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.
Getting arrested as a trans person means you have a high chance of being put into the wrong jail cell. Rates of violence against trans women in jail are astronomical. How you do not comprehend this is beyond me.
Yeah it isn’t like being a communist where you can just shut up in jail and have no repercussions from other inmates. If you’re trans in prison you either have to just sit with dysphoria in prison or be horrifically abused for being out.
I'd also like to point out the very high profile case of Chelsea Manning. She was considered to be in such danger in prison due to being trans that solitary confinement, a known torture method, was safer than being in general pop by the wardens.
The link I posted in the main article was of a trans woman being sent to a county jail and abused was for a traffic offense, even.
I do understand it. People should make their own personal threat assessments when deciding how private and secure to be with online and public communications.
What I'm pushing back against is not people making a personal decision to be more private and secure, which is their right; what I'm pushing back against is the insistence that queer and leftist people and groups should constantly be hiding themselves and their ideals away from the public at large.
I can make an analogy to something told to me by a Union representative: if you are worried about retaliation for support for the union, the best way to protect yourself is not to distance yourself or hide your affiliations; it's to loudly and proudly support the union, so they have a better case to claim your firing was retaliatory.
All revolutionary left-wing politics are inherently escalatory. You bait the oppressors into overstepping their bounds and giving people an excuse to be outraged. It's any one person's right to choose not to participate, and I won't hold it against them, but I believe it is unwise to recommend that the community at large hides itself away in anonymity. Our strength is in numbers, organization, and solidarity.
no one is arguing for that though. it's just a psa
Just to be sure, you are trans yourself, right? I'm trying to figure out which community youre referring to