A federal inmate sued the Trump administration on Sunday, challenging an executive order requiring the Bureau of Prisons to house transgender women in US prisons designated for men and stop providing prisoners with transitional medical treatments. gender.
Referred to by the pseudonym Maria Moe in court documents, the prisoner is described as a transgender woman who began transitioning in high school, began taking feminizing hormones at age 15, and was housed in a facility designated for women since who was detained in custody. . She is represented by two nonprofit legal advocacy groups, the National Lesbian Rights Center and GLBTQ advocates and advocates, and by a private law firm, Lowenstein Sandler.
The lawsuit, filed in federal court in Massachusetts, seeks a temporary restraining order to block the new regulations for all transgender prisoners.
It comes a week after President Trump ordered all government agencies to ensure that federally funded institutions recognize people as girls, boys, men or women based solely on their reproductive biology, rather than their gender identity.
The lawsuit challenges the regulations on procedural and constitutional grounds. The presentation alleges that the administration failed to comply with federal laws governing how such regulations must be adopted. And it argues that the order violates prisoners’ equal protection rights under the due process clause of the Fifth Amendment, as well as the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment.
A Justice Department spokesman declined to comment on the lawsuit.
Under regulations, the Department of Justice established in 2012, when the prison system determines where an inmate will be housed, the inmate must receive an individual evaluation to risk of sexual victimization That includes transgender status. The new executive order requires those regulations to be modified “as necessary.”
Supporters of 2012 regulations point to historic 1994 Supreme Court decision which recognized the vulnerability of transgender women in male prisons and Federal data showing that transgender prisoners are 10 times more likely than others to report being sexual victims. Critics have argued that allowing transgender women, whose birth certificates said they were male, to be housed in women’s prisons threatens the privacy and safety of other inmates.
Previous administrations have taken different approaches to those regulations. Under the Obama and Biden administrations, the Bureau of Prisons gave more weight to a Prisoner’s gender identity When deciding where to house them, compared to the previous Trump administration, which required primary consideration to be given to a prisoner’s sex at birth.
However, the new lawsuit argues that the blanket restriction in Mr. Trump’s new executive order is a departure from current policy that to implement it, the law would require the Justice Department to follow a process that involves announcing a proposed change and incorporating public response before moving forward.
The lawsuit says that on Jan. 21, Ms. Moe, who had no violent disciplinary history, was moved to a “special housing unit” and told she would be transferred to a men’s prison because of the executive order. On Jan. 23, Ms. Moe’s sex classification was still listed in publicly accessible jail records as “female,” her complaint says, but by Saturday the classification had been changed to “male.”
Both the transfer and the possibility that Ms. Moe will be denied access to hormones amount to punishment that violate the Eighth Amendment, the lawsuit argues. It goes on to allege that the provisions of the order that Ms. Moe is challenging were motivated by Animus toward transgender people, making them constitutionally suspect under Supreme Court precedents.
Shannon Minter, legal director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights, said the case was sealed shortly after Ms. Moe’s legal team filed it Sunday night. According to a mirror of the court record that is Available on CourtlistenerA nonprofit legal search engine, the case is assigned to U.S. District Judge George O’Toole Jr.
Shaila Dewan Contributed reports.
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