Clinical resources and tools for trans health care providers and community members in Ontario
Community Members
I AM A COMMUNITY MEMBER
If you are a community member looking for information about trans and/or 2SLGBTQIA+ health and wellness, you will find resources to help you navigate your transition medically, psychosocially, and legally.
Care Providers
I AM A CARE PROVIDER
If you are a care provider looking for information about caring for trans and/or 2SLGBTIA+ individuals, you will find clinical and operational resources as well as links to training and education opportunities.
About
Gender-affirming care is among the simplest, most impactful, and least available aspects of healthcare affecting our community. We know that trans people experience the highest rates of harm—including suicidality—while waiting to access gender-affirming care, but also see the most dramatic turnaround in health outcomes once they start care. Meanwhile, many service providers are open and willing to support trans clients, but have told us they don’t know where to start.
In 2023, MAX launched the Trans Health Navigation Project in partnership with the Centretown Community Health Centre’s (CCHC) Trans Health Clinic. CCHC’s Trans Health Clinic is widely recognized as a leader in providing exceptional gender-affirming care, and together, we set out to create this comprehensive toolkit and training program to support clinicians in providing better care.
This project was supported financially by Women and Gender Equality—Canada.
Centretown Community Health Centre’s (CCHC) Trans Health Clinic (THC) is the largest clinic for clients age 17+ in the Champlain region to access transition-related medical care, and the only clinic clients can access without a physician referral. The THC is guided by the Sherbourne Health Centre 4th edition Guidelines for Gender-Affirming Primary Care with Trans and Non-binary Patients (2019) and WPATH World Professional Association for Transgender Health Standards of Care version 8 (2022).
In 2019, the THC received permanent funding for a 2-day clinic and has since seen a 400% increase in client referrals, highlighting both an increased volume in demand for services and gaps in primary health care. This increase in referral volume has led to a waitlist crisis in the Champlain region, affecting accessibility to primary health care for trans and non-binary individuals.
Pioneering its own solution, CCHC launched “The Primary Care Trans Health Clinical Skill Development Opportunity”, a capacity-building pilot project. In the first year of the pilot, we collaborated with two major primary care clinics in order to expand primary care capacity and competency with transition-related medicine. The pilot is designed to be comprehensive, centered on trauma-informed care, with learning milestones that parallel the entire patient journey. Our teaching framework is peer-to-peer; meaning knowledge transfers are facilitated by role-experts. By the start of 2025, seven teams across Ontario have been trained to offer higher quality care through this program.
The Trans Health Team won the Transformational Change Award for Innovation in Health Care, from the Alliance for Healthier Communities, and this recognition bolstered incredible interest and demand for our capacity-building framework.
Developed with Centretown Community Health Centre and the University of Ottawa Department of Family Medicine, the Trans Health Residency Elective provides family residents a full elective block of gender-affirming health care learning. We're proud to have developed the elective objectives collaboratively with community members and regional health care providers.
The Trans Health Residency Elective officially launched in the University of Ottawa’s Department of Family Medicine in 2024.
To learn more about it, visit: https://uodfm.ca/en/e-learning-modules/app/gender-affirming-care.
Contact
info@maxottawa.ca
We are always working on improving and updating information on this page in collaboration with users. If a resource link is broken or missing, or if you have any suggestions on how to improve the toolkit, please let us know.
Toolkit Last Updated: February 11, 2025
Disclaimer
Some of the provided contents are the property of other organizational partners. Although we do use them, we are not responsible for the hyperlinked resources.