A federal judge is considering forcing Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth to testify in court about his anti-transgender statements for a lawsuit challenging the U.S. military’s ban on transgender people.
U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes said in court in Washington, D.C., Wednesday that she might compel Hegseth to sit for a one-hour deposition and answer questions about the anti-trans views he has expressed.
“I’m very aware that he is the secretary of defense and he has a lot of constraints on his time. But he has time to tweet and put out videos and speak to generals, and I think it’s fair game,” Reyes said, according to The Washington Sun’s Jose Pagliery.
First, though, Reyes said she’d give Hegseth the chance to respond to 10 written questions, and if he isn’t forthcoming enough and is too “lawyerly,” then he’d have to sit for the deposition.
The Department of Justice’s lawyers, meanwhile, don’t want Reyes to take Hegseth’s past statements or social media posts into consideration.
“The Supreme Court has held that courts should not look outside the operative terms of a policy—as this Court did with respect to certain social media posts—in assessing the basis on which a policy classifies,” the DOJ wrote in a four-page court filing Tuesday seeking summary judgment in favor of the government from Reyes.
Hegseth has a long history of making anti-trans comments—both in public and on social media.
On February 27, 2025, Hegseth shared an official Department of War post stating, “Transgender service members are disqualified from service without an exemption.” On April 20 the same year, he posted, “Your agenda is illegals, trans & DEI—all of which are no longer allowed @ DoD.” On April 24, he called Reyes “a rogue judge” and claimed there were “Zero readiness reasons for trans troops.”
In a speech on May 6, Hegseth declared, “No more dudes in dresses, we’re done with that shit.” And after the Supreme Court later allowed the ban to remain in place while the legal battle continued, Hegseth posted on May 8, “After a SCOTUS victory for @POTUS, TRANS is out at the DOD.”
In Reyes’s March 2025 ruling temporarily halting the military’s ban, well before these posts, she said the military’s policy was “soaked in animus and dripping with pretext.” That proved prescient, as in June this year, the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals ruled against the ban in a 2–1 decision.
The Pentagon is trying to delay enforcement of that decision, pending an appeal to the Supreme Court, while the lawsuit’s plaintiffs, service members who are already being pushed out, want the appeals court to mandate compliance immediately.