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Trump Is Making Federal Prison Even More Dangerous for Transgender Inmates

New directives from the Bureau of Prisons amount to government-mandated conversion therapy.

The Metropolitan Detention Center in New York City.

In February, the Trump Justice Department issued a program statement titled “Management of Inmates with Gender Dysphoria,” its new internal directives regarding transgender people in federal prison. The policy classifies being transgender itself as a “mental health disorder” and outlines a “treatment plan” to ensure those afflicted “progress toward recovery.” What “recovery” means, in the eyes of the administration, is made obvious by the mandates of the plan: confiscation of trans inmates’ gender-affirming clothes, makeup and other personal items; denial of hormones and any other gender-affirming medication; and program of forced psychotherapy and psychotropic drugs. “It is, in every meaningful sense, a blueprint for a government-run conversion therapy program,” Shannon Minter, legal head of the National Center for LGBTQ Rights, writes in the Advocate, “one targeting thousands of incarcerated people who have nowhere to turn.”

In January 2017, the outgoing Obama administration issued federal prison guidelines that aimed to ensure “transgender inmates can access programs and services that meet their needs.” Since then, including during Trump’s first term, the Bureau of Prisons’ official policy held that trans prisoners should be given gender affirming care—including hormones, surgery and placement in facilities matching their gender identity. But as the Marshall Project notes, “across both Democratic and Republican administrations, gender-affirming housing was rare, and surgery rarer still.” And depending on the prison, provision of even the most basic gender-affirming care was always inconsistent.

The EEOC Is No Longer Protecting Federal Workers From Gender Identity Discrimination Bryce Covert

The EEOC Is No Longer Protecting Federal Workers From Gender Identity Discrimination

“People’s experience in federal prisons varies widely from place to place. In some places, medical staff are more supportive and better trained. In others, people already often have to fight hard to get the medical care they need and are thwarted at every turn,” Minter told me. “It’s probably not news to anyone paying the least bit of attention that healthcare in prisons is generally abysmal. And people are denied all kinds of care that they need all the time.”

Of the 1,500 estimated trans women in federal custody, per NPR reporting, just 22 were in women’s prisons as of February 2025. (Of the estimated 750 trans men in custody, one was in a men’s facility.) That means that when Trump issued his day-one executive order declaring his administration would only “recognize two sexes” and requiring trans women to be put in men’s prisons, 99 percent of trans women were already being held in men’s facilities. That order also announced a new ban on using federal funds for gender-affirming care in prisons, providing the administration a pretext for ending numerous provisions—from hormones to gender-confirming commissary items such as breast and hip padding—for trans inmates.

On the heels of Trump’s order, the National Center for LGBTQ Rights and its partners immediately filed lawsuits, quickly securing injunctions in at least three federal courts. And yet, a BOP memo dated February 21, 2025, acknowledges the existence of a “nation-wide restraining order” blocking Trump’s EO—but nonetheless states the agency’s compliance with the president’s illegal order. BOP officials explicitly directed staff........

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