WASHINGTON — The Supreme Court on Wednesday denied the Trump administration's emergency request to immediately enforce a Bureau of Prisons policy that would have ended hormone treatments and other gender-affirming care for transgender inmates, leaving a lower court's injunction intact for now.

The order in Trump v. Kingdom came down 7-2, with Chief Justice John Roberts joining Justices Sotomayor, Kagan, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, Barrett and Jackson in the majority. Justices Clarence Thomas and Samuel Alito dissented and said they would have granted the stay, according to the Court's docket.

How the case got here

The dispute traces back to a Bureau of Prisons policy change that would have barred new hormone prescriptions for gender dysphoria, directed doctors to taper existing treatment, and stripped away accommodations such as gender-affirming clothing — while still allowing mental-health counseling. U.S. District Judge Royce Lamberth certified a class of roughly 2,000 federal inmates with gender dysphoria and blocked the policy, ruling that the Bureau's abrupt reversal of its own longstanding practice looked arbitrary under federal administrative law. A divided panel of the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals declined to lift that block.

Solicitor General D. John Sauer then asked the justices to step in on an emergency basis on September 28, arguing the Bureau's decision to "prioritize mental-health treatment, while discontinuing medically disputed and unproven sex-rejecting interventions, falls well within the bounds of reasoned decision-making." Chief Justice Roberts, who handles emergency matters from the D.C. Circuit, ordered the inmates' lawyers to respond by October 8 before referring the application to the full Court.

Attorneys for the inmates, including ACLU lawyers, countered that abruptly cutting off hormone therapy for a class of prisoners already receiving it amounts to cruel and unusual punishment and called the policy "a direct threat to the well-being of transgender people in federal custody."

What it means now

Wednesday's denial does not resolve the underlying case — it simply means the Bureau of Prisons cannot enforce its new restrictions while Lamberth's injunction and the broader lawsuit work their way through the courts. The administration could still return to the Supreme Court once the D.C. Circuit rules on the merits of the appeal. The case is one of several transgender-rights fights currently before the justices, following a term in which the conservative-majority Court upheld state bans on certain treatments for transgender minors and allowed other administration rollbacks on passports and military service to take effect on a short-term basis.

"Withholding necessary medical care is cruel and unusual punishment, full stop," the inmates' attorneys argued in briefing urging the Court to leave the block in place.

The Justice Department did not immediately issue a public statement following the order. The case returns to the lower courts, where litigation over the policy's legality continues.