Federal judges have now spent at least four months imposing restrictions on President Donald Trump’s “Make America Great Again” agenda, blocking the duly-elected executive from following through on his campaign promises, despite his best efforts.

While much attention has centered on the numerous universal injunctions and temporary restraining orders (TROs) halting deportations and immigration reform, district court judges have also taken aim at the president’s actions to curtail the transgender agenda. Judges have restricted the president’s orders on protecting children from harmful gender transition procedures, scrubbing gender ideology propaganda from federal health agencies, and keeping transgender-identifying biological men from being incarcerated in women’s prisons.

On Tuesday, yet another district court judge targeted the Trump administration’s efforts to uphold biological reality, ordering the administration to continue using taxpayer dollars to fund prisoners’ gender transition procedures. Judge Royce Lamberth of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia, who was appointed by Ronald Reagan, issued a preliminary injunction Tuesday demanding that the U.S. Bureau of Prisons (BOP) “restore and maintain access to” gender transition procedures — especially hormone drugs — for inmates in federal prisons who identify as transgender and were previously undergoing gender transition procedures.

In response to a day one executive order signed by the president prohibiting federal funds from being used for gender transition procedures, the BOP had “subsequently reduced or cut off” federal inmates’ access to gender transition procedures and related “social accommodations,” such as access to “chest binders” and men’s or women’s underwear, depending on how the inmate identifies.

Three transgender-identifying federal inmates subsequently filed a lawsuit under the Administrative Procedure Act (APA), seeking not only to “restore” their access to gender transition procedures and “social accommodations,” but also to certify a putative class, thus impeding the Trump administration’s orders across the whole of the BOP should the class be certified. Lamberth did just that. Previously, the Reagan-appointed judge had issued a TRO in a separate but related case, ordering the BOP to continue providing hormone drugs to transgender-identifying inmates. That TRO had an expiration date, however, which Lamberth’s preliminary injunction has now made semi-permanent, lasting until either stayed or vacated by an appellate court or until litigation in the case is concluded.

Lamberth’s order requires the BOP “to make social accommodations available to all class members to the same extent they were available prior to the issuance of the Executive Order, and to provide hormone therapy to all class members who have been prescribed hormone medications … to the same extent as before the issuance of the Executive Order.” He explained, “The import of this Opinion is essentially this: Under the APA, the BOP may not arbitrarily deprive inmates of medications or other lifestyle accommodations that its own medical staff have deemed to be medically appropriate without considering the implications of that decision.” The judge continued, “Even if the BOP did support such a decision with the consideration, study, and reasoning that the APA requires of it, its freedom of action may nevertheless be constrained by the Eighth Amendment of the Constitution…”

In comments to The Washington Stand, Hans Von Spakovsky, a senior legal fellow at the Heritage Foundation’s Edwin Meese III Center for Legal and Judicial Studies, stated, “This is a ridiculous, lawless decision by a senior judge who should have completely retired when he took senior status over a decade ago.” He explained, “Lamberth apparently believes that male prisoners who pretend they are women have a legal right to demand that the federal prison system provide them — at taxpayer expense — with women’s clothing, accessories, and hormones. Convicted criminals have no such constitutional right, and there is no such right under any federal statute, either.”

Von Spakovsky added, “This is an absurd example of an arrogant federal judge who thinks he can do anything he wants in a courtroom, going so far outside of his legal authority that it would make a good headline in ‘The Babylon Bee’ if it wasn’t a real case.”

Although Lamberth’s injunction is in response to an APA complaint, his reference to the Eighth Amendment seemingly indicates that he may consider the BOP’s policy shift on gender transition procedures to be outright unconstitutional. The Eighth Amendment prohibits “cruel and unusual punishments” and, according to the U.S. Supreme Court’s 1976 ruling in Estelle v. Gamble, denying prisoners access to “medically necessary” treatment qualifies as “cruel and unusual” punishment.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit determined in 2020’s Edmo v. Corizon that gender transition procedures are “medically necessary” and cannot therefore be denied to prisoners who identify as transgender, although the Supreme Court has not yet reached the same conclusion. Numerous studies, however, have demonstrated that gender transition procedures do not alleviate the risk of suicide or suicidal ideation — and, in fact, increase the risk — and further cause significant, lasting damage, including worsened mental health and irreversible sterility and infertility.

According to BOP data, less than 2,200 of the roughly 145,000 inmates currently incarcerated in federal prisons — that is, about 1.5% — identify as transgender. The majority (51%) of biologically male federal prisoners who identify as transgender are in prison for sex offenses, while the majority (over 55%) of biologically female federal prisoners who identify as transgender are in prison for drug offenses.