From WNYC Studios, I'm Brian Lehrer.

This is my daily politics podcast.

It's Friday, August 22.

Now this kind of shocking new report coming from the Washington Post, over the last two months, they say, President Trump's Justice Department

has issued more than 20 subpoenas demanding sensitive information from medical providers on transgender

patients under 19 years old. This, of course, comes after the Supreme Court ruled in June to uphold

a Tennessee law banning gender affirming care for adolescents,

allowing 23 states with similar laws on the books to follow suit.

But many of these reported investigations are in states where gender affirming care is or was at

the time legal.

Joining me now to share her reporting on the chilling effects these subpoenas

are having on medical providers and their patients and at least potential effects on people's

privacy is Casey Parks, Washington Post reporter, who covers LGBTQ issues for the paper. Casey,

thanks for coming on. Welcome to WNIC. Thank you so much for having me. Let me start with a very basic

question. With these subpoenas, what information is the Justice Department requesting from medical

providers? The subpoena itself is very broad. One of the lines in it says every written or

record or any kind of recording of any kind so that

includes even encrypted text messages doctors may have sent on WhatsApp or apps like signal

but the far-reaching thing that one of the scariest things for patients is it

requires it requests all information about

patients. So that could be social security numbers, their addresses, any information about their

parents. It includes entire personnel files for doctors. At one point it says any diaries

...