My goodness - Transgender Inmate’s Hormone Treatment Lawsuit Gets Justice Dept. Backing

From The New York Times:

WASHINGTON — The Justice Department put the nation’s prisons and jails on notice on Friday that it regarded blanket policies prohibiting new hormone treatment for transgender inmates to be unconstitutional.

 

In court documents, the Justice Department backed a lawsuit brought by a prison inmate who says the state of Georgia illegally cut off the hormone treatment that she had been taking for 17 years.

 

It is believed to be the first time that the Justice Department has weighed in on the question of whether hormone therapy for transgender inmates is necessary medical care that states are required to provide. Though the Justice Department did not explicitly say the prison should provide the hormones, it argued that Georgia’s treatment policy and those like it were unconstitutional.

 

The guidelines, known as “freeze frame” policies, allow inmates to continue any treatment they were receiving before their arrest but prohibit them from expanding or starting new treatments. The Justice Department argued that the Constitution requires prison officials to make treatment decisions based on independent health assessments.

 

Federal civil rights law does not explicitly ban discrimination against transgender people, but Mr. [Eric] Holder announced in December that the Justice Department considered such bias to be prohibited under the same civil rights law that outlaws sex discrimination.