United States District Court Judge Ana Reyes on Tuesday schooled lawyers representing the United States Department of Justice who were defending President Donald Trump's executive order barring transgender Americans from serving in the military.
As flagged by Politico legal reporter Kyle Cheney, Reyes questioned whether simply using transgender soldiers' preferred gender pronouns would materially impact the military's ability to fight and win wars.
"Can we agree that the greatest fighting force... is not going to be impacted in any way by less than one percent of the soldiers using a different pronoun than others might want to call them?" she asked.
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The attorney representing the government replied that they did not agree with that assertion.
Reyes, however, wasn't finished.
"Would you agree with me that if our military is negatively impacted in any kind of way that matters... we all have a lot bigger problems than pronoun use," she said. "We have a military that is incompetent. Any common sense rational human being knows that it doesn't."
She went on to describe the administration's rationales for saying pronoun usages harms military readiness was "pretext" and "frankly ridiculous."
"If you want to get me an officer of the U.S. military who is willing to get on the stand and say that because of pronoun usage the U.S. military is less prepared... I will be the first to give you a box of cigars," she said.