Federal Court Halts Transgender Inmate Transfers to Male Prisons

A group of 14 transgender women succeeded in convincing a federal district court to grant a preliminary injunction preventing them from being transferred to male prison facilities under a Trump administration executive order.

A preliminary injunction is appropriate because the government’s “mitigable” concerns about housing transgender women alongside cisgender women were outweighed by the far greater risks the plaintiffs would face in male prisons—which include sexual violence, self-harm, and suicide, the US District Court for the District of Columbia said Sunday.

The plaintiffs’ risks take precedence because many had lived in women’s facilities for years and undergone hormone therapy and surgeries that would make them particularly vulnerable targets in male prisons, according to the opinion.

“Today’s injunction merely enjoins the government from transferring Plaintiffs to men’s prisons,” Judge Royce C. Lamberth wrote. “It does not, at this juncture, require that Plaintiffs be housed alongside cisgender female inmates or share common spaces.”

The decision follows an appellate opinion that ordered district courts in April to make individualized findings on whether each inmate faces substantial risks of harm in violation of the Eighth Amendment. The US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia’s mandate implementing that April ruling was scheduled to be issued Monday, prompting Lamberth to act before it took effect.

On remand, Lamberth found that the plaintiffs individually were likely to face two objectively intolerable risks if transferred to male prisons: physical and sexual violence from fellow inmates, and severely exacerbated gender dysphoria. Though the government assured the court it would send the inmates to low-risk facilities, a former senior Bureau of Prisons official testified those assurances were insufficient given their particular vulnerabilities, the opinion said.

“These particular Plaintiffs have lived in women’s facilities for so long and have taken great lengths to accord their lives with their gender identities—such as by undergoing surgery, taking hormones, and wearing women’s clothing—their circumstances are unique even among the broader transgender female population,” the opinion said.

Lamberth also found that prison officials acted with “deliberate indifference” to those risks when they transferred plaintiffs to male facilities, which satisfies the subjective prong of an Eighth Amendment analysis.

The government’s categorical transfer policy was entirely derived by Executive Order 14168 and in direct conflict with the Prison Rape Elimination Act’s requirement of individualized placement decisions, Lamberth said. Rather than weighing whether any male facility was actually safer for these particular plaintiffs than the women’s prisons where they had lived for years, the Bureau of Prisons simply followed the executive order, the opinion said.

GLBTQ Legal Advocates & Defenders, the National Center for LGBTQ Rights, Lowenstein Sandler LLP, and Brown Goldstein & Levy LLP represent the inmates.

The case is Doe v. McHenry, D.D.C., No. 1:25-cv-00286, opinion filed 6/7/26.