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Donald Trump tried to force this trans woman into a men’s prison. A judge just stopped him.
February 01 2025, 08:15

A federal judge has temporarily blocked the transfer of a transgender woman inmate to a men’s prison and restored her access to transgender healthcare.

It’s the first legal victory challenging President Donald Trump’s Day One “gender ideology” executive order declaring there are only “two sexes.”

Related

Trans inmate sues Trump administration in first lawsuit over “two sexes” executive order
Courts have already found that forcing trans women into men’s prisons is cruel and unusual punishment.

Part of that order directed officials at the federal Bureau of Prisons to transfer all transgender women inmates to men’s facilities and cut off their access to gender-related healthcare, including hormone therapy.

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The injunction was granted Sunday soon after lawyers filed suit arguing the order infringed on their client’s due process rights under the Fifth Amendment and violates the Constitution’s Eighth Amendment prohibition against cruel and unusual punishment.

The case was sealed until Thursday, when the court held a hearing on whether to grant the woman, identified as Maria Moe, further relief. Following her motion for a temporary restraining order, she was returned to the general population.

“We are relieved that our client is staying put for now,” Jennifer Levi, senior director of transgender and queer rights at GLAD Law and one of Moe’s lawyers, said in a statement.

“For over ten years, prison officials have had the discretion to make individualized housing decisions to protect transgender women from severe violence in men’s facilities,” she said. “Corrections experts agree that case-by-case assessment is crucial for safety throughout the prison system and oppose any blanket rule that would overturn a policy that has been proven to work.”

The day after Trump signed the executive order, officials moved Moe into solitary confinement pending her transfer to a men’s facility. Her sex classification was changed from “female” to “male” on publicly available Bureau of Prisons records and officials were slated to end access to hormones she’s taken since her transition as a teenager.

Cutting off Moe’s hormone therapy would “trigger severe physical and psychological consequences,” the suit stated. “Without hormone therapy, her body will undergo significant and irreversible changes that will exacerbate her gender dysphoria, causing the kind of disabling depression, anxiety, lack of self-esteem, and suicidality that characterize untreated gender dysphoria.”

The suit said that Moe identified as a girl by the time she was in middle school and began medically transitioning when she was 15 years old. The day after Trump signed the executive order, Moe called her mother “frantic” and told her “through tears” that she was going to be transferred to a men’s prison because of the order, an affidavit from her mother stated.

“When your child is incarcerated, you worry about them,” Moe’s mother wrote. If she was “transferred to a men’s prison, my fears would multiply.”

Data from the Department of Justice indicates transgender prisoners are 10 times more likely to be sexually assaulted than straight prisoners.

Multiple court cases have found housing transgender women in men’s facilities and denying gender-related healthcare are violations of the Eight Amendment to the Constitution.

Roughly 1,500 federal prisoners are transgender women, according to the Bureau of Prisons, accounting for 15 percent of the total population of women in prison. 750 men identify as transgender out of about 144,000 male prisoners.

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