Gender-Affirming Care: History, Myths, and Real-Life Impact

When we talk about gender-affirming care, medical and social support that helps people align their external life with their internal gender identity. Also known as transgender healthcare, it includes everything from counseling and hormone therapy to surgical options—and it’s been around longer than most people realize. This isn’t just a modern trend. Ancient cultures, from the Hijra in South Asia to Two-Spirit people in Indigenous North American communities, recognized gender diversity long before Western medicine tried to pathologize it.

Modern transgender health, the field of medicine focused on the physical and mental well-being of transgender and nonbinary individuals didn’t start with hormones or clinics. It began with silence. For decades, doctors labeled gender variance as mental illness. The American Psychiatric Association didn’t remove "gender identity disorder" from its manual until 2013. Even then, the stigma stuck. Meanwhile, people kept living—finding each other, sharing information, demanding care. The fight for access to hormones, legal name changes, and safe surgeries was never just about medicine. It was about survival.

And here’s the thing: LGBTQ+ rights, the legal and social movement to ensure equal treatment for people of all sexual orientations and gender identities didn’t begin at Stonewall. It started in libraries, in coded letters, in secret gatherings where people shared what they knew about body changes, self-administered hormones, or how to find a sympathetic doctor. The same courage that drove those early efforts is what keeps gender-affirming care alive today—even as laws try to roll it back.

What you’ll find in the posts below isn’t just a list of articles. It’s a map. A map of how shame was turned into science, how silence became speech, and how people reclaimed their bodies when the system told them they didn’t deserve to exist. You’ll see how Victorian doctors pathologized desire, how feminist thinkers redefined pleasure, and how legal systems still fail people even after marriage equality. This isn’t theory. It’s lived history. And it’s still unfolding.