Prisons Must Halt Implementing Trump’s Gender Ideology Order (1)

The Federal Bureau of Prisons is temporarily barred from implementing President Donald Trump’s gender ideology executive order, a federal judge said Tuesday.

The group of transgender inmates challenging the order is suffering irreparable harm and is likely to succeed on the merits of their claims that BOP’s actions violated the Administrative Procedure Act, Senior Judge Royce C. Lamberth of the US District Court for the District of Columbia said in an order granting the inmates’ request for a preliminary injunction.

The judge also certified a class totaling at least 2,000 individuals in BOP custody who have gender dysphoria or who meet the criteria for a diagnosis. Lamberth ordered BOP to make available to class members all accommodations they were provided prior to the executive order, including hormone therapy and medications.

Trump’s Jan. 20 executive order—which prohibits BOP from using federal funds for treatments used “for the purpose of conforming an inmate’s appearance to that of the opposite sex"—has drawn other suits. Lamberth in a different case granted injunctive relief in February barring the government from implementing portions of Trump’s order against a group of inmates, and a Massachusetts federal judge in January temporarily blocked the transfer of a transgender woman to a men’s prison.

The inmates in this case argued that BOP’s “categorical withdrawal and denial of gender-affirming health care” to transgender people “regardless of their individualized medical need is paradigmatic deliberate indifference to a serious medical need, in violation of the Eighth Amendment.”

Each of the plaintiffs also said they were told they’d soon lose access to hormone treatments and other gender-affirming items they were provided prior to Trump’s order, which they allege will cause them irreparable harm, including exacerbating their gender dysphoria and increasing their risk of depression and suicidality.

But the government said in a filing that the inmates are required to first go through administrative remedies under the Prison Litigation Reform Act before pursuing litigation in court.

BOP is still evaluating individual inmates’ medical needs to provide necessary care, “which may include hormone medication” when appropriate, the filing said. And the inmates’ constitutional and APA claims fail, the government argued, since the allegations are based on “an incorrect assumption that BOP has categorically banned hormone medication for inmates with gender dysphoria.”

But the record suggests that when the plaintiffs filed their complaint, “the BOP’s policy and the Executive Order were essentially one and the same,” meaning BOP interpreted the order to forbid hormone therapies, Lamberth said. Even though the bureau has recently adopted policies providing hormone therapy to inmates with medical needs, that wasn’t the case when the complaint was filed. Their suit can therefore move forward, the judge said.

The BOP’s implementing memoranda also “fall short” of their requirements under the APA, Lamberth said. When an agency’s actions are carried out to fulfill a presidential directive, it “does not exempt them from arbitrary-and-capricious review,” the judge wrote. Even if BOP incorporated the executive order’s reasoning into its memoranda, “the reasoning contained therein is plainly deficient,” Lamberth added.

There’s also evidence suggesting that “to the extent the BOP officials have been meeting with the plaintiffs about their medical needs, none of the assessments made by those officials can be said to have been ‘individualized,’” Lamberth said in certifying the class.

The American Civil Liberties Union Foundation of the District of Columbia and the Transgender Law Center represent the plaintiffs.

The case is Kingdom v. Trump, D.D.C., No. 1:25-cv-00691, 6/3/25.