Before the start of the New Year, a preliminary injunction against a new Florida Department of Corrections (FDC) policy targeting transgender inmates was rejected by a federal judge in Florida’s Northern district.

The case in question, Keohane v. Dixon, amounts to emergency litigation, filed on October 24 by the ACLU of Florida, on behalf of Reiyn Keohane, a transgender woman in custody of the department who has been receiving treatment since 2016. The injunction also includes other transgender inmates, all being represented on the grounds that the new policy constitutes a violation of their Eighth Amendment right to medically necessary care.

The FDC bulletin with the policy change, titled “Mental Health Treatment of Inmates with Gender Dysphoria,” was introduced on September 30, 2024. The policy effectively strips transgender inmates of gender-affirming care along with amenities, such as clothing and grooming standards that align with their gender-identities. Mental health professionals, addressed in the fourth section of the document, are told to assert to patients that “no psychotherapeutic, medical, or surgical therapy can permanently eradicate all psychological and physical vestiges of one’s biological sex.”

In the document, gender dysphoria is framed as “short-term delusions or beliefs, which may later be changed and reversed.” In an attempt to back up this statement, the section uses the mention of “published and unpublished case histories” regarding cases where the subject in question has regretted undergoing hormone therapy. debilitating to the patients. The FDC bulletin also suggests psychotropic medications and psychotherapy as sufficient alternatives to medical transition, ignoring widely accepted medical guidelines.

In his 23-page decision, Judge Allen Winsor, a Trump appointee with a record of anti-LGBTQ+ rulings, threw out the request, arguing that the FDC’s policy does not constitute a blanket ban on hormone therapy, despite evidence showing the policy effectively forces the de-transition of hundreds of inmates.

In a press release lambasting the decision, Li Nowlin-Sohl, senior staff attorney at the ACLU’s LGBTQ+ HIV Project, pressed that “Florida officials are waging a baseless campaign to dehumanize and degrade incarcerated people like our client.”

“Allowing this policy to move forward threatens the basic human rights of transgender people in the state’s custody and the court’s order today affords the state’s policy more credulity than it deserves, when the clear intent of the state is to ban this health care outright.”

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