Federal Court Blocks an Executive Order Prohibiting the Bureau of Prisons from Giving Hormones to Federal Inmates to “Affirm” Their “Gender Identities.”

Weirdly, I agree with some aspects of the ruling, and I don’t like it one bit

June 9, 2025

First, here is a very handy list of pending cases involving people who have sued their medical professionals for subjecting them to harmful medical practices such as puberty blockers and opposite-sex hormones. I was aware of this outstanding organization, but until very recently, was unaware of its list. It does not include cases where students have sued schools, employees have sued employers, or any cases involving Title IX. If a list of such cases exists, I am unaware of it. However, The TERF Report is a decent archive of information about those cases; I’ve written about most of them in the past.

In a previous post, I noted that a federal court in Washington DC recently blocked an executive order prohibiting the Bureau of Prisons from giving hormones to federal inmates to “affirm” their “gender identities” and said that I hoped to do a deep dive into the case and write about it soon. The ruling (authored by a federal judge appointed by President Reagan) is here, and a Washington Post article about it is here. This post is that deeper dive.

The named plaintiffs are three “transgender” federal inmates, which is to say that they’re three inmates who claim to be the opposite sex (one man claiming to be a woman and two women claiming to be men). They’re represented by the ACLU, which states about the case:

Three transgender people currently incarcerated in federal custody have filed a class action lawsuit against the Trump Administration and the Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) challenging an Executive Order and new BOP policies prohibiting their access to gender-affirming care. The class action lawsuit was filed in federal court in Washington, D.C., on behalf of approximately 2,000 transgender people incarcerated in federal prisons across the United States.

The executive order in question is here. One of the new BOP policies the ACLU refers to is here. The court blocked the portion of the executive order that pertains to “gender identity” hormones and the corresponding BOP policies for procedural reasons. It also certified the case as a class action, where the individual plaintiffs now represent thousands of other federal inmates in a “class.”

Generally speaking, I am not a fan of tax dollars being used to allow federal inmates to claim to be the opposite sex, and I support the executive order in question. But surprisingly, as I was reading the ruling and the briefs in the case, I found myself agreeing with the ACLU and the court, and disagreeing with the government lawyers, about certain aspects of the case. Bottom line: the Department of Justice is really messing this up. Read on to find out why.

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