The justices on Wednesday turned away the Justice Department's emergency request to enforce a Bureau of Prisons policy that ends surgeries, phases out hormone treatments and strips clothing and grooming accommodations from transgender inmates — leaving a lower court's block in place while the case continues.
The Supreme Court on Wednesday refused to let the Trump administration enforce its restrictions on gender-affirming care for transgender prisoners, denying an emergency request from the Justice Department in a brief, unsigned order. The decision leaves in place a ruling by U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth that blocked the policy nationwide. Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito noted that they would have granted the administration's request.
The policy grew out of President Donald Trump's day-one executive order recognising two unchangeable sexes and barring federal funds "for the purpose of conforming an inmate's appearance to that of the opposite sex." The Bureau of Prisons updated its policy in February 2026: surgeries are banned, hormone treatments are tapered off, and so-called social accommodations — clothing, makeup, wigs and hair-removal items matching an inmate's gender identity — are ended, while psychiatric and mental-health services continue.
The administration told the court the bureau acted to "prioritize mental-health treatment, while discontinuing medically disputed and unproven sex-rejecting interventions," and that it had "reasonably considered its prior experience" with the treatments, which officials said raised security and prison-administration concerns that outweighed their limited benefits.
"The Bureau of Prisons acted to prioritize mental-health treatment, while discontinuing medically disputed and unproven sex-rejecting interventions."
Three inmates in New Jersey, Florida and Minnesota sued on behalf of a class of transgender prisoners. Their lawyers say hormone treatment for inmates dates back to at least 1992, that roughly 1,000 inmates are receiving it, and that cutting it off would cause "immediate and catastrophic" harm, including depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts and self-harm. The ACLU argued the bureau could not point to a single security incident caused by the treatments in 30 years. Lamberth, a Reagan appointee, found the policy was likely drawn up unlawfully — "arbitrary and capricious," in his words — because the bureau "reverse engineered" it, and the D.C. Circuit declined to lift his order in September.
Wednesday's ruling is not the end of the case: the litigation continues, and the government can return to the Supreme Court later. But it continues a split pattern — the court's 6-3 conservative majority has sided with the administration in other transgender cases, including the military ban, passport rules, sports and state bans on care for young people, while here the emergency request failed. Lamberth, explaining why he intervened, set the terms both sides are still arguing under: "With this opinion, the court has no intention of wading into the culture war being waged against transgender individuals."