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Left: President Donald Trump speaks to the media at Mar-a-Lago, Tuesday, Feb. 18, 2025, in Palm Beach, Fla. (Pool photo via AP). Right: In this May 1, 2008 file photo, U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth is seen during a ceremony at the federal courthouse in Washington. (AP Photo/Charles Dharapak, File).
A federal judge has issued a preliminary injunction blocking a move by the Trump administration to transfer three transgender women to all-male prisons, agreeing the inmates would be at a “substantially elevated risk” of physical and sexual violence and the move would exacerbate their mental health conditions.
U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth, a Ronald Reagan appointee, issued the preliminary injunction on Tuesday in a federal lawsuit involving the inmate plaintiffs.
Lamberth said that withholding the inmates’ prescribed hormone therapy medication would likely cause severe harm.
“Importantly, the defendants did not substantially dispute those facts,” he wrote. “Instead, the defendants pointed to speculative action that the Bureau of Prisons might take to mitigate those harms and thus assuage the Court’s Eighth Amendment concerns. Those hypothetical measures were insufficient to defeat the plaintiffs’ largely uncontroverted evidence of harm.”
He added that since a temporary restraining order was issued in the case, the Court received no further information about what steps, if any, the government intends or would take if the plaintiffs were to be transferred and deprived of their prescribed medications.
The litigation is in response to a Jan. 20 executive order signed by President Donald Trump, which purports to defend women from “gender ideology extremism” and restore “biological truth” by, among other things, transferring transgender women to men’s lockups and barring inmates from accessing medical care for gender dysphoria.
In seeking a temporary restraining order on Feb. 4, the plaintiffs’ attorney, Jennifer Levi, told the judge that the transfer order is sex-based discrimination and violates their protections against cruel and unusual punishment, CNN reported.
As Law&Crime previously reported, the government noted that only 16 male-to-female transgender women currently reside in women’s lockup facilities — and that 1,490 reside in men’s facilities.
Lamberth’s temporary restraining order is the latest setback for the Trump administration’s anti-transgender policies. Last month, another pseudonymous transgender woman inmate won a similar temporary restraining order in a Massachusetts court. A court battle is also taking place over the Trump administration’s order banning transgender people from serving in the military.