So You Think That Your Medical Records Are Secret.

Guess again! All the records of trans patients were seized from a hospital!

Tell Me There Isn’t a Witch Hunt in Tennessee

New York Times

By Margaret Renk

July 3, 2023

As part of a “run of the mill” inquiry into possible billing fraud — as officials described their investigation — the attorney general’s office demanded that Vanderbilt University Medical Center hand over a vast array of documents from its clinic for gender-affirming care. According to Tennessee Lookout, a nonprofit journalism site, those documents include:

    • complete medical records for an undisclosed number of patients

    • résumés of clinic physicians

    • information about the clinic’s Trans Buddy volunteers

    • emails sent to and from a public portal for questions about L.G.B.T.Q. health

    • the names of people referred to the gender-affirming clinic for care

Tell me this isn’t a witch hunt. Tell me this isn’t an open campaign of terror against already vulnerable citizens who had every reason to believe that their medical records — their medical records! — were confidential and every reason to believe that the medical clinic of a major university hospital was a safe space.

Tell me that this is intimidation? Tell me that this isn’t designed to keep trans children from seeking medically necessary healthcare?

“There’s nothing hysterical about worrying about what might be done with this data in a state like Tennessee,” Chris Sanders, the executive director of the Tennessee Equality Project, told Tennessee Lookout.

This investigation is clearly part of an intimidation campaign. Powerless to stop it, statehouse Democrats can only call it out. “Nowhere among the dozens of statutes in the Tennessee Code is there an authorization for the attorney general to use taxpayer resources and his office to promote his own political agenda or that of his political party,” said John Ray Clemmons, the Democratic Caucus chair of the Tennessee House.

This is what the fascist did in Germany in the 1930s gather up the medical records of people with mental or physical disabilities for extermination!

We live in two countries now: one in which basic civil and human rights are recognized and enshrined in law and another in which ideological extremists can decide how everyone else lives.

And two sets of laws one for Christians and one for the rest of us.