NY Times: ” Two weeks ago, while the rest of America was absorbed by the hunt for a doomed submersible, people in Tennessee discovered that their attorney general was conducting a witch hunt.
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, among others:
- 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.”