A federal judge has blocked the Trump administration from transferring more than a dozen transgender inmates, all biological males currently housed in women’s prisons across the country, back to men’s correctional facilities.
This week’s development in the closely watched case comes as female inmates from another high-profile lawsuit look to join the legal fight after they prevailed in cordoning off the men confined with them.
As the two judges overseeing the cases try to respect each other’s court orders, their differing decisions could lead to a circuit court clash attracting Supreme Court scrutiny.
Male prisoners secure pause on removal from female facilities
Judge Royce Lamberth, an appointee of former President Ronald Reagan, granted 14 biologically male plaintiffs, who identify as women, a preliminary injunction that temporarily prevents the Federal Bureau of Prisons from moving them to male-designated penitentiaries in accordance with President Donald Trump’s directive to separate federal prisons by biological sex.
The transgender litigants in Jane Doe v. Blanche were given temporary relief by Lamberth before, when they initially challenged their impending transfers in January 2025, but an appeals court later vacated those protections.
However, the appellate panel left open the possibility for the lower court to block the enforcement of BOP’s placement policy again, determining at the time that Lamberth simply did not weigh how each plaintiff would individually be harmed by biologically accurate housing assignments.
In May, GLAD Law and the National Center for LGBTQ Rights filed a new motion for continued protection on behalf of the 14 transgender complainants, this time asking Lamberth to particularize his findings. Lamberth did so over the weekend, granting the renewed relief request on Sunday and keeping the male prisoners where they are pending further litigation.
Female inmates on the offensive after winning protective order
Lamberth’s ruling comes as female inmates from a separate but related lawsuit, in which they recently won a separation order against the biological men imprisoned alongside them at a Texas women’s prison, move to intervene in the Doe case out of Washington, D.C.
Four female prisoners at Federal Medical Center-Carswell, a specialized women’s prison in Fort Worth, are seeking to be added as defendants to the Washington, D.C., case, arguing the federal government is not adequately representing the interests of incarcerated women.
“In this case, the Government has defended institutional discretion and Executive Branch policy,” said the intervention filing, submitted Friday. “But it has not developed the women’s constitutional theory, has not submitted declarations from any incarcerated women, and has not squarely argued that forcing women to share showers, toilets, changing areas, housing units, and common areas with biological males violates women’s bodily privacy and Eighth Amendment rights.”
In the women’s own civil rights case, Fleming v. Warden T. Rule, the court recognized that confining female inmates with biological men violates the women’s Eighth Amendment protections from cruel and unusual punishment, as well as their rights to bodily safety and privacy under the Fifth Amendment.
MORE FEMALE INMATES ALLEGE SEXUAL ABUSE IN TRANSGENDER SEPARATION CASE
Judge Sidney Fitzwater, also a Reagan appointee, granted the Fleming plaintiffs a first-of-its-kind protective order that sequesters the men at FMC Carswell away from the entire female prison population.
The landmark victory, handed down on June 2, protects women facilitywide for the first time since female prisoners started opposing the Obama-era transgender accommodations.
“Intervention will allow women themselves to be heard,” John Greil, one of the attorneys for the Fleming plaintiffs, told the Washington Examiner.
Greil said Lamberth granted the earlier injunction, in part, because government counsel failed to enter any evidence into the court record as to how the biologically male inmates harm women in prison.
“The defendants have not so much as alleged that the plaintiffs in this particular suit present any threat to the female inmates housed with them, or that this threat cannot be managed locally by prison staff,” Lamberth previously ruled.
The Fleming plaintiffs say Lamberth’s prior preliminary injunction rested heavily on the absence of articulated harms to the female inmates, which they say the federal government lawyers should have provided.
“In Texas and in D.C., government lawyers have refused to give voice to the women who suffer when biological males are placed in women’s prisons,” Greil said.
Government attorneys in Fleming, led by assistant U.S. attorney Brian Stoltz, attempted to dismiss the women’s complaint, opposed the preliminary injunction, and noted their objection when injunctive relief was issued.
TRUMP ADMINISTRATION TREADING CAREFULLY IN TRANSGENDER PRISON HOUSING CASES
Rhonda Fleming, lead plaintiff in the Texas case, told the Washington Examiner that Stoltz complained at a hearing last month that the separation arrangement would create a miniature “men’s prison” at FMC Carswell in violation of Lamberth’s restraint.
“If they all claim to be women, what is the big deal with them being in one area?” Fleming questioned. “These men want access to women, but not each other.”
Meanwhile, the Fleming co-plaintiffs documented specific incidents of sexual abuse and predatory behavior by the men at FMC Carswell, including detailed testimony from the women describing a pattern of stalking in the shower areas, voyeurism, sexual propositions, and threatening conduct. Many of the men are fully intact, while several were convicted of violent sex crimes against women and children.
The two cases, though filed in different jurisdictions, are directly tied. According to a government notice, four of the men housed at FMC Carswell — and therefore subject to the Fleming injunction — are also anonymous plaintiffs in the Doe case.
Lamberth instructed current parties, the Doe plaintiffs and government attorneys, to convene and propose a briefing timeline by June 17 for responses regarding whether the women’s motion to intervene should be allowed.
The two cases could collide despite judicial comity
Some legal observers suspect Fleming and Doe are on a collision course, despite the two Reagan-nominated judges intentionally structuring their orders so that they do not contravene each other.
Fitzwater’s order only moved the men to a segregated unit within FMC Carswell, rather than transfer them out of the facility altogether, as the women ultimately want.
Lamberth, in his decision, specified that the latest Doe injunction “merely enjoins” the government from sending the male plaintiffs to men’s prisons. It does not, Lamberth stated explicitly, require that the men share living quarters with the female inmates.
“Judge Lamberth carefully avoided directly contradicting Judge Fitzwater,” explained Elspeth Cypher, board president of the Women’s Liberation Front, a women’s advocacy organization.
Fleming said Fitzwater’s injunction essentially nullifies Lamberth’s by establishing a wing of the prison that completely closes off the men at FMC Carswell and simultaneously remedies the men’s fear of sexual violence claims. The men’s main argument centers on them facing the threat of rape, as “transgender women,” if they were relocated to men’s prisons.
“It is like Judge Lambreth’s order does not exist,” Fleming said. “And the men cannot complain that they are in danger.”
Lawyers for the Fleming plaintiffs argued ahead of Lamberth’s ruling that the men’s requested relief would undermine what the women already achieved in the Texas court: recognition that the female inmates are likely to succeed on the merits of their constitutional injury claims.
“Intervention is therefore necessary not only to protect their constitutional interests, but also to prevent this case from impairing relief already entered to protect those interests,” the women’s legal team wrote.
Cypher, a retired Massachusetts Supreme Court justice, said both cases will likely proceed to appeal and eventually end up with a circuit split, in which separate appellate courts reach different conclusions on the same issue.
Such conflicting opinions over sex-segregated prisons could then draw in the Supreme Court to settle the disagreement.