And I am one of the lucky ones, I can afford it and I have insurance that covers my hormones but for many trans people that is even too much to pay so they look for cheaper meds.
Sketchy Pharmacies Are Selling Hormones to Transgender PeopleHere in Connecticut I only know of one place where you can get hormones on a sliding scale, Planned Parenthood in New Haven but they are backed up for months as you can imagine. However, Medicaid’s Husky plans do cover hormones and other related transitioning expenses but the you have to find an endocrine specialist that takes Husky and trans patients.
Burdened by cost and medical discrimination, many people are taking a do-it-yourself approach to transitioning.
The Atlantic
By Gillian Bransetter
August 31, 2016
Two years ago at Burning Man, Andrea tripped on ayahuasca and had visions of herself as a woman in a past life. At the time, Andrea, a 33-year-old transgender woman, identified as a man, but she had struggled with gender dysphoria since high school. “Growing up I had no transgender role models, and there was nobody to tell me that what I felt was something anyone else had,” she says. “I was unhappy with how I was living, and I really wished I had been born with a female body.”
After meeting a few transgender women at the famed music and arts festival, Andrea decided to pursue her own transition. But when she sought out feminizing hormones through clinics around her home in Philadelphia, she ran into lengthy waiting lists and high costs. So she decided to experiment on her own. She ordered Estradiol, a commonly prescribed form of estrogen, and Spironolactone, a testosterone blocker traditionally prescribed to transgender women, from an online pharmacy without a prescription.
Andrea’s decision to manage her own transition outside of a doctor’s care is common. With a lack of transgender-related services across the country, as well as discrimination from medical professionals and insurance companies, many transgender patients are conducting their own hormone replacement therapy, a regiment of medications meant to help them develop some of the secondary sexual characteristics of their gender identity.
I am fortunate in having insurance as well as a pharmacy (at the Callen Lorde Community health clinic) that offers hormones on a sliding scale to those with prescriptions.
ReplyDeleteEarly in my transition, I knew of trans people who were buying "German hormones" on the street. Supposedly, they worked faster than Estradiol, Premarin or the other stuff people got through legit channels. Someone offered the "German hormones" to me. I admit that my understanding of the language is sketchy, at best, but I could read enough of the package to know that those hormones weren't meant for human consumption: They were for horses and cattle.