The Supreme Court on Wednesday blocked President Donald Trump from ending hormone therapy and other treatments for transgender inmates in federal prisons, handing the White House a rare loss at a court that has otherwise been pretty friendly to the administration’s agenda.
The court issued a one-sentence order with zero explanation, which is the judicial equivalent of just hanging up the phone. Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissented, also without explanation, which at least tells you where they stood.
To be fair to the conservative majority, this isn’t the full picture of where the court has landed on transgender issues. Supreme Court transgender rulings show the justices have allowed the administration’s military trans ban to stand, backed a policy requiring passports to reflect biological sex at birth, and upheld state laws keeping biological males off girls’ sports teams. This one ruling is the exception, not the rule.
Trump signed an executive order on his first day back in office barring any “medical procedure, treatment, or drug” for the purpose of “conforming an inmate’s appearance to that of the opposite sex.” The Bureau of Prisons followed up with a policy allowing psychotherapy and psychiatry for gender dysphoria, but drawing a hard line at hormone therapies, surgeries, and what they called “social accommodations,” things like clothing and makeup.
First of all, it’s jail. The prisoners should be in the jail that matches their biology. Nothing else matters. If you don’t like that, then stay out of jail.
A district court and the DC Circuit both blocked the policy from taking effect. The DC Circuit said the administration’s approach was likely “arbitrary and capricious” because the Bureau of Prisons hadn’t “adequately” considered “its own experience providing gender-affirming care under its prior policy.” The Trump administration fired back that it absolutely did consider that experience, and that previous treatments and accommodations “raised security and prison-administration concerns that outweighed whatever limited benefits they had.”
The ACLU, arguing on behalf of three prisoners who said they had been receiving hormone therapy for years, pushed back hard on the security argument. The group told the Supreme Court the concern was odd “given that BOP has not pointed to a single security incident relating to its provision of this treatment over the past 30 years.” That is a real argument, and it apparently landed with at least some of the justices.
The three prisoners challenging the policy argued that ending it would affect nearly 1,000 people in federal custody and represented an abrupt reversal of decades of practice. The case had been fully briefed and ready for a decision for almost two weeks before the court finally acted, which made the lack of any written reasoning particularly notable.
It’s worth remembering that Trump made trans issues a central part of his 2024 campaign, running television ads specifically targeting Kamala Harris over her positions on the topic. Voters rewarded him with a return trip to the White House. The legal fight over this executive order is far from over, and the administration will keep pushing. Wednesday was a setback, not a surrender.
It really makes you wonder what some of the judges are looking at late at night on their computers. I say that because these are not medical or lifesaving treatments or procedures. These are just things people want done out of personal reasons, and taxpayers should never be on the hook for that.
Doctors shouldn’t even do these procedures on anyone, anywhere, but here we are in the land of the bizarre.
