Rise With Pride: From an HRT Gender-Affirming Doctor at LA Pride’s Perspective
What "Rise With Pride" Means From Where I Sit
This year's LA Pride theme is "Rise with Pride." The nonprofit behind it, Christopher Street West, described it as a calling, a responsibility.
I'm Dr. John Fernandez. I run Aurum Haven Medical, a small direct care practice in West Hollywood at 8550 Santa Monica Blvd, STE 300, Studio 305 focused on gender-affirming hormone therapy with internal medicine support. This June, for the first time, I'll be at LA Pride with a booth. LA Pride is in Hollywood this year, and my booth will be booth #72. Come say hi!
I want to explain why that matters to me, because it's the same reason I built my practice the way I did.
A community that has learned to be resilient usually learned it the hard way.
Behind a lot of that resilience is care that came late, providers who didn't know the medicine, and a system that intentionally got in the way.
Sometimes I think of the simple things that somehow go wrong. Like injection supplies. I can send a specific prescription for a specific set of needles and syringes and STILL the pharmacy may only give 4 items instead of 24, sometimes of different lengths than ordered, which can mean multiple unnecessary trips to the pharmacy. Or don’t even get me started on sharps containers - these should easily be given out with injection supply prescriptions, and yet a majority of my patients have said that pharmacies just didn’t give them the sharps container.
Rising with pride, from where I sit, is not a slogan. It looks like making excellent care easier to reach, and being someone you can consult before you're in a moment of need.
A Personal Journey to Showing Up at Pride
Before I opened Aurum Haven, I spent five years doing this work at UCLA Health. I watched a lot of patients do well. I also saw how much of the difficulty had nothing to do with the medicine itself.
The medical complications were very few and far between. However, finding a consistent provider who had time, energy, and emotional space - that’s a different story. Let alone finding a provider they trusted enough to feel safe and authentic. Most of my patients want to feel heard, not have the kind of experience that makes you put off the next doctor’s appointment for years. That sentiment stayed with me.
So when I built my own practice, I built it around those gaps. I wanted a space that felt less like a clinic and more like somewhere you could exhale, without losing any of the seriousness that hormone care deserves. You can read more about Aurum Haven Medical and how I work.
A booth at Pride is that same instinct, taken one step further. It's me coming to you, in daylight, surrounded by music and friends, before there's ever a chart or a lab order. For some people, meeting a doctor that way is the first thing that finally makes the next step feel possible.
Why Visibility Is Part of the Medicine
I've come to believe that a doctor being visible and emotionally present is part of the care, not separate from it.
People skip care for a lot of reasons, but one of the quietest is that healthcare has felt cold, impersonal or condescending.
Seeing a provider out in the community, as a face and personality answering questions, helps close the gap.
Visibility also translates to transparency. I can tell you plainly what I charge, which is a flat quarterly fee with no insurance to bill or argue with. Care that supplements and enhances your healthcare team. I can tell you what my model is good at and where it falls short, the same way I'd tell a friend. There's no referral wall to get past and no mystery about how any of it works.
That kind of plain talk is hard to come by in a lot of medical settings, and the absence of it keeps people stuck. When you can look someone in the eye at a booth and answer "how much is this, how does it actually work, is it even right for me" without ambiguity, you remove a barrier to care.
Come Say Hi: What I'm Hoping to Talk About at LA Pride
Please stop by even if you have no intention of starting medical care with me.
Come if you're curious. Come if you started hormone therapy somewhere else and it hasn't felt right. Come if you have a question you've been a little embarrassed to ask a doctor in a formal setting.
I'm glad to talk through what starting actually looks like, what the lab side of it involves, whether telehealth or in-person makes more sense for your life, or what switching providers would mean if you've been thinking about it. None of that requires you to become a patient.
I'll have a card, a friendly face, and direct answers. Bring a friend. Bring the question you've been sitting on. If all you leave with is a name you remember for later HRT supplemental care, that's a good outcome to me.
Finding Me After Pride
Pride is one afternoon. Care is a relationship, and that's the part I'm actually in this for. If our conversation at the booth turns into wanting to take a real step, the door stays open long after the festival packs up.
If you want to understand the process first, I wrote a plain-language walk through of how to start hormone therapy in Los Angeles that lays out your options, including the ones that have nothing to do with me. And if you'd rather just talk it through, new patients can start with a free 15-minute consult so we can both figure out whether this is the right fit.
You can book a full initial consultation or inquiry phone call. Simply text me at (323) 212-5404 or email info@AurumHavenMedical.com. No pressure, no rush.
I'll be at the Pride Village on Hollywood Boulevard on Sunday, June 14. Come find me. I'd love to say hi. ^_^
