
U.S. District Judge Ana C. Reyes had criticized the department’s lawyer for not having read three reports that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth cited in his policy banning transgender members of the military, according to Politico’s senior legal affairs reporter Kyle Cheney, who posted several updates on the hearing on X.
An internal memo issued by the Pentagon in February “disqualified” transgender individuals from serving in the U.S. military.
“Service members who have a current diagnosis or history of, or exhibit symptoms consistent with, gender dysphoria are disqualified from military service,” the memo said, also banning individuals who had a “history of cross-sex hormone therapy or a history of sex reassignment or genital reconstruction surgery as treatment for gender dysphoria or in pursuit of a sex transition.”
Reyes claimed that Hegseth’s policy banning transgender service members had “egregiously misquoted” the three reports it cited, and she couldn’t believe that the Justice Department’s lawyer hadn’t bothered to actually read them.
Reyes requested that the court take a 30-minute break, and asked the department’s lawyer to review the reports and compare how they’d been misquoted by Hegseth in his policy. Then, they could tell her whether they believe she could reasonably rely on Hegseth’s interpretation of those reports.
>https://newrepublic.com/post/192657/judge-military-trans-ban-trial-lawyers-incompetence 