In 2019, Cristina Iglesias filed a suit that changed the course of treatment for herself and other transgender inmates in federal custody. Iglesias, a trans woman who had been incarcerated for more than 25 years, was transferred from a men’s prison to a women’s one in 2021. In 2022, she reached a settlement with the Federal Bureau of Prisons to receive gender-affirming surgery, which the agency said it had never provided for anyone, KFF Health News reports. By the time she got the surgery 10 months later, another federal inmate had also received a procedure to align their body with their gender identity. No other such surgeries for people in federal custody are publicly documented, although some people in state prisons have also received gender-affirming surgery, including at least five in Illinois and 20 in California in a U.S. prison population that tops 1.25 million. Still, those procedures loomed large in the 2024 presidential election. Political advertising for President Trump and other Republicans included $215 million in anti-trans ad. One declared that Democratic presidential nominee Kamala Harris supported “taxpayer-funded sex changes for prisoners,” and concluded, “Kamala is for they/them. President Trump is for you.”
In the run-up to the Nov. 5 election, 55% of voters felt support for trans rights had gone too far, according to VoteCast. On Inauguration Day, Trump issued a flurry of executive orders, including one to bar federal spending on gender-affirming care in federal prisons and to “ensure that males are not detained” in federal women’s facilities. “President Trump received an overwhelming mandate from the American people to restore commonsense principles and safeguard women’s spaces — even prisons — from biological men,” said White House spokesperson Anna Kelly. “Forcing taxpayers to pay for gender transition for prisoners is the exact sort of insanity that the American people rejected at the ballot box in November.” For Iglesias, 50, Trump’s order was a shocking reversal. “It puts someone’s life in danger being in a men’s prison as a trans woman,” she said from Chicago, where she’s lived since her release in 2023. “It’d be like putting sheep in a hyenas’ den.”
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