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A US judge has temporarily blocked federal prisons from transferring transgender women to men’s facilities and barring their access to hormone therapy, halting one of Donald Trump’s executive orders seeking to erode trans rights behind bars.
A lawsuit filed last week by three incarcerated trans women challenged Trump’s anti-trans order, which directed the US bureau of prisons to make sure “males are not detained in women’s prisons or housed in women’s detention centers” and that no federal funds go to gender-affirming treatment or procedures for people in custody.
US district judge Royce Lamberth in Washington on Tuesday issued a temporary restraining order, ruling late Tuesday that Trump’s order discriminates against transgender people and violates their constitutional rights.
The bureau must “maintain and continue the plaintiffs’ housing status and medical care as they existed immediately prior to January 20”, he wrote.
The judge said the trans women had “straightforwardly demonstrated that irreparable harm will follow” if they are denied healthcare and forced into men’s institutions.
US officials “have not so much as alleged that the plaintiffs in this particular suit present any threat to the female inmates housed with them”, the judge added. The family of one plaintiff said her life would be threatened if she were moved.
The judge said there were only 16 trans women housed in women’s facilities, and the ruling applies to all of them.
On 26 January, a federal judge in Boston issued a restraining order in a separate challenge to the same executive order. That order was limited to one transgender woman in a woman’s prison.
John Robinson, an attorney for the justice department, has argued that prison officials have “broad discretion” to decide where to place inmates.
Last week, trans women across US prisons shared accounts of a brutal crackdown following Trump’s order, reporting that they had been placed in solitary confinement awaiting transfers, lost access to healthcare and were harassed and taunted by guards.
Staff at Federal Medical Center (FMC) Carswell, a US women’s prison in Texas that houses people with special medical needs, took swift actions within days of the new administration, attorneys said. One resident reported that officers went to trans women’s cells one by one and ordered them out.
“The officers yelled at these women: ‘Come right now, leave your things. You don’t have time to pack,’” said the resident, who witnessed the interactions and requested anonymity. “The officials were degrading them and saying disgusting things, like: ‘We don’t have to call you women anymore. Where you’re going, you’re going to be a man.’”
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The plaintiffs in the case the Washington judge ruled upon on Tuesday are identified by pseudonyms in court filings.
They had been housed in women’s units for months or years until January, when they were removed from the general population of women’s prisons and segregated with other transgender women to await transfers to men’s facilities.
“They were terrified at the prospect of these transfers given the serious risk of violence and sexual assault that they face in these men’s facilities,” Glad attorney Jennifer Levi told the judge.
Reuters contributed to this report
