Judge blocks Trump from cutting off gender-affirming care for federal inmates
CNN
A federal judge on Tuesday ordered the Trump administration to continue providing gender-affirming medication for transgender inmates in federal prisons, dealing the latest blow to a multi-pronged effort by the president to pull back federal support for transgender health care.
A federal judge on Tuesday ordered the Trump administration to continue providing gender-affirming medication for transgender inmates in federal prisons, dealing the latest blow to a multi-pronged effort by the president to pull back federal support for transgender health care. “All parties seem to agree that the named plaintiffs do, in fact, need hormone therapy,” US District Judge Royce Lamberth wrote. The preliminary injunction from Lamberth means that officials within the Bureau of Prisons cannot enforce guidance the agency’s leadership issued earlier this year implementing President Donald Trump’s order, which directed the agency to revise its policies to “ensure that no Federal funds are expended for any medical procedure, treatment, or drug for the purpose of conforming an inmate’s appearance to that of the opposite sex.” Lamberth, an appointee of former President Ronald Reagan, said a group of transgender inmates who had been medically diagnosed with gender dysphoria and who challenged BOP’s guidance implementing the president’s order were likely to succeed on their claim that the agency violated federal rulemaking procedures. They will continue to receive drugs as prescribed, the judge said. “Nothing in the thin record before the Court suggests that either the BOP or the President consciously took stock of—much less studied—the potentially debilitating effects that the new policies could have on transgender inmates before the implementing memoranda came into force,” Lamberth wrote in the 36-page ruling. “The BOP may not arbitrarily deprive inmates of medications or other lifestyle accommodations that its own medical staff have deemed to be medically appropriate without considering he implications of that decision.”
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