A federal judge on Monday shielded more transgender women housed in federal prisons from an executive order that would have transferred them from all-female to all-male units and ended their hormone treatment.
In one of a series of orders targeting transgender Americans, President Trump directed the federal Bureau of Prisons on Jan. 20 to house all transgender women according to their sex at birth and halt any gender-related medical treatment.
But the order hit legal hurdles after several transgender prisoners sued, arguing that being transferred would place them at a high risk of physical and sexual violence and that ending their treatments would be physically “devastating” and raise their risk of suicide.
Judge Royce C. Lamberth of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia issued an injunction against the executive order that stopped the transfer of three inmates this month. On Monday, he expanded the injunction to cover 10 more transgender plaintiffs.
Courts have repeatedly held that prison systems must provide transgender prisoners with gender-related medical treatment. In addition, the Supreme Court, federal law and prison regulations have long recognized that transgender prisoners are at an elevated risk for violence, a factor that they say should be considered when housing assignments are determined.
Critics have argued that the privacy and safety of female inmates are put at risk when transgender women are housed in women’s prisons.
On Friday, the Bureau of Prisons issued new restrictions on transgender inmates. At the same time, the bureau said that Mr. Trump’s executive order “does not supersede or change B.O.P.’s obligation to comply with federal laws and regulations,” including the Prison Rape Elimination Act.
Only about two dozen of the 1,500 trans women in the federal prison system are housed in women’s facilities, in part because the process for approving such transfers is long and cumbersome.
Judge Lamberth, who was appointed by President Ronald Reagan, has said that the plaintiffs made a convincing argument that the transfers would violate their right to be free of cruel or unusual punishment and that the government had provided little evidence to the contrary.
The government has argued that housing decisions are at the discretion of the bureau and that it has identified low-security men’s facilities for the women that would “minimize the likelihood that they would be victimized.”
