{"id":129435,"date":"2025-08-08T16:01:09","date_gmt":"2025-08-08T16:01:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/129435\/"},"modified":"2025-08-08T16:01:09","modified_gmt":"2025-08-08T16:01:09","slug":"new-lawsuit-aims-to-protect-health-care-for-trans-inmates-in-georgia-prisons","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/129435\/","title":{"rendered":"New lawsuit aims to protect health care for trans inmates in Georgia prisons"},"content":{"rendered":"

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<\/a> <\/p>\n

Published<\/p>\n

2025-08-08 10:12<\/p>\n

10:12<\/p>\n

August 8, 2025<\/p>\n

am<\/p>\n

A group of incarcerated transgender women and men have sued Georgia corrections officials, challenging a new law that prevents them from receiving gender-affirming medical care. The lawsuit, filed Friday morning, accuses the state of violating the Eighth Amendment, which prohibits cruel and unusual punishment.<\/p>\n

Five transgender plaintiffs \u2014 two men and three women \u2014 brought the class action lawsuit on behalf of nearly 300 other people in Georgia state prisons, who argue that the state\u2019s law will have \u201ccatastrophic consequences.\u201d In some cases it is forcing trans people who have already received hormone replacement therapy and other services for years to detransition without their consent.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe are very much in the thick of seeing policies like this be adopted,\u201d said Chinyere Ezie, a senior staff attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, which brought the lawsuit with co-counsel Bondurant Mixson & Elmore LLP. \u201cIt\u2019s really unfortunate, I think that it has and will cost people\u2019s lives. I think that the plan is to really just eradicate trans people from public life, to really \u2014 contrary to medicine \u2014 make the treatment of gender dysphoria a culture war, as opposed to a serious medical need that requires treatment.\u201d<\/p>\n

In May, Gov. Brian Kemp, a Republican, signed SB 185, a bill passed by the state\u2019s majority conservative legislature that prohibits the use of state funds or resources for surgery, hormone replacement therapy, cosmetic procedures and other treatments used to address gender dysphoria. The law states explicitly that incarcerated people may still receive treatments like hormone replacement therapy if they are medically necessary for conditions other than gender dysphoria.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Ezie told The 19th that the bill\u2019s sponsors indicated during hearings that incarcerated trans people would not be allowed to pay for treatment themselves, either. Her team has also heard this from their clients, she said. The 19th reached out to the Georgia Department of Corrections to confirm whether incarcerated trans people can pay for these procedures themselves.<\/p>\n

\u201cSenate Bill 185 prohibits the use of state funds or resources for the following treatments for state inmates: A. Sex reassignment surgeries or any other surgical procedures that are performed for the purpose of altering primary or secondary sexual characteristics; B. Hormone replacement therapies; and C. Cosmetic procedures or prosthetics intended to alter the appearance of primary or secondary sexual characteristics,\u201d wrote Joan Heath, the department\u2019s director of communications.<\/p>\n

\u201cThus, the GDC cannot use state resources to transport an offender to be seen by a provider paid for at their own expense, nor allow a provider being paid by an offender to treat such offender at a GDC facility,\u201d she continued.<\/p>\n

The legal complaint filed by the Center for Constitutional Rights includes details about the plaintiffs who described the effects of being cut off from their gender-affirming medical care. One trans woman named Fantasia Horton, incarcerated in Phillips State Prison, had been receiving hormone therapy since 2019 but was completely cut off following the law, despite being told that her dosages would gradually decrease before ending, according to the Center for Constitutional Rights.<\/p>\n

\u201cDue to Defendants\u2019 policies and actions in terminating her treatment, Ms. Horton is now at grave risk of physical and psychological harm,\u201d the complaint stated<\/a>. \u201cThree years ago, after losing access to hormone therapy for just one week after her prison\u2019s supply of hormone therapy was temporarily depleted, Ms. Horton\u2019s mental health plummeted and her depressive symptoms returned.\u201d<\/p>\n

Gender dysphoria is a condition recognized by medical journals and professionals. It is defined as the sense of discomfort<\/a> or anxiety a person feels when their physical gender feels out of sync with their gender identity. This can lead to long-term mental health effects, including periods of depression, thoughts or acts of self-harm. Forced detransition due to anti-trans legislation, coupled with the poor conditions and discrimination that incarcerated trans people often experience, can worsen these mental health consequences. From a physical standpoint, doctors recommend that any termination of hormone replacement therapy takes place gradually over three to six months, rather than cold turkey.<\/p>\n

\u201cTaking away individuals\u2019 access to gender-affirming therapies while in prison constitutes cruel and unusual punishment and increases the likelihood of abuse and detrimental health consequences,\u201d Jan T. Mooney, an Atlanta-based psychologist, and Mark Spencer, an Atlanta-area internal medicine physician, wrote in an April column<\/a> about the Georgia bill.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u201cAbrupt cessation or forced weaning of medically necessary, ongoing treatment is a health risk. Physical effects of hormone withdrawal are accompanied by psychological distress, which may manifest as anxiety, depression, and suicidality,\u201d they continued.<\/p>\n

The class action lawsuit comes 10 years after the Center for Constitutional Rights first sued over another ban on gender-affirming care in Georgia prisons. In that case Ashley Diamond, a Black transgender woman, sued the Georgia Department of Corrections<\/a> in 2015 after being held in men\u2019s prisons and denied hormone treatments.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The case drew attention from the U.S. Department of Justice, which said at the time that blanket policies barring hormone therapy violate the Eighth Amendment \u201cbecause they do not provide for individualized assessment and treatment.\u201d Diamond won an undisclosed settlement in 2016, and her case prompted policy changes in Georgia meant to facilitate better treatment of incarcerated transgender people. But six years later, Diamond sued again, asserting that the state failed to provide her adequate health care or protect her from sexual assault after a second incarceration. Ultimately, Diamond dropped that lawsuit to protect her mental health, according to her lawyers.<\/p>\n

To see the same issues come up again in 2025 feels like being \u201cin a time machine going back in time,\u201d said Ezie, who represented Diamond 10 years ago.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think that is a feeling that\u2019s shared by many trans rights activists,\u201d Ezie said. \u201cIt feels like, rather than seeing a forward march of progress when it comes to securing basic rights and basic dignity for transgender people, we are now fighting to hold on to very basic legal wins that you know we achieved, at times, decades ago.\u201d<\/p>\n

Ezie and the legal team at the Center for Constitutional Rights are hopeful that the courts will overturn Georgia\u2019s law, as they have in other similar cases. For example, Wisconsin enacted a law in 2005 that barred prison doctors from providing hormone therapy or gender-affirming surgery to incarcerated transgender people in state custody. But a federal court ruled that denying this medical care constitutes cruel and unusual punishment. Another state-level class action lawsuit in Colorado resulted in a<\/a> negotiated settlement agreement between the state and the Department of Corrections requiring an overhaul of how it houses incarcerated transgender women and provides medical care to all trans people behind bars.<\/p>\n

If the Center for Constitutional Rights is successful in Georgia, Ezie anticipates that there will still be a long road ahead in the effort to challenge anti-trans legislation and policies.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe\u2019re going to continue to use the courts, we\u2019re going to continue to organize, we\u2019re going to continue to \u2014 as we did prior to the passage of this bill \u2014 lobby against bills like this that seek to cause so much preventable harm,\u201d she said. \u201cThis is why we fight.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Published 2025-08-08 10:12 10:12 August 8, 2025 am A group of incarcerated transgender women and men have sued…\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":129436,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[35],"tags":[210,1141,1142,67,132,68],"class_list":{"0":"post-129435","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-health-care","8":"tag-health","9":"tag-health-care","10":"tag-healthcare","11":"tag-united-states","12":"tag-unitedstates","13":"tag-us"},"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/pubeurope.com\/@us\/114993986475232808","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129435","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=129435"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/129435\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/129436"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=129435"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=129435"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.europesays.com\/us\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=129435"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}