PEORIA — Dana Garber had trouble finding a doctor who knew exactly how to treat her — or a dentist, or cardiologist, or nearly any kind of medical provider, for that matter.

"When I told them I was transgender they just give you a deer in the headlights look. They don't know what to say to you. They don' t know how to react," Garber said. "Then you find yourself in the position of educating your health care practitioner."

Garber, who was assigned a male gender at birth, now identifies as female. She's been dressing and living as a woman for more than a year, a transition she made after 51/2 decades of life as a male, and began five months ago traveling back and forth to Chicago to receive hormone therapy, a service that until recently was difficult to access for transgender individuals in downstate Illinois.

As a transgender advocate and active member of the Peoria Transgender Society, Garber knows well the lengths that some transgender people will go to receive hormone therapy: She carpools with another person to appointments in Chicago and has a friend who sees a specialist in St. Louis. A new initiative by Planned Parenthood that began offering the treatments in Peoria, Pekin and Bloomington this month, she said, will make a major difference in the lives of transgender people who don't have the time or resources to seek care in larger cities.

"This is like a godsend to the central Illinois community. We're not all Caitlyn Jenner," she said, referring to the trans community's most well-known member, the Olympian and reality TV star formerly known as Bruce Jenner. "Most of us are struggling. We're having trouble finding employment, we're having trouble keeping employment and we're being discriminated against regularly."

Hormone therapy, also known as hormone replacement therapy, is, as its name suggests, the use of medications to reduce or increase levels of estrogen and testosterone inside the body, which can lead to feminization or masculinization of certain physical characteristics such as weight dispersal and hair growth. Many individuals who identify as transgender will never receive hormone therapy. Very few will receive gender reassignment surgery, a much more complicated and unrelated surgical procedure.

For Garber, that means every-other-week injections of Delestrogen to boost estrogen, or female hormone, levels and a daily dose of Spironolactone, an antiandrogen that blocks the effects of testosterone, the dominant hormone in males.

"It does the same thing to your body as it does to a teenage girl when she starts puberty, basically," Garber said, adding that a person using hormone therapy to become more masculine would experience similar effects of male puberty.

The number of people in central Illinois who identify as transgender is difficult to estimate. More still would fall under other LGBTQ categories such as gender queer, gender nonconforming, gender variant or gender neutral. They can be people who are born physically male but identify as female, vice versa or anywhere in between, Garber said.

"Gender identity is in your head between your ears, not between your legs," she said.

But what was clear to the administration at Planned Parenthood, which has been providing non-hormonal supportive services to the transgender community for decades, was that their clinical needs weren't being met in all communities.

"That was really a huge problem, so as soon as we started talking about this … we were just inundated with phone calls and excitement from social service agencies," said Brenda Wolfe, director of clinical services and education initiatives for Planned Parenthood Illinois.

The organization rolled out hormone therapy at three Chicago-area facilities last fall serving patients from as far away as Columbia, Mo., and added hormone therapy in Champaign earlier this year, where they've received the greatest amount of interest, probably because people living in that community don't have easy access to multiple facilities specializing in transgender services available in Chicago.

Wolfe said the organization has provided hormone therapy to about 15 different individuals since it began offering the services last year, and expects those numbers to grow as they roll out more downstate programs, including Peoria, Pekin and Bloomington as of Aug. 1.

It was a natural progression, Wolfe said, for the organization that has long offered counseling, social work and sexual health services to the transgender community, helping them navigate challenges such as talking to family about gender identity, obtaining a driver's license or what to expect at work. Some Planned Parenthood offices on the West Coast have been offering hormone therapy for as long as 10 years.

"We fully believe that the individual feels what they feel, and we accept that and want to help them with this transition as much as possible," Wolfe said.

"Gender identity shouldn't affect one's access to health care."

To implement that approach in its clinics, Planned Parenthood did extensive training with its administration and clinical staff through modules and presentations by other agencies ahead of rolling out hormone therapy programs across the state to help them understand the appropriate language and break away from the mindset of a gender binary, realizing that some people don't fit neatly into "male" and "female" categories.

That kind of acceptance, Garber said, is the very reason that transgender people choose to seek out hormone therapy in the first place.

"Blending in is extremely important. We don't want to attract attention. We don't want people to look at us and point and laugh and whisper, and when you look like a man in women's clothing they're going to do that. That's the whole idea of hormone therapy is to try to get your body to match your mind," she said.

For more information on Planned Parenthood's hormone therapy services or to schedule an appointment, visit www.plannedparenthood.com/planned-parenthood-illinois or call offices in Peoria at 681-0350 or Pekin at 347-1274.

Laura Nightengale is the Journal Star health and lifestyle reporter. She can be reached at 686-3181 or lnightengale@pjstar.com. Follow her on Twitter @lauranight.