By Andrew Chung
Sept 28 (Reuters) - President Donald Trump's administration asked the US Supreme Court on Monday to let it enforce a policy restricting gender-affirming care for transgender inmates in federal prisons, part of his crackdown on the rights of transgender people.
The Justice Department filed an emergency request asking the court to lift Washington, D.C.-based US District Judge Royce Lamberth's order blocking the Federal Bureau of Prisons from enforcing the policy, while a legal challenge
to the measure plays out.
The policy, issued in February, prohibits medical and surgical treatments as well as any "social accommodations" including items that could be used to alter a person's appearance to align with their gender identity. The policy would still allow for psychiatric services to be provided.
The new restrictions would reverse prior procedures, which allowed inmates with gender dysphoria to receive gender-affirming treatments when clinically indicated.
Gender dysphoria is a term for the clinical diagnosis of significant distress that can result from an incongruence between a person's gender identity and sex at birth.
Trump has taken a hard line on transgender rights since returning to office in January 2025.
He issued an executive order on his first day back in office recognizing only two genders — male and female — and casting transgender identity as a lie. The directive ordered changes across numerous federal agencies, including requiring the Bureau of Prisons to revise its policies and halt funding for gender-affirming treatments.
The Supreme Court, which has a 6-3 conservative majority, has ruled repeatedly against transgender rights since last year.
It has backed state laws banning transgender athletes from participating on female sports teams at public schools including universities. It also has allowed the administration to ban transgender people from the military and bar passport applicants from designating their gender identities for the document. And it let states ban gender-affirming medical care for transgender youths.
Three transgender inmates incarcerated at federal correctional institutions in New Jersey, Florida and Minnesota filed a class action lawsuit challenging the restrictions. Lamberth blocked those restrictions in June.
The judge deemed the policy likely "arbitrary and capricious" in violation of a federal law governing agency procedures, finding that the Bureau of Prisons disregarded its own evidence and experience and "reverse engineered" the measure in order to implement Trump's executive order.
"With this opinion, the court has no intention of wading into the culture war being waged against transgender individuals," Lamberth wrote.
The US Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit refused the administration's request to lift Lamberth's ruling on September 18.
The Justice Department in its filing urged the Supreme Court to allow the Bureau of Prisons to enforce its "decision to prioritize mental-health treatment, while discontinuing medically disputed and unproven sex-rejecting interventions."
The Bureau of Prisons, the filing said, "reasonably considered its prior experience both in determining that such interventions are not medically necessary and in determining that security and prison-administration concerns independently justified a change in policy."
(Reporting by Andrew Chung in New York; Editing by Will Dunham)
