US President Donald Trump has suffered a partial legal setback in his push to exclude transgender people from the military.

The Trump administration may not remove the plaintiffs who brought the case from active military service, a federal appeals court in Washington said on Monday. The wider ban remains in place for now, however, giving the administration time to appeal.

The ruling partly upheld a lower court decision that found the exclusion of transgender people from military service violated the constitutional guarantee of equal treatment under the law.

The appeals court said the policy, named after Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, “appears to be driven by the bare desire to harm a politically unpopular group: persons who identify as transgender”.

Hegseth indicated that the government would appeal the ⁠decision to the Supreme Court. “See ⁠you at SCOTUS,” Hegseth wrote on X in response to a Fox News reporter’s post about the decision.

Transgender people do not identify with the sex assigned to them at birth.