Gender-affirming care
Starting or continuing hormone therapy
An informed consent conversation, baseline bloodwork collected in the building, a prescription, and follow-up that actually happens. No letter required.
What the first appointment is
It is a conversation and a blood draw. We talk about what you want from treatment, what the effects are and roughly when they show up, which of them reverse if you stop and which don’t, what the risks are given your own health history, and what monitoring looks like. Then we take baseline bloodwork.
You do not need to have an answer ready for “how long have you known”. You do not need a diagnosis letter, a therapist’s report, or a witness.
Informed consent means the assessment is about whether the decision is informed — not about whether you have proved something to us.
How it usually goes
Book, or walk in
No referral needed. If you would rather not say why you are booking, “to see a clinician” is enough on the phone or at the desk.
The consent conversation
Effects and their rough timelines, what is reversible and what is permanent, risks against your own history, and what monitoring involves. Questions welcome; leaving without starting is a normal outcome.
Baseline bloodwork
Collected in the building rather than sending you across town, so it is part of the same visit instead of a second trip.
Prescription
Once baseline results are back and there is nothing that needs sorting out first. Which route and which preparation is a decision made with you.
Follow-up and monitoring
More frequent early on while a dose is being settled, less frequent once it is stable. Bloodwork and a review each time.
Ongoing care
Dose changes, side effects, screening, and everything else a family doctor handles — with the same clinicians rather than a separate service.
Routes and preparations
Hormone therapy comes in several forms, and which suits you is a genuine clinical decision rather than a default. Broadly, there are preparations taken by mouth, applied to the skin as a gel or a patch, and given by injection — subcutaneously into fat or intramuscularly into muscle. Some people also take a medication that suppresses the body’s own hormone production alongside the main therapy.
Each route has trade-offs in how steady the levels are, how often you have to think about it, how it interacts with the rest of your health, and how it is covered. We go through that with you rather than handing you one option.
Why this page doesn’t name specific medications
Canadian law restricts what a clinic may say publicly about a specific prescription drug. Describing what a named product does, in public marketing, is the line. So the detail lives in the appointment, where it belongs and where it can be matched to you, rather than on a web page.
Monitoring
Hormone therapy is ongoing medical care, so it comes with ongoing bloodwork — hormone levels plus the other markers that matter for the specific therapy you are on. Testing is more frequent while a dose is being established and settles into a longer interval once things are stable.
Specimen collection happens in this building. That sounds small; in practice “one more trip across town before your next appointment” is one of the most common reasons monitoring quietly stops happening.
Bloodwork here is collected on site rather than sent elsewhere for collection, so it fits into the same visit.
Bloodwork in the building →Common questions
How soon can I start?
Usually after baseline bloodwork comes back and there is nothing in it that needs addressing first. We will not put a number of days on it here — that depends on your results and on the lab, and a promise we cannot keep is worse than no promise.
What if I want to stop, or pause?
That is your decision and it is a legitimate one. Tell us so we can do it safely and explain what reverses and what doesn’t. Stopping is not treated as a failure and does not affect the rest of your care here.
Does hormone therapy affect fertility?
It can, and for some people the effect is permanent. This is part of the consent conversation, and if preserving fertility matters to you we will talk about options and referrals before starting rather than after.
Will this be in my record?
Yes — it is medical care, and it belongs in your medical record so that the people treating you can treat you safely. What we will not do is disclose it outside your circle of care without your consent. If you have a specific worry about who can see what, raise it at the appointment; it is a fair question and there are usually concrete answers.
I’m on hormones I got outside the medical system.
Say so. Knowing what you have actually been taking, at what dose, is the only way to make what happens next safe. It is a clinical fact, not a confession, and the usual first steps are bloodwork and a dose review.
Do you prescribe compounded hormones?
For gender-affirming care we prescribe commercially manufactured products, which is what the Ontario guidance supports. Compounded “bioidentical” preparations are a different thing, marketed mostly for menopause, and they are not the standard of care here.
If your prescription is an injection, the part nobody teaches you is the technique, the needle sizes and what to do with the sharps. Kind Pharmacy on the ground floor covers that. Kind Clinic and Kind Pharmacy are separate businesses under common ownership. You can fill your prescription anywhere.
Kind Pharmacy →