Tennessee Senate Passes Bill Making "Recruiting" For Trans Youth Care A Felony
www.erininthemorning.com
The bill could have far ranging impacts in Tennessee and outside of the state, and could be broadly used to target health care professionals across state lines.

Tennessee has recently passed a bill, effective July 1st 2024, declaring it a class-C felony to “recruit, harbor, or transport an unemancipated minor within this state” for transgender healthcare procedures, carrying a sentence of 3-15 years in prison. This applies over state lines and states that do not have anti-extradition laws relating to trans rights can extradite you to Tennessee.

Notably: the bill is vague. This means: telling stories of your own transition, describing your healthcare experiences to an open group chat, describing your trans experiences on a public website, creating trans health guides online, describing how you have gotten DIY HRT, describing anything to do with trans healthcare, even as a cis person, can result in a class-C felony conviction.

Given that being arrested in any capacity for transgender people can be an incredibly dangerous experience (CW: SV), I strongly suggest you begin caring about opsec, stop referring to where you live, use VPNs, stop using apps like Discord, and stop using social media sites that track your IP or user agent fingerprint while unprotected. Remember that for a bill like this to be challenged in court, you have to be arrested first.

Will discuss creating / linking to a transgender matrix chat so that we can help people to move off of things like discord.

  • bleepbloopbop [they/them]@hexbear.netEnglish
    20·
    7 months ago

    As long as you don’t want to run your own server or join a specific one (you probably don’t), you just go to https://app.element.io/, or install element on your phone or computer, and click Create Account.

    Once you’re in, you can message directly with other people on any matrix server, join spaces (which work like discord’s “servers”, and join chat rooms (which are just one-off channels that don’t belong to a space)

    The only other thing you may or may not want to change is what app you use to access matrix. On desktop I like Nheko but I don’t have any mobile recs besides Element (for context, Element is the chat app developed by the same people who created the matrix protocol and the matrix.org homeserver, so it’s basically the default for everything, but other options are getting pretty mature, like Nheko). You aren’t tied to just one though so feel free to hop around.