We’ve been here before. When Dobbs came for abortion care in our states, we did two things: We opened clinics across state lines so our patients would still have a legal option. And we stayed. We kept our original clinics open, expanding the care we'd always offered or always wanted to offer. When Skrmetti came for gender-affirming care, we kept providing that too, because abortion care patients and transgender patients are not separate communities. The calculation patients make before they walk through the door is identical for both communities: Will I be seen? Will I be safe? Will the person across from me treat my body like a problem to be managed, or a life to be supported? June marks anniversaries of both Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health and US v. Skrmetti, and that conviction has never felt more urgent.

Long before Dobbs or Skrmetti, the intersection of abortion rights and trans rights was already living in our waiting rooms, in the patients who received reproductive care and gender-affirming hormone therapy (GAHT) under the same roof; in the person who drove hours across the state because we were the only provider they trusted; and in those who trust us with their whole-person care because their grandmothers, mothers, sisters, aunts, and friends have relied on our clinics for care for 50 years. Throughout that history, our organizations have been guided by a simple principle: When members of our community are targeted, excluded, or denied the care they need, we do not look away. We listen, we adapt, and we show up.

When abortion care moved across the border after Dobbs, the patients who remained still needed care they couldn’t access at home. The wall between reproductive healthcare and LGBTQIA healthcare that exists in policy language and funding categories has never existed in our exam rooms.

What connects every patient who walks through our doors, whether they’re coming in for an abortion or a hormone therapy appointment, is something our staff recognized long before we had language for it: the experience of arriving at a clinic while carrying the weight of a political target on your back. A clinic’s job of creating a space where people can receive care without shame or fear has always been exactly the same job regardless of why they came.

Bodily autonomy is the foundational principle of reproductive rights, and it only means something if it applies to everyone.

Marty had learned, growing up as a transgender person in rural Maryland, to brace himself before every medical appointment, because finding healthcare that was both competent and genuinely affirming had always required a fight. What he found at our clinic was a staff that met him without conditions, no justifications required, no explanations asked for. His mother has supported the Women’s Health Center (WHC) since its earliest days, and used to volunteer as a clinic escort. Watching the same clinic support her son in his gender-affirming care gave her, in her own words, a peace she hadn’t known she needed. When gaps in care left Ben, a transgender West Virginian, navigating painful dysphoric cycles and a transition that had stalled, he found his way to WHC West Virginia. Today, he says that every time he........

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