For Everyone
Small Changes, Big Impact
An introduction to gender diversity and to ensuring that all care settings are places where everyone feels seen, respected, and safe.
Primary Care
Primary Care
A resource for providing gender-affirming primary health care in Newfoundland and Labrador: from guiding principles to clinical conversations to hormone therapy and surgical referrals.
Patients
Patient Advocacy
A guide to preparing for gender-affirming care appointments: how to communicate your needs and stand up for your right to care.
How to Use this Toolkit
This toolkit is designed to be shared! As a free resource, it may be distributed to staff, partners, and communities. We hope that all care providers in the province will become familiar with it, in time.
Different readers will benefit from different components of the toolkit, in different ways. You may come across some of them as educational resources in a workshop setting, through team competency-building sessions, self-directed professional development, or even as a built-in component of onboarding processes. Some components are designed as valuable references, and we encourage all care providers to keep a copy of “Small Changes, Big Impact” in the clinic for whenever questions may arise about implementing or improving gender-affirming care. We also encourage you to draw on them as perspectives for informing policy decisions around gender-affirming care in your care settings.
FREE Workshops!
The toolkit is more than a set of documents. Trans Support NL also offers workshops to care providers at no cost (funded through the toolkit program). These workshops are built around the tools in the kit. They are tailored to the specific context of your team and expand on how to think about implementing practical changes. Every workshop also presents an opportunity for your team to learn directly from our first-hand perspectives on navigating care settings and the provincial health care system as gender-diverse patients.
Fill out the booking form below to request a workshop, or email us at info@tsnl.org to learn more. We look forward to meeting you.
About to the project
This project grew from a clear and urgent need in our community: there simply aren’t enough healthcare providers in Newfoundland and Labrador offering gender-affirming and transition-related care.
Right now, most gender-affirming care (GAC) in the province depends on a small group of dedicated providers—mostly based in the St. John’s area—who are doing incredible work under immense pressure. Wait times can stretch for months, especially for people living outside the metro region. For many, that means long travel distances, delayed care, or going without entirely. The system is fragile, and one resignation or change in staffing can create a province-wide gap in access.
But we also know this: gender-affirming care is primary care. It’s not a specialty reserved for a few—it’s something any family doctor or nurse practitioner can provide. What’s missing isn’t willingness, but confidence, knowledge, and support.
That’s where this toolkit comes in.
Developed by and for the community, NL Gender-Affirming Care Toolkit was designed to help primary care providers feel equipped, informed, and ready to offer affirming care. It breaks down barriers, fills knowledge gaps, and helps create healthcare spaces where Two-Spirit, trans, non-binary, and gender diverse people can feel safe, respected, and seen.
By building understanding and capacity within primary care, we can move toward a system where access to gender-affirming care doesn’t depend on where you live, or how lucky you are to find the right provider. Together, we can make affirming care the norm, not the exception.
Acknowledgements
Thanks to our Community Advisory Board and the medical professionals who contributed to the project
Thanks to Kate McHardy, our graphic designer
This project has been funded by Women and Gender Equality Canada.
