A federal appeals court on Friday allowed for the biologically accurate placement of transgender prisoners in accordance with President Donald Trump’s directive on housing inmates by biological sex, a ruling that incarcerated women hope will help their lawsuits aimed at moving biological males out of women’s prisons across the country.
Trump, upon taking office, issued an executive order directing the Federal Bureau of Prisons to undo a Biden-era transgender accommodation policy that placed biological males who identified as female in women-only facilities.
Seventeen transgender inmates, all biological males, then anonymously sued the Trump administration to prevent their transfer from women’s prisons. They won preliminary injunctions in district courts, which have blocked their transfers since February 2025.
Last week, a three-judge appellate panel vacated the injunctive relief, finding that the transgender litigants in Jane Doe v. Todd Blanche failed to prove that reassigning them to male-designated units would constitute “cruel and unusual punishment” in violation of their Eighth Amendment rights.
In a 27-page majority opinion, two of the judges, both nominees of former President Barack Obama, found that such a claim has to be supported by specific findings that the plaintiffs would be particularly exposed to “violence, abuse, and psychiatric harm” while housed at men’s facilities.
“The existing record does not include findings of fact about the individual plaintiffs’ vulnerabilities,” the majority wrote.
Their ruling, however, left open the possibility that the transfers could be blocked again if supporting facts were presented to the court.
“The record indeed contains ample, uncontested evidence of plaintiffs’ characteristics that, according to plaintiffs, make them distinctively vulnerable to harm in men’s facilities,” the judges ruled, citing one co-plaintiff’s vaginoplasty and another litigant’s previous suicide attempt at a men’s prison.
Judge Raymond Randolph, a nominee of President George H.W. Bush, dissented on the grounds that the plaintiffs’ claims should be thrown out because of a federal law requiring that they first exhaust their administrative remedies within the BOP before seeking civil action.
Randolph also questioned whether Judge Royce Lamberth, the Ronald Reagan-nominated district court judge who granted the injunctions, had the authority to do so in the first place. Although they were temporary restrictions, Lamberth’s restraining orders obstructed the transfers for more than a year, structuring them so that it appeared that the BOP was categorically forbidden from removing any biological male residing at a women’s correctional center as the case proceeded.
However, the plaintiffs represent a very small subset, roughly 1%, of the total transgender prison population currently incarcerated in the federal prison system. A vast majority of the 1,800 or so transgender inmates in BOP custody went back to their appropriate sex-specific facilities without pursuing a legal complaint following Trump’s policy change.
Immediate transfers on hold
The judicial panel gave the group of transgender plaintiffs seven days to file for en banc review, a rehearing by the full U.S. Circuit Court for the District of Columbia, before their transfers can be facilitated.
Because the case is not outright dismissed but rather sent back to the lower court, the litigants also have the option of asking Lamberth to intervene again, making sure this time to spell out his reasoning plaintiff by plaintiff.
According to the panel, Lamberth “did not identify characteristics of each individual, such as effects of sex reassignment medical treatment or prior experience of assault or self-harm in men’s prisons, and make a corresponding finding that the plaintiff therefore likely faces a risk of harm rising to the level of an Eighth Amendment violation.”
Lamberth, instead, generally ruled that plaintiffs were “at a significantly elevated risk of physical and sexual violence relative to other inmates when housed in a facility corresponding to their biological sex.”
One of the lawyers representing the transgender litigants indicated that they will prompt Lamberth to particularize his findings for each prisoner.
“We’re going to do exactly what the court directed us to do,” Shannon Minter, legal director of the National Center for LGBTQ Rights, told the New York Times. “Go back to the district court judge and ask him to put these individualized findings on the record in a ruling.”
Randolph, the lone dissenting judge, argued against sending the case back to Lamberth, saying that the Prison Litigation Reform Act “compels an end to these consolidated cases, not a remand that encourages the district court to repackage relief under alternative theories.”
The panel assessed Lamberth’s decision procedurally in its ruling, criticizing the district court for citing insufficient evidence rather than ruling substantively on the case’s merits.
Randolph suggested that his colleagues want the district court to correct its findings so they can uphold a more permanent and sound block of Trump’s executive order.
Notably, Lamberth only ruled on the plaintiffs’ “cruel and unusual punishment” claim despite the transgender prisoners arguing that Trump’s executive order violated a slew of civil rights protections, including due process and equal protection under the Fifth Amendment, as well as disability accommodations pursuant to the Rehabilitation Act.
Transfers in the interim
In a statement to the Washington Examiner, a Justice Department spokesperson called Friday’s decision “a win for common sense and biology.”
“The D.C. Circuit correctly held that the district court erred in preventing the Bureau of Prisons from housing inmates according to their biological sex,” the DOJ spokesperson said. “Under President Trump and Acting Attorney General Blanche’s leadership, this Department will continue to take all steps to push back against gender ideology extremism.”
Regarding imminent transfers, the spokesperson added that the administration will evaluate “all options in light of this ruling.”
The order, once finalized pending a possible full-court review, does not prohibit the federal government from transferring the plaintiffs while the district court reconsiders the case.
The BOP is free, in the interim, to move the 17 transgender inmates who filed the lawsuit.
Some plaintiffs, seeing the setback as a signal that they will fail to prevail in the long run, might voluntarily return to their original facilities, removing themselves from the case and abandoning the legal challenge altogether.
Impact on other lawsuits brought by incarcerated women
The ruling in Doe v. Blanche may affect a separate transgender prison housing case out of Texas.
Several incarcerated women at Federal Medical Center-Carswell, a special needs women’s prison in Fort Worth, joined a civil rights complaint alleging sexual abuse by the biological males housed alongside them.
In February, the parties agreed to a permanent injunction forbidding the warden of FMC Carswell from placing male inmates who identify as female in the same prison wing as the plaintiffs. The ruling, however, simply ordered federal officials to move the transgender prisoners away from the plaintiffs’ living quarters, not out of the facility entirely.
Lead plaintiff Rhonda Fleming told the Washington Examiner that she is hopeful that the judge overseeing her case will feel free to rule more expansively after the appellate court’s decision in Blanche.
“While the battle is not over, this victory gives Judge Sidney Fitzwater the room he needs to do all he wants to do in Fleming v. Warden T. Rule,” Fleming said. “Right now, the men have no protection.”
Fitzwater, a Reagan nominee, hinted he was treading carefully with his ruling because of the injunctions in Blanche, which some legal observers interpreted as a nationwide restraint.
In a partial final judgment, Fitzwater signified that he was being careful not to overstep his authority before Blanche was adjudicated.
“Nothing in this Order requires or authorizes action that would contravene any existing, valid federal court order,” Fitzwater wrote.
Fleming noted that Lamberth will have to hear additional testimony before he can grant another injunction.
“My hope is that the government will call on me and other women to testify,” she said. “Let women who have suffered be heard. The other side of the story needs to be part of the record.”
While Doe v. Blanche applies to federal facilities, not state prisons, which have different housing policies depending on jurisdiction, women’s rights leaders involved in similar litigation say its implications are far-reaching and that Friday’s majority opinion marks a turning point in the long-litigated issue of sex-segregated prisons.
Many Democrat-led states have anti-discrimination laws that house inmates on the basis of their “gender identity,” regardless of biological reality.
California, for instance, enforces its Transgender Respect, Agency, and Dignity Act, a law allowing biological males, including fully intact sex offenders, to be housed with women at prisons run by the state.
Feminist opponents of the law argued that California’s transgender placement practices unconstitutionally create an unsafe environment for women confined in the most vulnerable of settings by subjecting them to substantial risk of sexual violence and severe psychological distress.
Elspeth Cypher, president of the Women’s Liberation Front, which challenged the California statute on behalf of six female state inmates in Chandler v. Macomber, said biologically male complainants who have historically enjoyed “a leg up” in the legal fight will now be on even footing with their female counterparts.
“The narrative that the trans-identified male will be at risk for sexual assault and his very life is one that has been generally accepted everywhere, it seems,” Cypher told the Washington Examiner.
Cypher, a retired Massachusetts Supreme Court justice, said biologically male inmates who identify as female typically only have to submit their own affidavits to the court declaring that they feel at risk in men’s facilities for the judiciary to accept the claims at face value.
“This case,” Cypher said of Blanche, “puts the burden back on the men to prove that they will face so much harm that it will violate the Eighth Amendment bar on cruel and unusual punishment.”
She noted the nearly 2,000 biological males who identify as female in federal male facilities, who are apparently content with where they are.
“That makes the individualized showing of harm important,” Cypher said. “We would expect to hear stories from them about any problems. It appears that the lawyers for Doe, et al. understand that some men want to be in the men’s prisons because they did not argue at the appellate level that the mere placement of a trans-identifying male in a men’s prison would violate the Eighth Amendment.”
LAWFARE TARGETING TRUMP’S GENDER ORDER THREATENS PROTECTED STATUS FOR WOMEN
In Chandler, a federal judge struck down WoLF’s complaint in March, saying the female plaintiffs must prove individualized injuries.
“At least the men have to meet that same standard,” Cypher said. “My hope for this case is that it changes the narrative and that people can finally allow themselves to have some compassion for the women who are being watched by men while they shower, sexually assaulted, and raped in a place they cannot leave.”