Supreme Court rejects Trump's order to end hormone treatments for transgender prisoners

The Supreme Court on Wednesday refused to side with President Trump in a fight over medical care for transgender people in federal prisons. The court turned down Trump's appeal, which means his order to stop hormone treatments for transgender inmates will not go into effect. This was considered a rare win for transgender rights at the nation's highest court.

The case started when Trump signed an order telling federal prisons to stop providing hormone treatments and other gender-affirming care to transgender inmates. Gender-affirming care is medical treatment that helps people live as the gender they identify with. For many transgender people, this care includes hormone therapy, which is medicine that changes hormone levels in the body.

A federal judge named Royce Lamberth, who was appointed by President Reagan, blocked Trump's order from taking effect. Judge Lamberth said the Trump administration did not have strong enough evidence or good reasons to suddenly change a policy that had been in place for decades. He said the government was making an 'arbitrary,' or random and unfair, change to the rules.

Judge Lamberth pointed to a law called the Administrative Procedure Act. This law says the government cannot make sudden, unfair changes to federal rules without good reason. He also said the Bureau of Prisons, which runs federal prisons, was going against the advice of its own medical staff by stopping the treatments.

The American Civil Liberties Union, also known as the ACLU, brought the lawsuit on behalf of three inmates. Their lawyers told the court that since 1992, the Bureau of Prisons has treated people with a condition called gender dysphoria using hormone therapy. The ACLU argued that stopping treatment for nearly 1,000 inmates would cause serious harm.

Before reaching the Supreme Court, another court called the D.C. Circuit Court had already agreed with Judge Lamberth's decision by a vote of 2 to 1. That prompted the Trump administration to ask the Supreme Court to step in. The Supreme Court declined, meaning it chose not to take the case, without giving any explanation.

Two justices, Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito, disagreed with the court's choice and wanted to hear the case. However, they were outvoted by the other justices. The Trump administration had argued that prison officials should be trusted to make their own medical decisions for inmates. Even so, the majority of the court let the lower court's ruling stand, keeping the hormone treatments in place for now.