‘Alarming’: Legal analyst warns of Trump DOJ’s ‘all-encompassing’ Supreme Court gambit

The Trump administration’s latest Supreme Court request could have consequences far beyond the treatment of transgender people in federal prisons, legal journalist Chris Geidner warned Monday.

In a new analysis in his Law Dork blog, Geidner called the Justice Department’s position an “alarming, all-encompassing argument.” He warned that allowing it to go into effect could “upend the legal status of trans people everywhere.”

The immediate dispute is over a Bureau of Prisons policy that would end gender-affirming surgeries, generally discontinue hormone treatment, and remove certain accommodations for transgender prisoners. Solicitor General John Sauer asked the Supreme Court to pause a judge’s order blocking that policy while the administration appeals.

But the Trump DOJ’s official legal position goes much further than prison administration.

“Sauer is asking the Supreme Court to say that the federal government no longer believes that trans people are justified in being trans in either the medical or social ways that allow trans people to live their lives authentically,” Geidner wrote Monday.

The legal journalist said he had warned about the “extremism and importance of these arguments" when the DOJ first made them before U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth, who blocked the prison policy.

“While the case is over trans people in federal prisons, let there be no doubt,” Geidner concluded, “the Trump administration is seeking to use the presumptive unpopularity of this group — and lack of coverage that such cases garner — to advance extreme gender-restrictive policies that could apply to all trans people and, ultimately, to everyone.”

The Supreme Court has asked the prisoners’ lawyers to respond by Oct. 8.