Kristina Hernandez, left, and their mother Laura Hernandez pose for a photo Tuesday, April 12, 2022.
Monday, April 25, 2022 | 2 a.m.
Kristina Hernandez was 11 years old when she started her transition, wanting to use puberty blockers to halt her male puberty from commencing.
She recalled how difficult it was for her and her mother, Laura Hernandez, to find options locally for the hormone suppressants.
At 13, Kristina Hernandez began taking estrogen, the hormone that would allow her to develop traditionally feminine features. Over the years, she struggled to keep her testosterone levels at bay, as doctors did not fully understand how to assist her transition.
But since then, Kristina Hernandez, now 19, has changed her gender marker, which now shows “female” on her legal documents, and came out publicly to her peers at school. She also monitors her hormone levels at the Huntridge Family Clinic on East Sahara Avenue in Las Vegas.
This cornerstone of her identity was neither quick nor easy, she said.
“I think that the world has grown a lot in what’s going on almost a decade now since I transitioned,” she said. “I haven’t had a perfect experience as a trans person in the medical field.”
Gender-affirming health care not always easy to find
Huntridge Family Clinic is one of few Las Vegas health care providers offering gender-affirming care like puberty blockers and hormone replacement therapy, said Rob Phoenix, nurse practitioner and owner of the clinic.
Phoenix said he has been a nurse practitioner in Las Vegas since 1997, but his experience with gender care began with a phone call from a mother in 2013 — her son wanted to transition, she said, and she could find neither a primary care physician nor pediatrician who was willing to help.
Nine years later, this hesitancy from youth providers has not changed, Phoenix said. Today, the clinic often gets referrals for youths seeking transitions from primary care facilities or pediatricians who do not want to do the care in house.
It is an easy process to administer the hormones, Phoenix said — but combined with additional hurdles erected by insurance companies, which often do not cover or push back on coverage of the hormone therapy, as well as delays in getting the prescriptions filled by pharmacies, the short timeline can meander into months.
“The challenge that we have here at the clinic is finding and hiring, you know, gender-affirming providers,” Phoenix said. “You know, a lot of people are interested in doing primary care, but when it comes to the conversations around gender or sexual health, that’s not something that most providers are engaging in or wanting to do.”
While in Nevada it may be difficult to find gender-affirming care, in other states, these services are on the defensive.
In Texas, for instance, Republican Gov. Greg Abbott signed a bill classifying gender care as “child abuse” into law, a move that was later blocked by a state district judge.
Additionally, the Florida health district on Wednesday said in a statement that gender transition services — like hormone therapy, puberty blockers and gender reassignment surgery — “should not be a treatment option” for transgender and gender-diverse children and adolescents, who should instead be “provided social support by peers and family and seek counseling from a licensed provider.”
‘An asset to the community’
As Kristina Hernandez adjusted her physical appearance to her gender identity, her mother, started the Nevada Alliance for Student Diversity, a local organization that centers conversations about gender diversity around youth in the state.
The group’s most recent event was March 27 at Sunset Park in honor of Transgender Day of Visibility, officially recognized March 31.
Laura Hernandez, 47, started the alliance to coalesce with other parents. Together, they could seek answers for how to support their trans children, she said.
In the face of further conversations surrounding laws dubbed “Don’t Say Gay” from states like Florida — which bans discussions of gender identity as well as sexual orientation in kindergarten through third-grade classrooms — Laura Hernandez said parents and older adults should listen to kids’ needs around their gender identity.
This is a matter of unlearning a foundation of her childhood: that children’s perspectives are inferior to their parents’ opinions, Laura Hernandez said.
“We think because they’re young that they don’t know things, that they don’t have insights, that they don’t have gifts to give,” she said. “They’re so way ahead of me, teaching me things and helping me to see things in a way that I would never have thought about or seen, had I not had this opportunity to be on this journey with my daughter.”
Trans Day of Visibility was proclaimed in Nevada by Gov. Steve Sisolak on March 30 at the LGBTQ Center of Southern Nevada. The national event is an annual celebration of transgender identities and a day of awareness for the discrimination they face.
“There’s a lot of hate speech out there, so we need to do what we can to make Nevada and Las Vegas, Clark County, particularly more welcoming, more diverse and more loving when it comes to people of all races, creeds, colors, sexual persuasion, whatever it might be,” Sisolak said at the news conference. “I’m proud that Nevada is a diverse state.”
At the Trans Day of Visibility event, Kristina Hernandez said she was struck by the number of gender diverse kids at Sunset Park, some of whom were about the same age she was when she transitioned.
“My mom has created this space that didn’t exist outside of Nevada in this way,” she said. “She’s just been such an asset to the community for so many years.”
Jay Wilkins is a youth facilitator for Nevada Alliance of Student Diversity. Transitioning when he was 16, the now-21-year-old — who uses he and they pronouns, a mark of his trans-masculine identity, he said — shares his experience with other young people.
The youth group meets once per week to discuss resources in the local LGBTQ community, like doctors who do hormone replacement therapy.
At the Sunset Park event, Kristina Hernandez surprised Wilkins with a mentorship award for his work with the group.
“I have a lot of experience being out, and I’ve experienced a lot of the things that teenage kids are experiencing now,” he said. “When I received that award, it really put into perspective, like, the impact that I make on the youth, and that’s really a great feeling.”
