Trump just rolled out a cruel anti-trans prison policy doctors are calling 'dangerous'https://www.advocate.com/politics/national/trump-dangerous-transgender-hormone-policy 🔗Christopher Wiggins (10 March 2026)
The Trump administration has ordered federal prisons to begin tapering hormone therapy for incarcerated transgender people. Physicians say that it could inflict immediate psychological distress and long-term medical harm on a vulnerable population.
The guidance, issued February 19 by the Federal Bureau of Prisons, outlines how the federal prison system will treat incarcerated people diagnosed with gender dysphoria. It bars the agency from initiating hormone therapy for inmates who were not already receiving it and instructs clinicians to develop tapering plans that could ultimately discontinue treatment for prisoners who currently rely on hormones as part of their medical care.
To physicians who treat transgender patients, the directive reads less like clinical guidance than a political decision overriding established medical practice.
"From a medical point of view, this is alarming because it's essentially saying that a form of evidence-based care will no longer be provided to people under the purview of the Bureau of Prisons," Dr. Carl Streed, a Boston primary-care physician and one of the country's leading researchers on transgender health, told The Advocate in an interview. "That means the policy runs counter to best practices and arguably probably the law in terms of providing care to inmates because it's setting up a different standard for them versus the standard out in the community."
The policy follows a January 2025 executive order from President Donald Trump barring federal funds from being used for medical treatments intended to align a person's physical characteristics with a gender identity different from their sex assigned at birth.
