Supreme Court Keeps Taxpayers Funding Hormones, Wigs and Makeup for Transgender Inmates. Only Thomas and Alito Sided With Trump.

The Supreme Court on Wednesday refused to let President Trump's Bureau of Prisons stop providing hormone treatments, transition surgeries and items like wigs and makeup to transgender inmates in federal prisons. In a one-line, unsigned order, the justices turned down the administration's emergency request to lift a lower court's block on the policy, the New York Post reported. Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito were the only two who said they would have sided with the administration.

The order gave no reasoning. It is not a final ruling on the merits, and the case keeps moving through the lower courts, Just the News reported. But for now, about 1,000 transgender inmates in federal custody stay on the treatments the administration tried to end, NBC News reported.

What Trump tried to stop

On his first day back in office, Trump signed an executive order directing the attorney general to "ensure that no Federal funds are expended for any medical procedure, treatment, or drug for the purpose of conforming an inmate's appearance to that of the opposite sex," SCOTUSblog reported.

The Bureau of Prisons followed in February with a written policy. It ends transition surgeries and new hormone therapy for inmates with gender dysphoria, puts inmates already on hormones on a plan to taper off, and stops handing out "social accommodations" such as breast padding, binders, wigs and makeup, CBS News reported. Inmates still get a full mental health evaluation and individual treatment, the policy itself states, and mental health care remains available, the Washington Examiner reported.

Put simply, the government wanted prisons to treat the mental health condition, not pay to make inmates look like the opposite sex. Think of a prison doctor told to treat the patient's depression and anxiety, but not to stock the infirmary with makeup kits.

The government's case

The bureau did not just point to the executive order. It said it adopted the policy "independently of" that order and backed it with an extensive record and a 43-page memo citing "the latest scientific information," SCOTUSblog reported. Its old rules leaned on the World Professional Association for Transgender Health, whose standards prison officials had deemed "unreliable" and "unpersuasive."

Security was the other pillar. The bureau warned that offering procedures like transition surgery could expose transgender inmates to "attacks," "raise fairness concerns" and "breed resentment among other inmates," SCOTUSblog reported. The administration told the justices the policy is needed to "maintain institutional security," according to CBS News.

Solicitor General D. John Sauer, the administration's top lawyer at the Supreme Court, said the trial judge had "radically" departed "from the significant deference that BOP is due," the Washington Examiner reported. "Without meaningfully engaging with either BOP's reasoning or the administrative record, the district court prohibited BOP from applying its 2026 policy to any inmate who is or will be diagnosed with gender dysphoria," he wrote. He also accused the court of "substituting its own policy judgment for that of the agency" and of faulting the bureau for following the president's directions, NBC News reported.

How the policy got frozen

Three transgender inmates, Alishea Kingdom, Jas Kapule and Solo Nichols, sued with the backing of the ACLU, NBC News reported. Senior U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth in Washington blocked the February policy in June, calling it a "near total ban," Bloomberg Law reported. He ordered the bureau to keep providing the treatments and accommodations to a whole class of inmates, and renewed that order in August.

A divided appeals court panel in Washington refused 2-1 to lift his order in September, CBS News reported. Sauer went to the Supreme Court on Sept. 28, and the justices sat on the request for nearly a month before Wednesday's one-sentence denial, SCOTUSblog noted. The case is Trump v. Kingdom, docket No. 26A416.

A break from the Court's recent record

Wednesday's order cuts against the direction the Court has been heading. In June, the justices upheld state laws keeping males out of women's and girls' sports. A year earlier, they backed state bans on transition treatments for minors, and they have let Trump enforce his ban on transgender troops in the military, NBC News reported. Trump has won most of his emergency requests at the high court since returning to the White House, the Post noted.

The case is not over. It will keep working its way through the lower courts and could return to the Supreme Court on its regular docket, the Washington Examiner reported. Until then, federal prisons have to keep supplying hormones, wigs and makeup on the public's dime, and only two justices were willing to say that the people running those prisons, not a judge, should decide.