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Did you know that it used to be extremely difficult to get on hormone therapy as a transgender person? Under old protocols, you would have to jump through dozens of hoops just to get started with your medical transition. Some clinics required therapist letters, and many therapists would only give those valuable letters after 1 or 2 years of intensive gender therapy where they would question your entire narrative of being transgender. Often they would deny you the letter if you were a transgender gay or lesbian person. Non-binary people were not allowed to transition at all. Many times, they forced the transgender person into registering for surgery before offering hormone therapy and would withdraw the hormone therapy if the transgender person did not follow through. This was an untenable circumstance.
This all changed a few years ago, when informed consent clinics started popping up. WPATH 7 released in the early 2010s allowed for informed consent HRT, making hormone therapy much easier to access. The idea behind these clinics was that the doctors and providers would trust you that you are transgender, and would focus their effort and attention on ensuring that you can access hormones safely. They would take your levels, give you medical care, and manage your medical transition according to your needs. This suddenly made transition care much easier to access - no longer did you need to pay thousands of dollars to therapists in order to obtain hormone therapy.
In my own transition, I was very nervous about going through the therapy process. When I first reconnected with my trans self at 29 years old, I thought that those letters were still needed. It wasn’t until researching that I learned about informed consent HRT. I found a clinic, but it was three hours away. Nonetheless, the idea that I could start hormone therapy quickly spurred me to action - I drove 3 hours to get my hormones and to go to all the follow ups.
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I realized there were likely closer clinics to me, but I didn’t know how to access them. That’s when I decided to get to work - I began mapping them out as a personal project to give back to the transgender community that had helped me so greatly. I first went to every Planned Parenthood website and checked if they had HRT and what locations had them by using the dropdown scheduler - virtually all Planned Parenthood HRT locations operate under informed consent. I then visited a variety of forums and pulled up old PDFs from local LGBTQ+ orgs that sometimes indicated which clinics were informed consent. I mapped them all out on a Google Map.
After releasing the first map, I immediately began getting tips from community members on adding their local clinics. I have continued to update this for years, and many trans resources include the map to help new transgender people. Therapists use it to help trans people not experience a break in continuity of care when they make big moves. New transgender people access it and are shocked, often, to learn that there is a clinic near then. It has, at the time of writing this, been accessed nearly 4,000,000 times. With no further adieu: Here is Erin’s Informed Consent HRT Map. Go get on your hormones.
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