A federal inmate sued the Trump administration on Sunday, challenging an executive order that requires the Bureau of Prisons to house transgender women in U.S. prisons designated for men and to stop providing prisoners with gender-transition medical treatments.
Referred to by the pseudonym Maria Moe in court papers, the prisoner is described as a transgender woman who began transitioning in middle school, started taking feminizing hormones at age 15, and has been housed in a facility designated for women since she was taken into custody. She is represented by two nonprofit legal advocacy groups, the National Center for Lesbian Rights and G.L.B.T.Q. Advocates and Defenders, 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 both procedural and constitutional grounds. The filing 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’ rights of equal protection under the Fifth Amendment’s due process clause, as well as the Eighth Amendment’s prohibition of cruel and unusual punishment.
A spokesman for the Department of Justice declined to comment on the lawsuit.
Under regulations the Justice Department put in place in 2012, when the prison system determines where an inmate is to be housed, the inmate must be given an individual assessment for risk of sexual victimization that includes transgender status. The new executive order calls for those regulations to be amended “as necessary.”
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