DOJ Reverses Policy Making Sex Change Surgery Protected Right for Inmates Under ADA

A ludicrous Biden administration policy making costly treatments—including sex reassignment surgery—a protected right for transgender prison inmates under the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) has been reversed by the Trump administration. Under Biden, American taxpayers were on the hook for experimental gender-affirming surgery, breast augmentation, facial-feminization, permanent hair removal and other procedures for jailed felons who claim to have gender dysphoria. In fact, the federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) even created a Transgender Executive Council and in 2022 agreed to provide gender-affirming surgery for the first federal inmate, a trans man incarcerated for a series of terrorist threats and an anthrax attack who sued the BOP after it repeatedly denied his request for the procedure. Under the agreement the BOP provided the trans man with vaginoplasty and other “medically necessary gender-affirming procedures.”

The Trump Department of Justice (DOJ) recently dismantled the outrageous transgender surgery policy for federal inmates and has been diligent in countering it for state prisoners as well. In two Georgia cases, the DOJ reversed support granted under Biden to provide inmates with sexual reassignment surgeries at state expense. “The prior administration portrayed such claims as necessary medical care for gender dysphoria under the ADA,” the DOJ writes in a statement that goes on to say it was based on guidelines that were politically motivated and based on junk science. The Biden administration had validated in a court filing a Georgia inmate’s assertion that treatment for gender dysphoria is a protected right under the ADA as well as the Eighth Amendment. “[T]he Eighth Amendment requires prison officials to provide incarcerated people with adequate medical care for serious medical conditions,” the Biden DOJ wrote in the filing. “It is well established that gender dysphoria is a serious medical condition. Prison officials demonstrate deliberate indifference to a substantial risk of serious harm—and thus violate the Eighth Amendment—when they categorically refuse to provide medically necessary gender-affirming surgery to an incarcerated individual with gender dysphoria.”

The recent DOJ court actions, both in Georgia, undo the Biden administration’s “abuse of the legal system that pushed an agenda driven by politics, not law,” according to the agency, which explains that it withdrew an incorrect statement of interest in one case and submitted a new statement of interest in a separate case brought by prisoners seeking the state to provide “dangerous, elective surgery as treatment of inmates’ gender dysphoria claims.” The new filings lay bare the Biden administration’s manipulation of supposed medical guidelines to try to create an inmate’s right to optional surgeries where no such entitlement exists, the DOJ confirms. “There has never been an Eighth Amendment right for inmates to demand elective and experimental surgeries, said Assistant Attorney General Harmeet K. Dhillon of the DOJ’s Civil Rights Division. “The prior administration’s nonsensical reading of the Americans with Disabilities Act was an affront to the very people the statute intended to protect.”

In one case a 45-year-old woman, Ronnie Fuller, sentenced to life for murder sued the state alleging Eighth Amendment violations for being denied access to a mastectomy. In 2017 she told a mental health counselor she had feelings of body hatred and depression and was eventually diagnosed with gender dysphoria. The murderer requested and was provided with hormone replacement therapy and later demanded a subcutaneous mastectomy, claiming emotional distress and mental anguish for “want of a preferred top surgery.” However, gender dysphoria is not a disability under the ADA, the DOJ confirms in its recent statement of interest to the court. “The ADA specifically excludes from its definition of “disability” “transvestism, transsexualism, pedophilia, exhibitionism, voyeurism, gender identity disorders not resulting from physical impairments, or other sexual behavior disorders,” the federal court document states. In the other case supported by the Biden administration, a man incarcerated for decades for an unidentified crime sued the state to fund his sex-change surgery to become a woman. “The United States has since disavowed the scientific theories” of World Professional Association for Transgender Health, a key source used in the Biden administration court document supporting the trans inmate, according to the DOJ reversal under Trump. The legal document also states that the previous administration “wrongly asserted that gender dysphoria necessitated elective care to abate risk of suicide.”

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