Appeals Court Clears Way to Transfer Trans Women to Men's Prisons

A federal appeals court on Monday cleared the way for the Trump administration to transfer incarcerated transgender women out of women’s prisons and into men’s facilities, vacating a preliminary injunction that had kept the policy on hold for more than a year.

The 2-1 decision from the U.S. Court of Appeals for the D.C. Circuit is one of the most significant rulings to date on Executive Order 14168, the order Trump signed on his first day in office directing the federal government to recognise only two sexes, assigned at birth, across every agency — including the Bureau of Prisons.

What the court decided

Chief Judge Sri Srinivasan and Judge Cornelia Pillard formed the majority; Judge Raymond Randolph dissented. The panel held that the plaintiffs — 18 incarcerated trans women who sued the Bureau of Prisons last year — had not shown they were likely to succeed on their Eighth Amendment claim that transferring them to men’s facilities would constitute cruel and unusual punishment.

That finding, the court said, was enough to vacate the preliminary injunction that U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth issued in February 2025. The case now returns to Lamberth’s courtroom for further fact-finding on the specific risks faced by each individual plaintiff.

Crucially, the ruling does not end the case. It shifts the legal posture from a class-wide freeze on transfers to an individualised inquiry: each of the 18 plaintiffs can still argue that her own transfer would expose her to a substantial risk of serious harm. But it removes the blanket protection that has kept them in women’s facilities while the litigation proceeds, and it signals to lower courts how the D.C. Circuit views the underlying constitutional claims.

What the evidence actually shows

The Eighth Amendment analysis is not abstract. The factual record in the case — some of which the majority acknowledged and much of which the dissent cited at length — documents what happens when trans women are housed with men.

A 2007 University of California study, still the most cited in the field, found that trans women in men’s facilities are sexually assaulted at rates roughly 13 times higher than the general male population. The Bureau of Prisons’ own reporting to Congress under the Prison Rape Elimination Act has consistently identified trans inmates as one of the most frequently victimised groups in federal custody. Advocacy organisations that work directly with incarcerated trans people — including Just Detention International and the Transgender Law Center — describe placement in a men’s facility, without meaningful protective custody, as near-certain victimisation.

“These women already had a bullseye on their back,” Jesse Lerner-Kinglake of Just Detention International said in response to the ruling. “The federal government knows it.”

The majority’s answer to that record is essentially procedural: individualised harm must be shown in individualised hearings. The dissent argued that the record already established a pattern severe enough to sustain the injunction, and that forcing each plaintiff to litigate her own safety — after she has already been transferred — upends the basic logic of a preliminary injunction.

The broader policy

Executive Order 14168, signed on 20 January 2025, directed federal agencies to define sex “as either male or female” based on reproductive biology at conception and to apply that definition in “all contexts.” For the Bureau of Prisons, the practical consequence was a policy change requiring trans women to be housed according to their sex assigned at birth, regardless of how long they had lived as women, what medical care they had received, or what previous BOP placements had concluded about their safety.

The BOP began implementing transfers within weeks of the order. Lamberth’s February 2025 injunction paused the policy as to the 18 plaintiffs in this case and, by extension, cooled the administration’s willingness to move more broadly. Monday’s ruling removes that brake.

The administration has not said publicly how quickly it intends to restart transfers. Attorneys for the plaintiffs said they would seek emergency individual hearings for any client who receives a transfer notice.

What comes next

The case returns to Judge Lamberth for the fact-finding the D.C. Circuit said is missing. Lamberth, a Reagan appointee, was the judge who issued the original injunction and has shown little patience for the administration’s procedural arguments in the past. Advocates believe he will move aggressively to schedule individual hearings.

A parallel challenge to the underlying executive order, rather than just the prison policy, remains pending in the same court. And the Supreme Court has not yet weighed in on any of the trans-rights executive orders from the second Trump administration — a silence that will not last forever.

For the 18 plaintiffs, and for the estimated several hundred trans women currently in federal women’s facilities, Monday’s ruling is not the end of the fight. But it is a reminder of what the current federal judiciary is willing to do when presented with evidence of foreseeable harm to trans people: require them to wait until the harm has already happened before the court will act.