Garrison Davis

The state of catastrophic fear I've been talking about is maintained by a near constant wave of articles with panic-inducing headlines, which fuel social media posts that further escalate an abstract claims made in headlines to a Nazi Germany-esque level of potential danger facing trans people.

One such impending danger circulating online this month is the claim that the FDA is making a registry of trans women and moving to criminalize DIY estrogen.

This claim originated from an article in a trans news outlet published March 12th

reporting that anti-trans lobbying groups sent a petition to the FDA to create a registry of trans women who take estrogen and restrict the use of feminizing HRT, which if implemented could, quote, fast track a pathway to criminalizing estrogen use.

Importantly, this citizen's petition is not U.S.

law or proposed government legislation, nor is it FDA policy or regulation.

It was written by an anti-trans activist coalition and sent to the FDA over three months ago in December of 2025.

The petition requests quote-unquote immediate action by establishing a new docket for the public to officially comment on the safety and effectiveness of estrogen in gender transitions and to schedule a public hearing on the subject.

That is mainly what the petition is for.

Though it does make further recommendations following the conclusion of a public hearing.

These recommendations include adding a warning label to estrogen, conducting a safety review, having clinicians report adverse effects to the FDA, and requiring the drug manufacturers, quote, establish a patient registry as a part of a risk evaluation and mitigation study to capture real-world safety data, unquote.

And that is the registry mentioned in this panic headline.

This article, or more accurately, distorted versions of its claims went viral across trans Twitter with tens of thousands of likes and hundreds of thousands of quote-unquote views.

But the article received strong pushback on Blue Sky for being quote-unquote sensationalist and inflammatory.

The outlet that originally published the story later updated the article, clarifying that the FDA receives hundreds of petitions a year, and even if implemented, they can take years to go into effect.

From 2001 to 2013, only 6.6% of FDA citizen petitions were approved and resulted in new regulation.

A study from 2016 found that on average, quote, these petitions require 2.85 years for a final agency decision, and many decisions remain pending 10 to 13 years after their initial submission, unquote.

This FDA petition story was not the only article this month theorizing about a trans registry or adult HRT restrictions.

In mid-March, multiple LGBTQ news outlets reported that Republican lawmakers in Tennessee advanced a bill that would quote-unquote create a public list of trans residents in the state.

The bill in question mandates insurance companies also cover detransition and would require that care providers submit statistics on gender-affirming care to the Tennessee Department of Health, which must, quote, not contain individually identifiable information defined in HIPAA, unquote.