HATCH collective is a group of trans people based in the UK.

Our Structures

At the moment, HATCH collective is a diarchy, with two people making all of the major decisions.

In the future, we will have a steering committee formed from a diverse group of trans people. The role of this committee will be to provide feedback on our procedures (see below). These procedures will then be carried out by the core team.

Our Principles

  1. HATCH collective is an organisation that will provide free hormone level testing for anyone taking hormone treatments for reasons of gender.

  2. The geographical region HATCH collective will operate in consists of:

    • The island of Great Britain
    • Northern Ireland
    • Any other parts of the British Isles that are part of the United Kingdom

  3. HATCH is not a general-purpose care organisation, and healthcare needs beyond hormone testing are not within the scope of HATCH collective.

  4. Principles, structures and procedures relating to the operation of HATCH will be posted online. This will ensure that our work is transparent as well as replicable.

  5. The work of HATCH collective will be guided by procedure. If something needs to be done, and it is within the scope of HATCH collective, and there is no preexisting procedure that covers it, then procedure will be drafted. In urgent circumstances HATCH collective may act without first drafting procedure, and in such cases procedure will be drafted after the fact to document what we have done.

  6. HATCH collective will aim to be as accessible to as many people as possible. Anybody taking hormones for reasons of gender is welcome to access testing through us, and we will not exclude anyone.

  7. HATCH collective will have a steering committee, the primary purpose of which is to ensure our procedures do not exclude anyone, deliberately or inadvertently, who may need to access hormone testing.

  8. Money received by HATCH collective will go towards the following:

    1. Covering infrastructure costs, such as web hosting and e-mail;
    2. Legal costs necessary to keep the activities of HATCH collective safe and within the law;
    3. Supplying hormone tests to people who request them;
    4. Paying a living wage (as set by the Living Wage Foundation) for the services of our steering committee.

    Any other money collected by HATCH collective will either be saved for future use or donated to other organisations working to serve the needs of the trans community.

  9. Personally-identifiable information collected by HATCH collective will be used for the following:

    1. Providing hormone tests to people who request them;
    2. Rate-limiting hormone tests to one per person per year, unless there are extenuating circumstances, so we can detect duplicate requests and avoid “denial-of-service” attacks.

    Information stored for the purpose of rate-limiting is kept as a cryptographic hash for one year, enabling us to see if a given person has received a test recently without being able to retrieve a full list. Other personally-identifiable information will be removed as soon as we receive confirmation that the test results have been received. No personally-identifiable information will be kept for longer than a year.

Our Procedures

A procedure marked as “legal” or “adopted” is ready to be used. A procedure marked as “provisional” has yet to be approved by the steering committee, but can still be used if time is limited, if the committee is unavailable, or for a limited times as a “dry run”.