Tennessee Gov. Bill Lee (R) signed a bill into law Thursday that vastly expands the state’s power to gather information about transgender patients and their healthcare providers.
Clinics that receive state funding will now be required to provide aggregated data about transgender patients and their doctors to the state, and the information will be made publicly available.
Health care providers will be tasked with detailing the age and sex of patients receiving any type of gender-affirming care, as well as the type of procedure, names of drugs, dosages, frequencies, methods by which drugs are administered, and any diagnoses of mental health or neurological conditions. Clinics will also have to disclose the name, contact information and medical speciality of any health care provider who offers gender-affirming care.
Any state-funded clinic that offers gender-affirming care will also have to provide similar information about patients who detransition, meaning they once sought gender transition and now want to stop or reverse some aspects of it.
LGBTQ+ and privacy advocates have called the law a massive invasion of privacy. Although individual patients or clinics will not be directly identified in reports to the state legislature, experts worry that patients and providers will remain at risk since transgender people, and the doctors who treat them, make up such a small fraction of the overall population.
