Nobody stops you.
There is no lock on a gold IRA. No waiting period, no approval committee, no form that asks why. You are 54, you want the money, you fill out a request and the money comes.
The tax code does not prevent early withdrawals. It prices them.
And the price is higher than the headline number suggests, because three separate things happen at once and most people only count one.
The good news is that there are eight legal exceptions, and a few of them are genuinely useful to people in exactly the situations that make someone want the money early.
So let us do the arithmetic honestly, then look at the escape hatches.