An appeals court has upheld a lower court’s support for a group of male inmates who argued that the state’s refusal to pay for hormones to change their body type was a form of torture.

“A three-judge panel of the 7th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals on Friday said that state officials were violating prisoners’ constitutional rights unless they let male inmates receive a hormone regimen to make their bodies more feminine,” reports Kathleen Gilbert for LifeSiteNews.

The three inmates had sued the state in 2006 after prison officials began reducing their estrogen treatments which, as the court noted in its opinion, supports female self-idenfication by causing “breast development, relocation of body fat, and softening of the skin.”

The court concluded that “plaintiffs could not be effectively treated without hormones” because mental health remedies, such as psychotherapy and antidepressants, “do nothing to treat the underlying disorder” of a perceived incorrect body type, something the court called a “medical condition.”

“Surely, had the Wisconsin legislature passed a law that DOC inmates with cancer must be treated only with therapy and pain killers, this court would have no trouble concluding that the law was unconstitutional,” stated the panel, concluding that refusing the hormones had “no valid penological purpose and amounts to torture.”