A federal judge has blocked Donald Trump’s administration from forcing three incarcerated transgender women into men’s prisons and taking away their gender-affirming healthcare.
The order on Tuesday from Washington, D.C. District Judge Royce Lambert – who was appointed by Ronald Reagan – temporarily strikes down part of Trump’s sweeping executive order on gender as a likely violation of the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment, landing yet another court-ordered blow to his agenda.
A pair of lawsuits filed by incarcerated trans women have accused the president of endangering their lives while stripping them of their healthcare through an executive order that “categorically bans transgender healthcare regardless of medical necessity,” according to the D.C. lawsuit.
Trump’s order “prohibits prison medical providers from treating transgender patients’ gender dysphoria on an individual basis, according to independent medical judgment,” serving as a “blanket ban that “will deprive Plaintiffs of essential treatment, putting them at high risk of serious harm,” according to the complaint.
The three trans women at the center of the case in Lambreth’s court feared the loss of their healthcare and a heightened risk of sexual abuse and violence if they were moved to men’s facilities.
Lamberth agreed that the women faced a “significantly elevated risk of physical and sexual violence” and “numerous and severe symptoms” without appropriate medical care.
Lawyers with Trump’s Department of Justice argued in court filings that it was still too soon for a judge to weigh in because the women had not yet been transferred, and that the administration had not issued a “yet-to-be formulated policy” on medical care for incarcerated trans people.
The judge argued that Trump’s executive order was clear enough; the language “plainly requires the [Bureau of Prisons] to perform the allegedly unlawful facility transfer and to withhold the prescribed hormone therapy drugs.”
“With respect to the transfer provision, the plaintiffs cited various government reports and regulations recognizing that transgender persons are at a significantly elevated risk of physical and sexual violence relative to other inmates when housed in a facility corresponding to their biological sex – which the defendants do not dispute,” he wrote.
Trump’s executive order also effectively seeks to eliminate transgender, intersex and nonbinary people across the federal government, taking aim at what he characterizes as “gender ideology” and the “ideologues who deny the biological reality of sex.”
Lamberth’s order only applies to provisions in the order concerning the housing of trans inmates and a clause that prohibits federal funds for “any medical procedure, treatment, or drug for the purpose of conforming an inmate’s appearance to that of the opposite sex.”
In court documents, the Justice Department said 16 transgender women are currently housed in federal women’s prisons, while the vast majority of the more than 2,200 incarcerated trans people are housed in facilities that do not align with their gender.
Of those inmates, 1,506 are trans women, and 724 are trans men, according to the Justice Department.
A lack of gender-accurate housing, compounded by difficulties accessing gender-affirming care, have subjected trans inmates to extreme abuse, The Independent previously reported. Incarcerated trans people are 10 times more likely to report being sexually victimized as other prisoners, according to federal data.
Two of the three plaintiffs in the D.C. lawsuit are survivors of sexual assaults in men’s facilities, according to the complaint.
A separate federal lawsuit filed in Massachusetts by another incarcerated trans woman claims she was segregated from the general population at a women’s facility, moved into a “special housing unit,” and told that she would be transferred to a men’s prison.
On January 25, five days after Trump signed his executive order, prison records suddenly classified her as “male,” according to the lawsuit. She remains in the special housing unit, pending transfer.
