Supreme Court rejects Trump admin. policy banning trans procedures for inmates

The U.S. Supreme Court on Wednesday denied the Trump administration's emergency request to enforce a Federal Bureau of Prisons policy limiting taxpayer-funded trans procedures for federal inmates.

The brief, unsigned order leaves in place a lower-court injunction blocking the policy, which was implemented in February and was tied to a January 2025 executive order from President Donald Trump that directed federal agencies to affirm biological sex.

The executive order directed the Bureau of Prisons to house inmates according to their actual sex, halt dispensing cross-sex hormones, and restrict clothing or other "social accommodations" that do not align with an inmate's birth sex. The policy continued to allow mental health treatment for the roughly 2,000 trans-identifying people in federal prisons and halfway houses.

The administration has characterized such procedures as "unproven sex-rejecting interventions" in litigation.

The Supreme Court's Wednesday order did not explain its reasoning, but noted that Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito indicated they would have allowed the policy to proceed.

The order was related to a case brought by the American Civil Liberties Union on behalf of a group of three trans-identifying inmates who had been receiving cross-sex hormones at taxpayer expense in prison for years. Citing the Eighth Amendment's ban on cruel and unusual punishment, they argued that the U.S. government failed to justify reversing the hormone treatment that has been available to federal inmates with gender dysphoria for about 30 years.

"This ruling will prevent serious and irreparable harm to plaintiffs and the class while we continue to challenge the government's unlawful efforts to deny ​medically necessary healthcare for political reasons," ACLU attorney Aditi Shah said, according to Reuters.

U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth for the District of Columbia, a Reagan appointee, had blocked the policy, finding that the Bureau of Prisons offered no evidence from its own medical staff that the cross-sex hormones were ineffective or harmful. In a later 2-1 ruling, the D.C. Circuit declined to lift that injunction.

The Trump administration, through Solicitor General D. John Sauer, has argued that the lower courts were improperly second-guessing agency judgment and penalizing compliance with the executive order.

The decision is an uncommon setback for the Trump administration on trans issues at the Supreme Court, which has previously allowed restrictions on trans-identified individuals serving in the U.S. military, state bans on youth transition treatments, and limits on trans-identifying athletes in girls' and women's sports.