diff --git a/doc/source/whatsnew/v0.21.0.txt b/doc/source/whatsnew/v0.21.0.txt
index f4fbbd3596b57c..b06075f2dd13c1 100644
--- a/doc/source/whatsnew/v0.21.0.txt
+++ b/doc/source/whatsnew/v0.21.0.txt
@@ -1017,6 +1017,7 @@ Categorical
 - Bug in :func:`Series.isin` when called with a categorical (:issue:`16639`)
 - Bug in the categorical constructor with empty values and categories causing the ``.categories`` to be an empty ``Float64Index`` rather than an empty ``Index`` with object dtype (:issue:`17248`)
 - Bug in categorical operations with :ref:`Series.cat <categorical.cat>` not preserving the original Series' name (:issue:`17509`)
+- Bug in :func:`DataFrame.merge` failing for categorical columns with boolean/int data types (:issue:`17187`)
 
 .. _whatsnew_0210.pypy:
 
diff --git a/pandas/core/internals.py b/pandas/core/internals.py
index a1e9b24afe5fc8..f6c5ecbca81ef3 100644
--- a/pandas/core/internals.py
+++ b/pandas/core/internals.py
@@ -5596,7 +5596,7 @@ def get_reindexed_values(self, empty_dtype, upcasted_na):
                     # preserve these for validation in _concat_compat
                     return self.block.values
 
-            if self.block.is_bool:
+            if self.block.is_bool and not self.block.is_categorical:
                 # External code requested filling/upcasting, bool values must
                 # be upcasted to object to avoid being upcasted to numeric.
                 values = self.block.astype(np.object_).values
diff --git a/pandas/tests/reshape/test_merge.py b/pandas/tests/reshape/test_merge.py
index ed99814afd20a9..81956c0bd5b281 100644
--- a/pandas/tests/reshape/test_merge.py
+++ b/pandas/tests/reshape/test_merge.py
@@ -1546,6 +1546,30 @@ def test_dtype_on_categorical_dates(self):
         result_inner = pd.merge(df, df2, how='inner', on=['date'])
         assert_frame_equal(result_inner, expected_inner)
 
+    @pytest.mark.parametrize('category_column,categories,expected_categories',
+                             [([False, True, True, False], [True, False],
+                               [True, False]),
+                              ([2, 1, 1, 2], [1, 2], [1, 2]),
+                              (['False', 'True', 'True', 'False'],
+                               ['True', 'False'], ['True', 'False'])])
+    def test_merging_with_bool_or_int_cateorical_column(self, category_column,
+                                                        categories,
+                                                        expected_categories):
+        # GH 17187
+        # merging with a boolean/int categorical column
+        df1 = pd.DataFrame({'id': [1, 2, 3, 4],
+                            'cat': category_column})
+        df1['cat'] = df1['cat'].astype('category',
+                                       categories=categories, ordered=True)
+        df2 = pd.DataFrame({'id': [2, 4], 'num': [1, 9]})
+        result = df1.merge(df2)
+        expected = pd.DataFrame({'id': [2, 4], 'cat': expected_categories,
+                                 'num': [1, 9]})
+        expected['cat'] = expected['cat'].astype('category',
+                                                 categories=categories,
+                                                 ordered=True)
+        assert_frame_equal(expected, result)
+
 
 @pytest.fixture
 def left_df():