1. United States
2. Mich.
3. Letter

I am writing to urge you to take immediate action against the Bureau of Prisons policy released last Thursday that subjects approximately 2,200 transgender people in federal custody to what constitutes conversion therapy—a practice rejected by every major US medical association and recognized by the United Nations as torture. This policy denies transgender prisoners access to medically necessary healthcare, confiscates all gender-affirming items including binders and bras, and mandates treatment targeting psychological distress through talk therapy and psychotropic medication until gender dysphoria can be marked as resolved. The policy designates gender dysphoria as a mental illness requiring routine mental health care, with stated goals to assist progress toward recovery while reducing or eliminating symptoms and associated negative outcomes. Transgender people do not recover from gender dysphoria—they alleviate it through transition. The negative outcome being eliminated is transition itself, which is the explicit goal of conversion therapy. The policy incorporates terminology exclusively used by RFK Jr.'s Department of Health and Human Services, including sex trait modification and sex rejection, and adopts HHS's assertion that exploratory therapy will help gender dysphoria resolve. Organizations like the Trevor Project and KFF characterize this approach as conversion therapy. Unlike Florida's September 2024 policy from which this was copied, the federal version makes no exceptions—even for individuals who no longer produce their own sex hormones, creating devastating health consequences. Most troubling, this policy creates a closed system with no end date and a measurable outcome that will be electronically recorded. If any cases are marked as resolved, the administration can claim conversion therapy works, validating a politically motivated treatment rejected by medical consensus. This constitutes human experimentation on a captive population subjected to empirically harmful practices shown to increase suicidal ideation, depression, and PTSD. I urge you to publicly oppose this policy, introduce or support legislation prohibiting conversion therapy in federal custody, and demand accountability for what amounts to state-sanctioned torture of vulnerable people who cannot consent or withdraw from this experimentation.