U.S. President Donald Trump gestures as he speaks with reporters before boarding the new Air Force One, a plane gifted by the Qatari government, at Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, U.S., July 1, 2026., REUTERSEvan Vucci
President Donald Trump and his administration have long targeted transgender people, to the point where the Republican executive faces political blowback when he is perceived as wavering on the point. Now a federal judge appointed by a different Republican president is blasting the Trump administration for prioritizing their anti-trans agenda over following court orders.
“The litigation follows an executive order issued by President Donald Trump shortly after taking office requiring transgender women inmates to be transferred to men’s prisons and barring federal prisons from providing gender-affirming treatment,” reported Bloomberg Laws' Suzanne Monyak on Wednesday. A group of transgender female inmates sued because, after a court order nullified parts of the executive order, the Trump administration moved the inmates to a segregated facility where they were deprived of the same rights granted to other prisoners.
“Senior Judge Royce Lamberth of the US District Court for the District of Columbia appeared frustrated by the government’s actions during a hearing Wednesday in a legal challenge to the Bureau of Prisons’ treatment of transgender women in its custody,” Monyak wrote. “Lamberth, a [President Ronald] Reagan appointee, last month blocked the federal government from transferring a group of transgender women to men’s prison facilities. But attorneys for the inmates later accused the government of violating the judge’s order by instead holding these individuals in a ‘quasi-solitary unit’ without the same work or recreational programming—and by sending others there too.”
Lamberth wrote that “you’re violating my order, aren’t you?” and suggested the refusal to simply follow the court’s directive was insubordinate “on its face.”
The Trump administration’s representative replied that the ruling merely stated that the inmates could not be transferred to a male prisons but added there’s “been no violation of your order whatsoever” because it did not require them to “be housed alongside cisgender female inmates or share common spaces.”
Lamberth responded that he might have used “poor words” but that it “never crossed” his mind that the government would respond by putting the transgender inmates somewhere where they had fewer privileges.
“His ruling came days after a separate court order by a Texas federal judge, who barred the government from housing any inmates at a federal prison in Fort Worth who are ‘biologically male, regardless of gender identity’ in the general population ‘where biological females are present or will be confined,’” Monyak reported. “The Bureau of Prisons then moved four of the transgender women involved in the Washington case, who were held in the Fort Worth prison, to a ‘restrictive, segregated unit’ with little to no access to recreation, work, or other programming, their attorneys said in a motion to enforce Lamberth’s June order.”
Monyak concluded, “The four women in this segregated unit have experienced declining mental health and gender dysphoria. The government is also moving to transfer all of the transgender inmates in the case, from other parts of the country, to this unit, the lawyers said.”