A Central Texas nonprofit is opening the region’s first transgender care clinic in Austin. The nonprofit Kind Clinic, in a medical complex near 30th Street and Interstate 35, will provide free services such as hormone therapy specifically for people who are transgender, gender nonconforming or nonbinary. The services expand on the HIV-prevention work that the Texas Health Action nonprofit has been doing at the site since May 2015.
Joe McAdams, executive director of Texas Health Action, said the transgender-specific services were a logical extension of the organization’s larger mission, a product of growing recognition of the LGBTQ community’s needs. The Austin clinic is intended partly to offer transgender people, particularly low-income ones, a place they can feel comfortable seeking medical services, managers and community activists said.
“Competent and knowledgeable medical care is extremely important, and extremely hard to find in Texas” for transgender people, said Meghan Stabler, a transgender board member of the Human Rights Campaign, which advocates on various lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer issues.
Stabler said the standard medical path is often unavailable to low-income people who don’t identify with their birth sex. Patients often need counseling on gender identification, referrals to medical specialists when seeking hormone therapy, periodic checkups to ensure the hormones are working properly, and sometimes surgery.
Read more on MyStatesman.com.
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