Trump is Making Federal Prisons More Dangerous for Transgender Prisoners
by Michael Dean Thompson
The 2003 Prison Rape Elimination Act (PREA) requires prison officials to consider vulnerabilities such as LGBTQ+ status when making housing decisions precisely because LGBTQ+ prisoners are more likely to be victims of sexual violence. For incarcerated transgender prisoners, the threat of sexual violence is 13 times higher. At the time, the law passed Congress with a unanimous vote.
President Donald J. Trump (R), however, announced in December 2025 that his administration was defunding the National PREA Resource Center, thereby eliminating prison staff training, certification and other means of support to prevent sexual violence in prisons across the United States. That was followed by the Department of Justice (DOJ) issuing a program statement titled “Management of Inmates with Gender Dysphoria.” The new program outlines a “treatment plan” for the “mental health disorder” with the goal of progressing transgender prisoners toward “recovery.”
President Trump’s flurry of day-one executive’s orders (EO) included one that declared his administration would only recognize “two sexes.” The order also required that all transgender women be moved to men’s prisons, 99% of whom already were, and banned gender affirming care. And despite at least three successful court orders blocking the EO, a Bureau of Prisons (BOP) February 2025 memo states the agency’s compliance with the orders even as it acknowledges the nation-wide restraining order.
In June 2026, a D.C. federal court judge ordered the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) to return to providing hormone therapy and prohibited the relocation of transgender women. [See: PLN, July 2026, p.38.] Nevertheless, it appears that the BOP has refused to comply. Shannon Minter, the legal head for the National Center for LGBTQ Rights, told The Nation, “This administration has unlawfully thrown all that overboard and is busily trying to implement policies that they know are going to result in sexual violence against these vulnerable people—everyone knows that is going to happen.”
The BOP’s policy borrows heavily from 2024 policy in Florida that rolled back transgender rights, claiming that gender dysphoria originates from “unaddressed psychiatric issues and unaddressed childhood trauma” and declares they are “short-termed delusions or beliefs which may later be changed or reversed.”
A 400-page 2025 report on transgender youth from Trump’s Health and Human Services Department also provides fodder to the policy by promoting “exploratory therapy,” a euphemism for conversion therapy. The paper was widely criticized by clinicians, researchers, scholars, and scientists, as well as the American Academy of Pediatrics, as “bypassing medical expertise and scientific evidence.”
The BOP policy declares that treatment should include, at a minimum, therapy that has a goal of “reducing or eliminating the frequency and severity of symptoms and associated negative outcomes.” Furthermore, the treatment will end only when “it is determined by a medical professional that the inmate no longer meets the criteria for gender dysphoria.”
Mental health and medical associations across the U.S. support efforts to ban conversion therapy. It has been linked by the American Psychiatric Association and scholars at Stanford to “depression, anxiety, suicidal thoughts and behaviors, substance abuse, and posttraumatic stress.”
Likewise, the United Nations has labeled it as a form of torture and called for a global ban. Accordingly, among transgender and non-binary youth who were subjected to conversion therapy last year, three out of every five (60%) attempted suicide. Conversely, when given access to hormone treatments, transgender people are far less prone to psychological distress and suicidal ideation according to the Stanford study.
Minter told The Nation that this administration is operating “with very little, if any, respect for the rule of law. Or norms of basic decency. Or respect for human dignity and human rights. They are engaged in full-on, open scapegoating of many vulnerable minorities. Including transgender people.”
Source: The Nation
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