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Former General Michael Flynn, and President Donald Trump’s pardoned national security adviser, attacked the integrity of transgender people in a court filing.
He wrote that coupling transgender people "with ready access to fully automatic firearms and other powerful weapons might not be the best of ideas."
In a court filing that reads more like a culture war manifesto than a legal argument, disgraced former Trump national security adviser Michael Flynn and conservative allies this week urged a federal appeals court to uphold President Donald Trump’s renewed ban on transgender military service. Their amicus brief in Talbott v. United States not only casts transgender people as mentally ill and dangerous, it argues that courts have no power to review the president’s military policies at all — a claim legal scholars say veers toward authoritarianism.
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The 34-page brief, submitted Tuesday on behalf of groups including Citizens United and Public Advocate, supports the administration’s appeal to reinstate Executive Order 14183, which categorically excludes transgender people from the armed forces. The case is now before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit, following a decision by U.S. District Judge Ana Reyes in Washington, D.C., to block the policy earlier this year. In May, the U.S. Supreme Court allowed the administration to begin enforcing the ban while litigation continues, lifting a similar nationwide injunction in a case out of Washington state.
The filing leans on deeply contested and false claims. Gender dysphoria is described as a “serious mental illness.” Transgender people, the brief asserts, suffer from rates of depression, substance use, suicidality, and HIV infection so severe that their service would pose a national security threat.
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In one of its most jarring passages, the brief warns, “Coupling a high attempted suicide rate with ready access to fully automatic firearms and other powerful weapons might not be the best of ideas.” It continues, “Placing a person with a serious mental illness in the cockpit of a fighter aircraft or in a missile silo in North Dakota may jeopardize not just the military, but also the nation.”
Such rhetoric, advocates note, is not only demeaning but demonstrably false. Major medical organizations, including the American Medical Association, the American Psychiatric Association, and the American Psychological Association, affirm that transgender identity is not itself disqualifying and that gender-affirming care improves mental health.
The 2022 U.S. Transgender Survey, the most extensive such study ever conducted with more than 92,000 respondents nationwide, found that access to transition-related care dramatically improves lives: 98 percent of respondents who used hormones and 97 percent who underwent surgery said those interventions made them feel better. Far from worsening health, transition was associated with higher rates of reported well-being and stability.
The claim that transgender people in “the cockpit of a fighter aircraft” endanger national security also collapses against lived experience. Commander Emily “Hawking” Shilling, a decorated Navy pilot, has logged thousands of hours in F/A-18 jets, completed test pilot training, and deployed repeatedly overseas. Shilling, who is transgender, was cleared through exhaustive evaluations and now serves as president of SPARTA Pride, an association of trans service members and veterans.
In her own words, Shilling is “proof that we are qualified to serve.” Her record illustrates precisely what the brief denies: that transgender people already meet the military’s highest standards, often excelling in positions of immense responsibility.
Beyond its stigmatizing language, Flynn’s brief advances the radical jurisdictional claim that courts have no authority even to hear challenges to military policy.
Related: DOJ denies existence of transgender people in stunning court filing defending Trump’s military ban
“It is telling that the individuals and groups supporting the ban cannot advance any rational justification for it, and can only defend it by taking the extreme position that the courts have no power to review military policies,” Shannon Minter, legal director of the National Center for LGBTQ Rights, told The Advocate Wednesday morning. “Flynn’s brief takes the most extreme version of that argument, literally arguing that courts have no jurisdiction even to entertain challenges to military policies.”
He added, “The Supreme Court has repeatedly rejected that view and repeatedly affirmed that the courts can and do regularly determine whether particular military policies violate the Constitution of the United States. One of the strongest proponents of that view has been Justice Thomas, who has strongly endorsed the Supreme Court’s authority to strike down military policies that conflict with the Constitution. Flynn’s argument would effectively allow the president to be a dictator, not the leader of a democratic government. That Flynn would openly endorse such an extraordinary argument is a troubling sign of the extremism that is infecting our country.”
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