Washington – A federal judge agreed on Tuesday to temporarily block prison officials to transfer three transgender women imprisoned to men’s facilities and finish their access to hormonal therapy under an executive order signed by President Donald Trump.
The American district judge Royce Lambeth in Washington, DC, granted the request of inmates of a temporal restriction order. He issued a written ruling several hours after an hearing in which a lawyer’s lawyer argued that Trump’s order discriminates transgender people and violates their constitutional rights.
The judge chairs a lawsuit filed on behalf of three transgender women who were housed in women’s facilities before Trump signed the order on January 20, his first day back in the White House.
On January 26, a federal judge in Boston issued a restriction order in a separate challenge to the same executive order. That order was limited to a transgender woman in a woman’s prison.
Trump’s order requires the Federal Prison Office to ensure that “men are not detained in women’s prisons.” It also requires that the office review its medical care policies so that federal funds are not spent “with the purpose of forming the appearance of an inmate to that of the opposite sex.”
The lawyer of the Department of Justice, John Robinson, said that prison officials have “broad discretion” to decide where to locate inmates.
Looking at women to a prison of men would endanger their safety and would expose them to psychological damage, the lawyers of the plaintiffs argued.
Trump’s order would interrupt the accessors’s access to hormonal therapy for gender dysphoria, the anguish that a person can feel because his assigned gender identity and gender do not coincide. The medical condition has been linked to depression and suicidal thoughts.
Lamberth said that there are only about 16 transgender women housed in female penitentiaries, including the three plaintiffs they demanded in Washington. The judge concluded that “the public interest in seeing the plaintiffs immediately relocated in the male facilities is light in the best of cases.”
“In addition, the balance of actions and public interest favor the plaintiffs,” Lamberth wrote, a main judge who was nominated by then President Ronald Reagan in 1987.
The plaintiffs, identified by pseudonyms in judicial presentations, are represented by lawyers of the National Lesbian Rights Center based in San Francisco and GLBTQ legal defenders based in San Francisco, also known as Glad Law.
The plaintiffs were housed in women’s units for months or years until January, when they were withdrawn from the general population of women’s prisons and were segregated with other transgender women to wait for transfers to men’s facilities.
“They were terrified of the perspective of these transfers given the serious risk of sexual violence and aggression they face in these men’s facilities,” said lawyer Jennifer Levi to the judge.
The lawyers of the plaintiffs argued that Trump’s order violates the constitutional rights of their clients to the equal protection of laws and be free from cruel and unusual punishments.
“There is no way to keep these women safe outside a women’s prison,” Levi said. “We are only asking this court to keep the status quo.”
Robinson said that the plaintiffs have not denied any medical attention since Trump signed the order. The prison office has not decided where to transfer them yet, he added.
“I don’t want to leave Bop interpreting this executive order,” Robinson said.
