When Gulf Coast native Stacie Pace decided to open her own clinic, the nurse practitioner carefully considered one question: Whose healthcare needs were not being met? The answer, she concluded, was transgender people in Mississippi, who are estimated to number around 15,000. Nationwide, nearly 20% of trans people say they’ve been denied access to healthcare because they are trans. And in a state with only one medical facility consistently offering hormone therapy, one healthcare need stood out to Pace. “The hardest thing for trans people to get access to is hormones,” she said. “Here and there you’ll find a primary care or endocrinologist that does it, but they don’t advertise it. They usually don’t take very many of those patients because they don’t want to be seen as the ‘trans provider’ and build up that reputation.”