In a DC courtroom this past week, Judge Ana C. Reyes of the United States District Court for the District of Columbia held a hearing in the case of Talbott v. Trump, where a group of transgender members of the military are challenging President Donald Trump's January 25 executive order that bans anyone who is transgender from serving in the US military. The suit is named after Nicolas Talbott, a trans man who was able to fulfill his dream of joining the Army after President Joe Biden overturned Trump's 2017 order that overturned President Barack Obama's order allowing trans people to openly serve. Yeah, that's how whiplash fast this has all moved.
Reyes took no shit from the attorneys for the Trump administration and their assertions about trans people. From wrecking the idea that that sex only exists as an "immutable biological classification as either male or female" (as stated in Trump's other odious executive order trying to erase trans people from any kind of public existence) to treating the government's legal lackeys like children who need a spanking to absolutely embarrassing them on the very issue of the effect of transgender men and women on the military, Reyes reamed them out again and again with the spiky dildo of reality.
What Reyes did was cut through the bullshit and obfuscation that is the craft and trade of any lawyers for Trump. When one tried to assert that the ban was not, in fact, a ban, she asked him, "If we had President Trump here right now, and I said to him, ‘Is this a transgender ban?’ What do you think he would say?" The Justice Department lawyer, Jason Lynch, replied, "I have no idea, your honor." And Reyes more or less scoffed, "I do. He would say, ‘Of course it is.’ Because he calls it a transgender ban, because all the language in it is indicative."
Reyes kept throwing Trump and his cretinous administration's lies and hyperbolic statements back at them. She read off a litany of things about the military that Trump claims are affected by treatment of gender dysphoria and proper pronoun usage and she asked if Lynch really believes it would affect military readiness. Then she cut off Lynch when he tried to respond, saying, "Because it doesn’t. We all have a lot bigger problems than pronoun use. We have a military that is incompetent, if that is the case. Any common sense rational human being knows that it doesn’t." And, goddamn, it's good to hear someone state, on the record, that at some point you have to fucking deal with what's real and not what some slimy power-mad fucknut says to keep the con going with the rubes. Hell, Reyes even got Lynch to admit that if he were in a foxhole with fellow soldiers during combat, "I doubt the gender identity would be a primary concern."
Perhaps the most beautiful moment was when Reyes asked Lynch to define what Trump meant by "radical gender ideology." He replied that he was "loath to speculate what the president had in mind when he signed this executive order." Reyes impaled him with her gavel when she said, "Well, it’s not like I picked you off the street and said, ‘Hey, Mr. Lynch, hey, let me ask you some questions about what the government thinks.’ You’re the government’s legal representative." Ouch.
At one point in the hearing on Tuesday, Reyes wondered aloud if the executive order met the legal definition of "animus," which is something done for no other reason than the hatred of a group of people. She said, "[The order] calls an entire category of people dishonest, dishonorable, undisciplined, immodest, who lack integrity—people who have taken an oath to defend this country, people who have been under fire, people who have received medals for taking fire for this country. I want to know from the government whether that language expresses ‘animus.’ Does that express animus?" Lynch wouldn't answer so she cut him off with "This is a policy from the President of the United States affecting thousands of people… to call an entire group of people, lying dishonest people who are undisciplined, immodest, and have no integrity. How is that anything other than showing animus?" Lynch said he didn't know, which prompted Reyes to say, "You do have an answer. You just don’t want to give it."
Of course, the Justice Department made a complaint to the chief judge of the federal court in DC, calling for Reyes to be disciplined for making complete idiots out of the idiots who had to defend an idiotic policy. Of course, the complaint has got peak hypocrisy in it by saying that judges should always appear impartial, which is something no conservative should ever be allowed to say as long as Clarence Thomas's corrupt ass is still farting up the chambers of the Supreme Court.
As a defense of the rights of transgender Americans, Reyes was an absolute pit bull getting her teeth into the supple legs of the shitty men who dared to leap the fence into her yard. But just as important was Judge Reyes refusing to buy into the cruel fantasy world that Trump and most of the right in this country demand we all live in. There are immutable facts, to use the administration's word, about what sex actually is, about what actually affects the readiness of the military, about the honorable records of the plaintiffs who served their nation more than Trump and his garbage children ever have or ever could. And the same goes for so many other issues, like immigration and crime and election integrity and abortion and race and taxation and, really, every fucking thing that is being used to justify the insanity going on at the White House that's forced on the nation.
At some point, Reyes is saying, it matters that we agree that reality is real, whether you like it or not, and it doesn't shift with whatever a cadre of evil motherfuckers want it to be. And real people live in reality and have to deal with its real effects. This shit matters, as Reyes asserted forcefully, because you can't just hate someone and then try to create a reason to justify harming the people you hate. Which is essentially the entire ethos of the MAGA movement.
