COLORADO, USA — Out Boulder County, an LGBTQ+ rights group, offers grants for gender affirming services to people of color – the grant program comes after a 2020 study showed some transgender individuals are getting their hormones from unregulated sources.
The group has rolled out a grant program called Advancing and Sustaining Transgender Rights and Autonomy (ASTRA). It offers a one-time $500 grant for gender affirming care and is specifically for transgender people of color in northern Colorado.
"They are able to seek out a particular type of service that they would like paid and so Out Boulder County can outreach to these services and pay on this persons behalf to be able to have the gender affirming care and also the medically necessary care that they need," Lucinnia Majik the group's trans coordinator said.
"Our gender identity is one of the things that we strive to attend to and being a person of color on top of being trans can be extremely complicated. So when you have things like the ASTRA fund, when you have doctors who understand that its medically necessary to be able to transition to the person you want to be it becomes more accessible to be that person."
Accessibility may be be a challenge. When certain gender affirming care services can be costly which leads to some turning elsewhere for treatement.
"I definitely have personally known folks who have gone through some black market routes of all how to get their hormones," Majik added. "Unfortunately that does come with a consequence of not knowing what is going into this type of care."
A 2020 peer review study from the Annals of Family Medicine shows about 9% of transgender people access hormones from non-licensed sources like friends or online. Jacob Bellendir from the Transgender Center of the Rockies has also had one patient come from the online world. He worried about those getting it from friends or unregulated sources.
"You should not be taking a medication that's not prescribed to you and that process needs to be monitored for a decent amount of time," Bellendie said. "So if you're doing that without any guidance I imagine it's probably very scary and there's always risk to doing that without any knowledge. "
Majik hoped accessibility grows so that the chance to start a needed journey is one gifted to everyone.
"We have the ability to develop a relationship with these resources and not feel like we have to constantly strive for them it becomes a whole different dialogue of our own ability to see our self worth in our healthcare," she said. "Overall these medically necessary things are all for our ability to live as trans people regardless of where we're at."
It's important to note that gender affirming care is not one-size-fits-all so while the costs vary so do the services. The ASTRA grant can go towards anything from hormone replacement therapy to speech and voice therapy or even mental health support.
This year the FDA cracked down on online pharmacies. They stressed that buying from them could be dangerous or even deadly. They sent out warning letters to 100 different pharmacies they found illegally offering prescription drugs.
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