Remote View

1y ago

CW: Transphobia. PSA for anyone who supports trans people: Begin using secure communications like Matrix now. Do NOT wait or delay.

www.erininthemorning.com Tennessee Senate Passes Bill Making "Recruiting" For Trans Youth Care A Felony

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.

75 comments

My current strategy of "stick to the safe states" is starting to feel shakier and shakier.
I'm fuckin scared yo.
- It's only a matter before a red state tries to extradite a trans person from safe state, which will comply in the spirit of bipartisanship. Or maybe they won't, in which case it will go to the Supreme Court which will rule just the way you expect them to. Fuck this depraved country
  
  Supreme Court might be idiotic assholes but I really doubt they will rule in favor of forced extradition to a different state. This is something pushover blue states might do on their own, but for the federal government to say that state laws apply nationwide would open a can of worms.
  Edit: I was wrong. https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution-conan/article-4/section-2/clause-2/overview-of-the-extradition-interstate-rendition-clause

i don't even have words for this one other than
. shit's getting worse, the dems will refuse to do anything, and unless some serious left wing labor/political org can get formed real fast real quick then there's basically nothing we can do about it
God damn America, that's in the bible

Maybe cross post this onto blahaj zone (even though some of the users are weird pissy freaks about hexbears posting there, it's probably important enough to get them aware of this and stuff)

Sooo... I could be prosecuted for being a mod?
- probably, or just posting anywhere really
  
  "Your content can be seen in Tennessee. Guilty!"
  At this point they'll try to extradite international posters for existing while trans

I know this is serious, but I eagerly await Biden's response. He cares about trans rights, doesn't he?
- He hasn't said jack shit while trans and their allies are systemically incriminated across the country, hexs too busy comittng multiple genocides. He hears you. He sees you. He just Does Not Care.

If you or anyone needs help setting these things up or creating guides please reach out. I’d be happy to help.
- Help would be very much appriciated, pls pm me!!!

This applies over state lines and states that do not have anti-extradition laws relating to trans rights can extradite you to Tennessee.
Is there a place where I can check which states do/don't have said laws? or is that included in that first map you posted?
- first map

Death to the United States of America.

I wonder if the weather underground is nice...
- Well, the wind's blowing in the direction of "you should be armed and ready to catch some blue laces"

Anyone have a beginner's guide to matrix?
- If you find one lmk
- It's just federated chat. You sign up and join a server and choose a mobile app if you need one same as with penny lemmy then use it like a chat app.

fuck.

This will become a new form of swatting. A group like kiwi farms picks a target, collects their online statements, then sics the law on them.

Guess the People’s Republic of Chattanooga isn't happening anytime soon

Does this mean if I provide medical care to a trans person (dispense spironolactone, testosterone, etc) I could be prosecuted in Tennessee?
- It sounds to me like it's if that trans person is a minor, and you don't have permission from their parents.
  
  I mean I have no reason to need that information. Fucking fascists.
  “Do your parents know you’re taking this?” Not my fucking business.
  
  And doing so in the state of TN.

I hope someone sues this unconstiutional law for fucking millions.

Okay so we need to secure Michigan and Wisconsin, then break away with Minnesota and Illinois to form the Great Lakes Protectorate.
- Sorry it's called the Great Lakes People's Republic. I have been irl shitposting about it too much to accept another name.

For one-to-one comms Signal is easier to get started with. Matrix requires a hosting service (or just reliance on the main matrix.org instance), or trust in a server administrator to run one. But it is good software. But unfortunately for group chat it's not as easy to get started as Discord, due to the encrypted nature of Matrix. But Discord shouldn't be considered secure or private, not really. It's just more proprietary spyware, at the end of the day.
Certainly, no matter what, no SMS.
- Signal is incredibly dangerous, it's a US hosted and domiciled company, and they have a legal obligation to forward anything they know about you to the federal government if asked.
  
  I wouldn't knock it until I learn of a situation where Signal handed data over to the government that wasn't encrypted mishmash or derived from side-channel that wasn't specifically related to Signal (the app or the protocol) itself. I do fully agree, however, that a phone number as a registration ID is bad.
  But as it stands I don't consider the point that it's located in the USA to be fully incriminating. Just as I don't find it a problem that Matrix and Vector Creations were an offshoot from an Israeli tech company*. The protocol, and how it functions, are what matters.
  *And yes, the major caveat here is that you can inspect and run the Matrix server code (Synapse or Dendrite), but not the Signal server code.
- Didn’t Signal recently get outed as having a back door?
  
  Honestly, as long as you're using a phone, you're at risk. As LLMs becomes more portable it's just a matter of time before our own phones will narc on us. Most of them already have some sort of ocr /image describer process happening on our photo rolls.
  
  Can you post a source? Because I haven't heard such a thing.
  
  No.

I disagree with the idea that people should be so overcautious as to only communicate the ideas they support or share in closed, secure, completely anonymized spaces. Generally speaking, it is my belief that overzealous Left-wing security culture does more to harm the movement in the long run than help it.
How and what you choose to communicate is a personal decision, and you should make your own threat assessment to decide what to do. It's important to protect yourself. It's also important not to so easily allow ourselves and our beliefs to be siloed off to private corners of the Internet and not expressed openly in public.
I'm a junior member of the PSL and this is their party line. Use your real name, don't hide your face, tell people exactly what you believe and who you are, if it is at all feasible for you to do so. The more people brazenly and publicly oppose the Capitalist order, the better. I don't share my real name on the Internet because I don't want groypers harassing me, but I have zero fear of fascists breaking down my door and killing me in my home. This sort of thing is exceedingly rare and, if it did happen, I would die a martyr.
- 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.
  
  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.

ffs

stay safe out there

Damn, look at that one extension of green in that sea of pale yellow with warning signs in the South and Appalachia. That one safe spot that's just one train ride from Memphis, Jackson, New Orleans, Little Rock, and DFW; the spot that's just one bus ride from Nashville and then one connecting bus ride from most places in the South.
I wonder if they have a good pro-trans climate there.

For anyone curious, here's the bill in question: https://publications.tnsosfiles.com/acts/113/pub/pc1064.pdf
Apparently they dropped it being a felony in final version of the bill, it is now a cause for civil liability to "intentionally recruit, harbor, or transport an unemancipated minor within this state for the purpose of receiving a prohibited medical procedure under this chapter, regardless of where the medical procedure is to be procured." There are exceptions cut out for common carriers, the minor's parents or guardians, and anyone designated by the minor's parents or guardians and the civil action can only be initiated by the minor's parents or guardians.
I'm curious what counts as "recruiting" kids for trans health care.

75 comments