Metro Wellness and Community Centers — currently providing Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT) to 584 patients throughout Tampa Bay — has announced that nearly half of those patients have begun receiving care within the last year.

“We’ve had 275 new HRT patients and that’s without counting the 76 who are in another program that we offer,” Metro’s Trans Care Coordinator Lucas Wehle says. “Almost half of our patients have started HRT care with us within the last year… that’s huge. We’ve had a huge growth.”

HRT is utilized within the transgender and gender nonconforming communities for the purpose of allowing individuals to more closely align their sexual characteristics with their gender identity. It includes both feminizing hormone therapy, typically utilized by transgender women or transfeminine people, and masculinizing hormone therapy, typically utilized by transgender men or transmasculine people.