Garrison Davis

The Tennessee Department of Health would then use that information to make a publicly available statistics report.

But online accounts are spreading this story as if Tennessee is making a quote-unquote sex offender style public registry with the names and locations of all trans people in the state.

A bill like this could potentially be used for harm, and it may face court challenges for possibly violating parts of HIPAA by collecting data on county of residence and procedure dates.

But the reporting on the bill and the viral reaction online make it out to be something completely different.

There's no reason to believe this bill would create a publicly accessible registry or list identifying trans people by name in the state.

The bill has not yet passed the state senate, and it may not in its current form.

Right now it's unclear what exact form the collected data will take within a statistics report,

and what level of anonymizing data aggregation will be employed.

This is something to keep an eye on if the bill does pass and the State Department of Health drafts guidelines for the mandatory statistics reporting, but the way it's being reported is incredibly misleading.

Interestingly, the source for this public list claim is the same Substack outlet that created the false story about ICE now being able to detain people for looking trans.

Also earlier this month, multiple LGBTQ news outlets reported that the Fourth Circuit Court approved state bans on gender-affirming health care for adults.

On March 10th, a Republican-appointed three-judge panel of the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that states can prohibit gender-affirming surgery from being covered by Medicaid.

The ruling affirmed a ban on Medicaid coverage for, quote, sex change surgeries in West Virginia, with the panel arguing it doesn't discriminate against trans people because it applies to specific procedures, not specific individuals.

This is certainly bad news for trans people in West Virginia on Medicaid.

But reporting that this decision could soon result in trans people losing health care in other states or nationally is misleading and removes key context.

This is not a total ban on these procedures.

It's a ban on state Medicaid coverage of these surgical procedures.

The ruling is not a ban on other forms of gender-affirming healthcare like HRT, nor does it threaten the hospital's ability to receive Medicare and Medicaid funds for providing gender-affirming healthcare like the Trump administration has threatened so far unsuccessfully.

Still, people postulated on how this ruling could be laying the legal groundwork to eliminate adult transgender healthcare.

but trans journalist David Forbes noted that this ruling will likely be appealed to the wider Fourth Circuit, which has recently ruled in the opposite direction of this three-panel ruling.