Gender-affirming care
Your name on your records, and changing your ID
Two separate things that get tangled together constantly. One of them we control completely, and it requires no paperwork at all.
The name we use
Your chosen name and your pronouns go in the chart, at the front, where the person about to walk into the room reads them. Not in a note somebody has to scroll to.
You do not need to have changed anything legally for this. You do not need a document, a letter, a diagnosis or a reason. You tell us, and that is the name that gets used — at reception, in the room, and on anything we print.
There is no process for this and nothing to apply for. It is a field in a record, and the only reason it ever goes wrong is that nobody bothered.
Where a legal name still has to appear
Some documents are bound to the name on your health card — billing to OHIP, certain lab requisitions, certain third-party forms. Where that is unavoidable it will be explained rather than done silently, and it does not change what you are called or what appears on anything we control.
Changing your legal name or your documents
This is a government process, run by the province and by federal departments depending on the document. A clinic does not decide it, cannot speed it up, and should not pretend otherwise.
What a clinic can do is supply documentation where documentation is part of the requirement, and do it promptly and correctly rather than making it another thing you have to chase.
There is free, experienced help for this in the city, and it is worth using rather than working it out alone. The 519’s Trans ID Clinic does exactly this work — the paperwork, which document needs what, and the order to do it in. ServiceOntario handles the provincial filings. Neither of them is us, and neither costs anything.
Work out which document you are actually changing
Name and sex designation are separate changes, and different documents have different requirements set by different levels of government. Establishing which one you need first saves the most time.
Find out what it requires
Some changes need supporting documentation from a clinician and some need none at all. The requirements are set by the issuing body and are revised, so they are worth confirming from the source rather than from a clinic’s website.
Where a clinician’s document is needed
We complete it. What it can say is bounded by what is true and by what the form asks for, and that will be explained rather than negotiated at the counter.
Updating your records afterwards
Once a document changes, your health card and your chart should follow. Bring it in and it gets updated, so the system stops generating mail in the old name.
Whether this is an insured service
Completing a form for a third party is generally an uninsured service, like any other third-party paperwork. You will be quoted before anything is completed, never after. See physicals and forms for how uninsured work will be handled generally.
Common questions
Do I need to change my ID before you’ll use my name?
No. These are unrelated, and believing they are connected is one of the more common reasons people put off seeing anyone at all.
Will my old name still be in the system somewhere?
A legal name has to be retained where billing and certain records require it. It should not be what anybody sees or says, and if it surfaces somewhere it should not, that is a fault worth telling us about.
Can you write a letter saying whatever the form needs?
We can complete what a form asks for, accurately. What a clinician can attest to is bounded by what is true — that limit protects you as much as it binds us, because a document that overreaches is a document that gets rejected.
What about my prescription label?
A separate system with a separate answer, and one of the places a name most often appears where it is least wanted.
Kind Pharmacy on the ground floor has its own page on what can and cannot be changed on a dispensing label, because the rules there are different from ours. Kind Clinic and Kind Pharmacy are separate businesses under common ownership. You can fill your prescription anywhere.
Kind Pharmacy →