The Texas Department of Criminal Justice (TDCJ) has quietly removed several documents from its website pertaining to the care of trans inmates, according to new reporting by Transistics. That includes the long-established policy that allowed trans people to receive non-surgical gender-affirming care while incarcerated in Texas.

Earlier this year, the Trump administration ordered federal prisons to strip trans inmates of their hormone therapy healthcare. That drew alarm from experts who suggested the move violated a court injunction, and one expert in trans healthcare, Dr. Carl Streed, told The Advocate at the time, “It’s essentially saying that a form of evidence-based care will no longer be provided to people under the purview of the Bureau of Prisons. That means the policy runs counter to best practices and arguably probably the law in terms of providing care to inmates because it’s setting up a different standard for them versus the standard out in the community.”

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However, state prisons were able to set their own rules, with only four states having banned gender-affirming care for trans inmates, and two of those bans were blocked by the courts. Texas wasn’t one of those four states.

From 2006 to 2015, TDCJ had a “freeze-frame” policy, which allowed hormone care to be provided for any inmate who had already been receiving it before being incarcerated. But for those who had not already begun a medical transition, they were not able to start new prescriptions and would have to wait until they were released.

That policy was replaced in 2015 by G-51.11, which provided a full guide titled “Treatment of Inmates with Intersex Conditions, or Gender Dysphoria, Formerly known as Gender Identity Disorder.”

Upon finding that Policy G-51-11 had been removed from TDCJ’s Correctional Managed Health Care policy manual, Transistics Aleksandra Vaca spoke with TDCJ by phone about the matter. They confirmed that the policy was no longer in effect and that had been the case for “a few weeks.” They also confirmed that there was no plan to replace the policy with any other policy and that TDCJ health services were no longer authorized to provide gender-affirming care to inmates.

That means that for all of TDCJ’s trans inmates, which Vaca estimates at being over 1,000 people, they have had their hormone treatments abruptly ended and have been forcibly detransitioned for “a few weeks.” For those who have had certain surgical procedures as part of their transition, the denial of their hormones could be life-threatening outside of the mental toll of being denied their approved healthcare.

The main focus of the documentation is on trans people, and it is clear that the state is intentionally scrubbing mentions of trans people and gender dysphoria. The 2026 Disease Management Guidelines issued by the TDJC have removed the “Gender Dysphoria Hormone Monitoring Guideline” since the 2025 version. However, intersex people have also been caught up in this purge, with some of those documents including basic information and guidance designed to help staff understand intersex identities, as can be seen in archived versions of the documents.

The choice to revoke the policy seems strangely timed and spur-of-the-moment, as it was only renewed in July.

Ken Paxton, Texas’ Attorney General, has long supported anti-trans policies and was behind one of the first state-level lists of trans people that we know about. He’s also running for Senate against Democrat James Talarico, and his poll numbers aren’t looking too good.

It might be reasonable to think that the move to deprive trans inmates of healthcare was an attempt to follow the Republican playbook of attacking trans people to get more votes. But the removal of this policy and related documents has happened silently and was enacted for weeks before Transistics uncovered the move, meaning that there was no chance for political credit and the only result will be the suffering of trans people.

As the policy change was made without warning and without any legislation to support it, there’s a possibility for a due process challenge. Alternatively, as judges have blocked the federal ban on gender-affirming care for trans inmates, there may be a case there. However, any case would inevitably reach the Fifth Circuit, which is notoriously right-leaning and unlikely to rule in trans people’s favor.