WASHINGTON, D.C. (LifeSiteNews) — The Trump administration asked the U.S. Supreme Court on Monday to uphold a policy denying cross-sex hormones and “gender transition” surgeries to federal inmates claiming to be “transgender.”
On his first day back in the White House last year, President Donald Trump signed an executive order establishing that “Federal funds shall not be used to promote gender ideology. Each agency shall assess grant conditions and grantee preferences and ensure grant funds do not promote gender ideology.” It also directed the heads of the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security to “ensure that males are not detained in women’s prisons or housed in women’s detention centers” under their jurisdiction.
Under the policy eventually adopted by the U.S. Bureau of Prisons (BOP), inmates afflicted with gender dysphoria may receive counseling, but so-called “gender-affirming” hormones, surgical procedures, and “social accommodations” (such as affirming preferred gender pronouns or allowance into opposite-sex facilities) are prohibited.
But the far-left American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU) sued, and, in June 2025, U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth blocked the administration from denying taxpayer funds to prison inmates for “transition” purposes. The White House declared at the time that the ruling “fundamentally makes women less safe and ignores the biological truth that there are only two genders. The Trump administration looks forward to ultimate victory on this issue in court.”
CNN reports that additional federal courts have since ruled against the administration, prompting it to appeal to the nation’s highest court. Specifically, it wants the justices to stay an order by the District Court for the District of Columbia and allow the policy to be enforced while arguments on the merits work their way through the system.
“BOP explained that its prior policies reflected WPATH’s [the embattled World Professional Association for Transgender Health] standards of care, which had since been cast into serious doubt. BOP also repeatedly pointed to its prior experience in explaining why security and prison-administration concerns independently justified the 2026 policy,” the brief says. “The court’s demand for additional evidence cannot be reconciled with bedrock principles of administrative law or the double deference that BOP is due in this context.”
“Second, the district court stated that the 2026 policy is objectively unreasonable,” it added. “But BOP’s decision to prioritize mental-health treatment, while discontinuing medically disputed and unproven sex-rejecting interventions, falls well within the bounds of reasoned decision making. The court reached a contrary conclusion only by disregarding fundamental principles of APA review – relying on evidence outside the administrative record and substituting its own policy judgment for that of the agency.”
In recent years, there has been growing concern around the world over placing men who claim to be women in female prison populations, which has proven to be a means of both securing lighter treatment during incarceration and gaining easy access to women to prey upon. Transgender status also has the potential to be exploited to avoid incarceration entirely in some cases, as seen in Wales, when a man who identified as a woman received a suspended sentence keeping him out of prison despite physically assaulting two women within days of each other, on the grounds that he would be “vulnerable” behind bars. LifeSiteNews reported in 2023 that a Correctional Service Canada (CSC) report found that sex criminals account for almost half of gender-confused male inmates in Canada.
In May 2023, investigative journalist James O’Keefe released an interview with U.S. Federal Bureau of Prisons psychologist Dr. Linda Noelle, who says that male and female prisoners “both play the victim card” to obtain gender “reassignment” surgeries at taxpayer expense. “And then they go through [the American Civil Liberties Union], and then the ACLU sues the [U.S. Department of Justice]” when demands for subsidized “transition” procedures are initially rejected, Noelle told O’Keefe. “And the DOJ, unfortunately, under Merrick Garland, it rolls over. It doesn’t go through the courts, so they just pay people off.”
In May 2024, Hector Bravo Ferrel, a U.S. Army Iraq veteran who served the California Department of Corrections for 16 years, spoke out about his decision to resign in protest of leaders allowing male inmates to exploit “gender-affirming” policies. “They were like kids in the candy store, because they knew they were going from a men’s prison to a females’ prison,” he said.