A federal appeals court has ruled against trans inmates, vacating the ruling of a lower district court and allowing the Bureau of Prisons to move ahead with plans to transfer incarcerated trans women to male prisons where they will face a greater risk of violence.

Trans inmates “already had a bullseye on their back — and the federal government knows it,” Jesse Lerner-Kinglake, communications director for Just Detention International, said last month when discussing the Trump administration’s planned policies. “The rates of sexual abuse facing the transgender community were astronomical before these new policies. It’s hard to imagine this already abysmal situation getting worse. And yet it will.”

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When Trump signed his “two sexes” executive order on January 20, 2025, one of the instructions it gave was to then-Attorney General Pam Bondi to have trans women housed in men’s prisons. That plan was temporarily blocked by a U.S. District Court Judge Royce Lamberth, barely two weeks after the order was signed.

In that ruling, Lamberth, a Ronald Reagan appointee, noted that the Bureau of Prisons (BOP) did not dispute that housing trans women in a “male penitentiary would substantially increase the likelihood of them experiencing this parade of harms,” and that the BOP in fact acknowledged those harms. Instead, the defendants claimed that the inmates should have gone through a four-step administrative process with the BOP before taking the matter to court.

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Judge Lamberth’s ruling agreed with the plaintiffs that housing trans women in male prisons would be so likely to expose them to a higher risk of harm and violence that it would meet the threshold for the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition against “cruel and unusual punishment.”

The United States Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit has now overturned Lamberth’s ruling, meaning that after a block being in place for more than a year, the BOP may soon begin the process of transferring trans women into male facilities. While the original filing named 18 plaintiffs, that number has dropped to 17 because, according to legal counsel, one plaintiff has since passed away.

In 2-1 their decision, the federal appeals court found that the plaintiffs did not provide enough evidence to reach the “cruel and unusual punishment” threshold. This was despite the court’s acknowledgment that there was “ample, uncontested evidence of plaintiffs’ characteristics that, according to plaintiffs, make them distinctively vulnerable to harm in men’s facilities.” That is, the trans inmates’ “facial reconstructive surgery, breast augmentation surgery, and vaginoplasty” make them targets for violence in a men’s prison.

Despite their decision, the two justices who voted in favor of the opinion seem to support the trans inmates being able to block their transfer in the future.

In her opinion, Chief Justice Cornelia Pillard wrote that the issue was that “the district court did not make findings that each of the plaintiffs would be subject to a ‘significantly elevated risk’ of harm in men’s facilities.” She went on to note that the federal court cannot conduct a fact-finding mission, as that’s the district court’s role.

Judge Pillard went on to say, “We accordingly remand to allow the district court to exercise its judgment whether to make the factual determinations needed to hold, as plaintiffs urge, that the distinctive characteristics of these individuals in particular render their transfer to men’s facilities unconstitutional under the Eighth Amendment.” This appears to not only allow the plaintiffs to refile the case with additional evidence to add to the record at the district level or for additional reasons, but also encourages them to do so.

One of the lawyers representing the trans inmates, Shannon Minter, legal director of the National Center for LGBTQ Rights (and recent Time 100 honoree), told The New York Times that he was “very encouraged” by the ruling. Minter went on to explain that they had a path forward: “We’re going to do exactly what the court directed us to do. Go back to the district court judge and ask him to put these individualized findings on the record in a ruling.”

The one dissenting judge on the decision was Senior Circuit Court Judge Raymond Randolph, a George W. Bush appointee. In his dissenting opinion, he argued that the plaintiff’s claims should be thrown out as they had not completed the full administrative process established with the Bureau of Prisons before filing, and questioned Judge Lamberth’s authority to block orders surrounding trans inmates.

Trans inmates’ access to gender-affirming care has similarly been threatened by Trump and his executive orders, with those threats blocked by Lamberth as well. However, it appears that the BOP is still attempting to wean trans inmates off hormones despite court orders.

Judge Pillard’s decision notes that the Bureau of Prisons has, in its defense, provided “no evidence in the record even suggesting that there is any sustainable way in which BOP’s grievance procedure could provide plaintiffs’ ‘some relief’ from the severe risks they claim they will face if housed in men’s prisons.”

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