Just as the Trump administration was preparing to roll out the forced transfer of trans inmates into facilities aligning to their assigned sex, a federal judge has temporarily halted the action for ten trans women. The ruling found Trump’s executive order to be arbitrary and a likely candidate for cruel and unusual punishment.
On January 20, Trump signed an executive order directing the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) to transfer all trans inmates into prisons based on their sex assigned at birth. According to NPR, the BOP was all ready to enforce these directives starting this week.
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Now US District Judge for Washington DC Royce Lamberth has blocked the order’s enforcement for the ten trans women currently suing the Trump administration. A previous ruling from Lamberth earlier this month had protected only three trans women. Out of the 2,198 trans inmates incarcerated in federal prisons, there are 22 trans women housed in women’s facilities and one trans man in a men’s facility.
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The preliminary injunction currently applies only to those inmates involved in the lawsuit while the legal battle makes its way through court. Plaintiffs argue that Trump’s order will put them in serious risk and Judge Lamberth concurred.
While the government has reasoned that housing trans women in low security men’s prisons would “minimize the likelihood that they would be victimized,” Labmberth agreed with federal prison data showing trans women face “a significantly elevated risk of physical and sexual violence.” He said that the government’s solution won’t “disaggregate assaults against transgender inmates from overall rates of assault.”
As a result, Judge Lamberth ruled that Trump’s order is likely in violation of the 8th Amendment, which outlaws cruel and unusual punishment. “Summarily removing the possibility of housing the plaintiffs in a women’s facility, when that was determined to be the appropriate facility under the existing constitutional and statutory regime, demonstrates a likelihood of success on the merits of the plaintiffs’ Eighth Amendment claim,” he wrote.
The ruling also argues that beyond the risk of physical violence, moving the prisoners to men’s facilities will constitute excessive punishment in and of itself. Such a move “will exacerbate the symptoms of their gender dysphoria, even if they are not subject to physical or sexual violence in their new facility—whether because they will be subject to searches by male correctional officers, made to shower in the company of men, referred to as men, forced to dress as men, or simply because the mere homogeneous presence of men will cause uncomfortable dissonance.”
Before Trump’s order, the BOP would assign housing for trans inmates through individual assessment, basing the decision on safety risk and guidelines set by the Prison Rape Elimination Act. Now the BOP has issued new regulations, banning gender affirming care, the purchase of gender affirming clothing, the use of pronouns that do not align with assigned sex, and special procedures for pat-downs and searches.
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