On February 19, 2026, the Federal Bureau of Prisons issued a new policy on the “Management of Inmates with Gender Dysphoria.” The title sounds clinical. The reality is brutal: the federal government has now officially placed itself in the business of punishing transgender people for being who they are — by withdrawing their medical care, confiscating their personal belongings, and subjecting them to forced psychological treatment. It is, in every meaningful sense, a blueprint for a government-run conversion therapy program — one targeting thousands of incarcerated people who have nowhere to turn.
NCLR condemns this policy in the strongest possible terms. For now, a federal court order is blocking its enforcement — and we are committed to ensuring it stays that way. But the policy itself is a declaration of intent, and we are calling on everyone — not just those who are transgender, not just those who have loved ones in prison — to recognize what it represents and to oppose it.
What the Policy Actually Does
The BOP policy does three things that, taken together, constitute a systematic program of forced psychological coercion.
First, it categorically bans hormone therapy for any transgender inmate not already receiving it. For those who are receiving it, the policy mandates a forced tapering and discontinuation — a medically and psychologically dangerous process that deprives people of care they may have received for years or even decades. The policy’s stated goal is eventual cessation in virtually all cases. There is no medical justification for this. Hormone therapy for gender dysphoria is established, evidence-based care endorsed by every major medical and psychiatric organization in the United States.
Second, the policy strips transgender inmates of social accommodations — the items, including clothing and personal care products, that allow them to live as who they are. Under the new policy, the BOP will not only stop providing these items but will “remove or confiscate” them from people who already have them. For a transgender person, these items are not accessories — they are the difference between basic dignity and daily humiliation. Confiscating them is not treatment. It is punishment.
Third — and this is where the conversion therapy framework becomes unmistakable — the policy substitutes psychotherapy specifically directed at reducing gender dysphoria symptoms, combined with psychotropic medication, for the evidence-based care that was previously available. The policy instructs clinicians to treat being transgender as a mental disorder to be “cured” through conversion therapy, contrary to decades of medical research and practice.
A Court Order Is Currently Blocking Enforcement — But the Threat Is Real
The BOP did not issue this policy in a legal vacuum. On June 3, 2025, the United States District Court for the District of Columbia issued a preliminary injunction in Kingdom v. Trump, Case No. 25-cv-691 (D.D.C.), requiring the BOP to continue providing hormone therapy and social accommodations to transgender inmates under the policy that existed before the administration’s January 2025 executive order. That injunction remains in force.
The BOP’s own General Counsel acknowledged the injunction in the memorandum accompanying the new policy, instructing prison officials that the BOP “remains obligated to comply” with it even as it issues this new policy. That acknowledgment is notable: the BOP is formalizing a policy that a federal court has already found to be unlawful, with the clear intent of enforcing it at the first opportunity.
The administration is actively seeking to overturn the preliminary injunction in Kingdom and to enforce this policy. If and when it succeeds, the harm will be immediate and severe. Thousands of people currently receiving hormone therapy could be subjected to forced tapering and discontinuation. Every transgender inmate’s personal items could be confiscated. The coercive therapy framework would become the official policy in every federal prison in the country. The injunction buys time — it does not resolve the threat.
This Is Conversion Therapy. Full Stop.
NCLR has been fighting conversion therapy since 1993. We launched Born Perfect to end these practices, and we have seen this playbook before. Conversion therapy is not defined by the use of any particular technique. It is defined by its goal: to punish and pressure a person into suppressing their sexual orientation or transgender status.
The BOP policy meets that definition exactly. It punitively withdraws medical care. It subjects people to therapy designed to force them to suppress and deny who they are. It uses psychotropic medication as a coercive tool in that process. And it forces people to wear clothing and conform to grooming standards that contradict who they are while they are imprisoned and cannot leave.
A person in a free-world clinical setting can walk out. A person in federal prison cannot. The coercive power of the state is at its maximum inside a prison cell, and the BOP is deploying that power against some of the most vulnerable people in the country.
Part of a Catastrophic Pattern
The BOP policy did not emerge from nowhere. It is one piece of a coordinated, comprehensive federal campaign to eliminate healthcare for transgender people.
The administration has purged transgender service members from the military and stripped their healthcare. It has eliminated healthcare for transgender federal employees. Proposed HHS rules would cut Medicaid and Medicare funding to hospitals and providers that offer healthcare to transgender youth — effectively ending this care by bankrupting anyone who provides it.
The chilling effect of this environment is already causing providers to end care for transgender adults even without any law requiring them to do so: Vanderbilt University Medical Center recently announced it will no longer offer surgical care to transgender adults, and community health clinics that serve low-income patients are quietly ending hormone therapy for transgender adults, citing fear of federal retaliation. Subpoenas have been issued to healthcare institutions for transgender patient data. And the FBI has run public tip campaigns inviting people to report providers of transgender healthcare.
What we are witnessing is the systematic dismantling of every pathway through which transgender people access medically necessary care — in prisons, in the military, in federal healthcare programs, and increasingly in the private sector. The BOP policy is the most visible and perhaps the most naked expression of this agenda, but it is not an isolated act. It is a test — a test of whether the courts will stop it, whether the public will demand accountability, and whether people with power to protect transgender lives will use it.
Why Everyone Should Care
If you are not transgender and do not have a transgender loved one in federal prison, it might be easy to experience this as someone else’s emergency. It is not.
The government’s authority to impose psychological coercion on incarcerated people, to withhold medical care in order to punish someone for who they are, and to forcibly confiscate personal items to strip a person of their dignity does not stop at the transgender community. The same legal framework that permits the BOP to do this to transgender prisoners can be deployed against anyone the state decides is a suitable target. The power being claimed here — that the government can use its custody of a person to punish them for who they are — is a power without principled limits.
This is also an Eighth Amendment case. The Eighth Amendment prohibits cruel and unusual punishment. For thirty years, courts have recognized that denying medically necessary care to prisoners constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. If the government can redefine what counts as “medically necessary” based solely on the political preferences of whoever is in power — stripping courts of the ability to independently evaluate that question — then the Eighth Amendment’s protection of every prisoner is weakened. That affects the 2.3 million people incarcerated in the United States, most of whom are not transgender.
Beyond the constitutional stakes: this policy is medically dangerous. Abrupt discontinuation of hormone therapy can cause serious physiological and psychological harm. The policy’s own text acknowledges this, which is why it includes provisions for “tapering” in some cases — but the framework is designed around cessation, not care. If this policy is enforced, people will be harmed. Some of those harms will be irreversible. And the institution proposing to do this is a federal agency with custody over human beings.
If you believe that government power over imprisoned people should have limits — that the state should not be in the business of forcing people to be someone they are not through the systematic withdrawal of medical care and coercive “therapy” — then this policy should alarm you regardless of how you feel about any other aspect of this debate.
What NCLR Is Doing
NCLR is closely monitoring compliance with the preliminary injunction in Kingdom v. Trump and working with our partners to ensure that transgender inmates receive the protections the court has ordered. We are representing transgender prisoners in a companion case challenging this administration’s attempt to force transgender women to be exposed to rape and sexual assault in male prisons. And we are working to make sure that every person in BOP custody who is affected by this policy knows their rights.
We will also keep the public informed. The BOP issued this policy and hoped it would pass quietly into the bureaucratic record. It will not. Every provision of this policy — the denial of necessary medical care, the confiscation of personal items, the coercive “therapy” regime — is a federal constitutional violation. This policy was issued in the dark. We will litigate it in the light — and we will win.
Shannon Minter is the Legal Director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights (NCLR). He has litigated on behalf of LGBTQ+ rights for more than thirty years.
