(LifeSiteNews) – U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth blocked the Trump administration from denying taxpayer funds to prison inmates for gender “transition” procedures, siding with the far-left American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU).
On his first day back in the White House this year, President Donald Trump signed an executive order establishing that “Federal funds shall not be used to promote gender ideology. Each agency shall assess grant conditions and grantee preferences and ensure grant funds do not promote gender ideology.” It also directed the heads of the Departments of Justice and Homeland Security to “ensure that males are not detained in women’s prisons or housed in women’s detention centers” under their jurisdiction.
But the Daily Wire reported that the ACLU sued on behalf of 1,000 inmates who stand to lose cross-sex clothes, hormones, and more under the order, and the judge agreed.
“In light of the plaintiffs’ largely personal motives for undergoing gender-affirming care, neither the BOP nor the Executive Order provides any serious explanation as to why the treatment modalities covered by the Executive Order or implementing memoranda should be handled differently than any other mental health intervention,” Lamberth wrote. “(N)othing in the thin record before the Court suggests that either the BOP or the President consciously took stock of — much less studied — the potentially debilitating effects that the new policies could have on transgender inmates before the implementing memoranda came into force.”
In response, the White House confirmed plans to appeal the ruling, saying it “fundamentally makes women less safe and ignores the biological truth that there are only two genders. The Trump administration looks forward to ultimate victory on this issue in court.”
In recent years, there has been growing concern around the world over placing men who claim to be women in female prison populations, which has proved to be a means of both securing lighter treatment during incarceration and gaining easy access to women to prey upon. Transgender status also has the potential to be exploited to avoid incarceration entirely in some cases, as seen in Wales when a man who identified as a woman received a suspended sentence keeping him out of prison despite physically assaulting two partners within days of each other on the grounds that he would be “vulnerable” behind bars.
In May 2023, investigative journalist James O’Keefe released an interview with U.S. Federal Bureau of Prisons psychologist Dr. Linda Noelle, who says “male and female prisoners “both play the victim card” to obtain gender “reassignment” surgeries at taxpayer expense. “And then they go through (the far-left American Civil Liberties Union), and then the ACLU sues the (U.S. Department of Justice)” when demands for subsidized transition procedures are initially rejected, Noelle told O’Keefe. “And the DOJ, unfortunately, under Merrick Garland, it rolls over. It doesn’t go through the courts, so they just pay people off.”
In California during the summer of 2023, biologically male triple murderer David “Dana Rivers” Wakefield began serving his life sentence in a women’s prison. The state has allowed biological males to be housed with female inmates since 2021, putting actual female inmates in serious danger, according to critics.
In May 2024, Hector Bravo Ferrel, a U.S. Army Iraq veteran who served the California Department of Corrections for 16 years, spoke out about his decision to resign in protest of leaders allowing male inmates to exploit “gender-affirming” policies. “They were like kids in the candy store, because they knew they were going from a men’s prison to a females’ prison,” he said.
