Pensacola resident Natalie Rockwell recently received the phone call from her doctor she had been dreading for months: Gov. Ron DeSantis had passed legislation restricting gender-affirming care.
Legislation signed by the governor on May 17, SB 254, mandates that physicians must be in the same room as their patient when providing gender affirming care.
Rockwell, 34, is a transgender woman whose care provider was Planned Parenthood in Tallahassee, which uses Spektrum Health to provide comprehensive primary healthcare options for LGBTQ+ patients and is one of the closest providers available that offers gender-affirming care. Since Rockwell is no longer able to use telehealth services to extend her prescription for estrogen pills and testosterone blockers, she is one of the many people scrambling to find a new provider before her prescriptions run out.
“Florida had for a while been kind of lagging behind some of the other red states when it came to a lot of the anti-trans legislation that we’re seeing nationally,” Rockwell said. “But then all of a sudden, Florida had four or five different bills all get introduced around the same time and it was like they were (not only) playing catch up, but also they wanted to pass every other state at how hard they were going after trans people.”