A recent federal appeals court ruling against Secretary of War Pete Hegseth’s military policy on so-called transgender personnel shows how easily judges can move from interpreting the Constitution to rewriting military policy.

The policy at issue concerns transgender service members and applicants with a current diagnosis or history of gender dysphoria. The military has always had the authority to set medical, physical, and readiness standards. Those standards have long affected people with common mental health conditions such as ADHD, OCD, depression, anxiety, and other diagnoses, even if waivers are available in some cases.

Gender dysphoria, under this view, is not being treated as a political identity but as a medical condition subject to military standards.

The judge, however, concluded that the policy was not merely aimed at gender dysphoria but at transgender people as a class. To reach that conclusion, the court pointed partly to broader statements and policies from the Trump administration, including executive actions recognizing biological sex in federal policy. The argument is that those actions show a broader effort to target, stigmatize, or exclude transgender Americans.

That reasoning is flawed.

The military has a unique constitutional role. It is not a college campus, a private workplace, or a social experiment. Its mission is readiness, discipline, cohesion, and deployability. Courts have traditionally given broad deference to the political branches when they make military judgments because judges are not commanders or defense officials.

That does not mean the military can do whatever it wants. But it does mean courts should be careful before assuming that a disputed military policy is unconstitutional merely because it involves a politically charged issue.

A key distinction in this debate is between transgender identity and gender dysphoria. Identifying as transgender is not itself classified as a mental illness. Gender dysphoria, by contrast, is a clinical diagnosis involving distress connected to a mismatch between “gender identity” and biological sex. The government’s argument is that the policy concerns the medical and practical consequences associated with gender dysphoria and transition-related accommodations, not transgender identity in the abstract.

If the Armed Forces disqualify applicants with certain medical histories, that does not automatically mean they are targeting those people as a hated class. It may simply mean the military has made a judgment about readiness.

The court also relied on statements in White House materials suggesting that preferred-pronoun requirements and gender-identity accommodations could conflict with military standards. Whether one agrees with that argument or not, it is still a policy argument about military cohesion. Treating it as evidence of unconstitutional actions stretches the judiciary’s role.

When judges use political context to override military policy, they risk substituting their own preferences for those of elected officials and military leaders. The Constitution does not give judges the power to run the Pentagon. It does not allow them to turn every controversial policy disagreement into a claim that the policy is unconstitutional. And it certainly does not allow courts to decide military readiness questions based on which administration’s motives they distrust.

Military policy should be debated by the people’s representatives, shaped by military necessity, and judged with proper constitutional restraint. Courts should commandeer the ship.