Transgender prisoners ask U.S. Supreme Court to stop Trump from taking their medical care

Attorneys representing transgender people in federal prisons urged the U.S. Supreme Court to preserve their access to gender-affirming care, including hormone therapy.In a 41-page brief filed October 8, attorney Li Nowlin-Sohl and other lawyers representing the prisoners argued that the justices should uphold an updated preliminary injunction issued this year by U.S. District Judge Royce C. Lamberth. The order followed an injunction issued last year and blocked the Bureau of Prisons from enforcing a policy implementing President Donald Trump’s executive order denying gender-affirming care to transgender people in federal prisons.Related: Trump just rolled out a cruel anti-trans prison policy doctors are calling ‘dangerous’“The district court issued a fact-bound, preliminary order based on its determination that BOP’s sudden reversal of its own longstanding policy of providing hormone therapy and social transition accommodations based on individual assessments of clinical need was arbitrary and capricious,” the attorneys wrote.The brief follows a request from the Trump administration last month to allow federal prisons to withdraw gender-affirming care from people in their custody. In an emergency application in the case Trump v. Kingdom, administration attorneys asked the court to allow enforcement of a policy that would deny hormone therapy for gender dysphoria and require prison medical providers to taper patients off the treatment.Those policies implement an executive order Trump issued on the first day of his second term. In addition to directing that transgender people be housed in prisons according to their sex assigned at birth rather than their gender identity, a matter being fought in separate court battles, the order directs federal officials to “ensure that no Federal funds are expended for any medical procedure, treatment, or drug for the purpose of conforming an inmate’s appearance to that of the opposite sex.”But the prisoners’ atto