The Trump regime attempted to hoodwink the court by jettisoning the original transgender military service ban and issuing a new version with slightly different language several weeks ago, but the court isn't falling for it.
U.S. District Judge Marsha Pechman has blocked the latest version of the ban and ruled that transgender Americans are a protected class of citizens which means the government must present extraordinary evidence to justify discriminating against them.
The problem for the Trump regime is they have no evidence at all
From the Huffington Post:
“The Court also rules that, because transgender people have long been subjected to systemic oppression and forced to live in silence, they are a protected class. Therefore, any attempt to exclude them from military service will be looked at with the highest level of care, and will be subject to the Court’s ‘strict scrutiny.’ This means that before Defendants can implement the Ban, they must show that it was sincerely motivated by compelling interests, rather than by prejudice or stereotype, and that it is narrowly tailored to achieve those interests,” Pechman wrote.
While Trump had tweeted that he consulted generals and military experts about the ban, Pechman wrote that the government had “failed to identify even one General or military expert he consulted, despite having been ordered to do so repeatedly.”
It is highly unlikely that the Ninth District Court of Appeals will immediately disagree with the lower court ruling that transgender people are a protected class and lift the injunction against Trump's ban when an appeal inevitably lands in their court room.
This is far from over, but it's going to be quite a slog for Trump regime lawyers. I don't see a path to victory for them if they can't produce any evidence to support the ban nearly a year after it was first drafted. They've had a long time to come up with evidence to support it and the best they can do is claim that the presence of transgender soldiers harms combat readiness without proving that it does.