In part to the previous executive orders, the President has moved to end gender-related medical treatments for transgender persons in prison, as well as ordering federal prisons to house inmates according to their birth gender and not the gender, to which they currently align. This will mean that transgender women are forced to be housed in men's facilities and transgender men in women's facilities. The new executive order calls for those regulations to be amended “as necessary.”
The directive on prisoners also applies to immigration detainees and is among the more concrete parts of the Executive Order. President Trump set restrictions on housing and healthcare for transgender prisoners in his previous term, but under the new policy, this will be more far-reaching. Although relatively small, there are about 1,500 federal prisoners who are transgender women but they represent an outsize portion of federal inmates, especially among female prisoners: 15% of women in prison are transgender. There are 750 transgender men out of about 144,000 male prisoners.
"There will be rapes and physical assaults because of this policy," said Shannon Minter, legal director of the National Center for Lesbian Rights, which has represented transgender prisoners specifically. Transgender people make up less than 1 percent of adults in the United States, according to the Williams Institute, a research center at the University of California, Los Angeles, law school that studies the L.G.B.T.Q. population. However, it is unclear why the number is higher in federal prisons, but experts point to studies that show transgender people are more likely to attract attention from law enforcement. Federal data shows that transgender prisoners are 10 times as likely to report being sexually victimized as other prisoners.
This E.O. is a direct violation of constitutional rights, under the 8th Amendment: the right to protection from cruel and unusual punishment. "Constitutional protections do not stop if a person is in prison, jail, or immigration detention facilities,” said Richard Saenz, a lawyer at Lambda Legal, an L.G.B.T.Q. legal advocacy organization.
The Supreme Court acknowledged the vulnerability of transgender inmates decades ago in the 1994 decision Farmer v. Brennan. (source: N.Y.T)