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.
What does this mean, exactly?
As far as I know there haven't been any scandals or major flaws in the end to end encryption... so yes? But there is some metadata that can be gleaned by whoever runs your homeserver, and they probably do respond to take down requests on matrix.org if there's sufficient pressure/evidence that the room is being used for illegal purposes or whatever.
If you run your own server that mostly goes away, but you do still have to deal with your hosting provider, like any website or service you might host. But yeah, encrypted DMs and rooms should be as safe as the vigilance of the people in them.
And in case it wasn't obvious, when I say server I mean the actual server hosting what's called the matrix homeserver (usually the synapse reference implementation), not like Discord "servers" which are all one big unencrypted service. You can create what are called "spaces" on matrix, which act like discord servers (can have multiple different channels within them, etc.) and people from any homeserver can join and chat with everyone else.