Dr. Jerrica Kirkley Creates Safety for Trans Folks with Plume

“In my own, internal sense of who I was, it was a massive relief and literally like taking a breath after holding your breath for 35 years. I think I carried a lot of anger, a lot of frustration, and it just melted away after finally admitting to myself and others, ‘This is who I am,’” Dr. Jerrica Kirkley explains in a deeply personal conversation about identity.

She goes on, “I brought this intense alignment and everything that I love about medicine, providing creative ways to access care to vulnerable and marginalized communities, and specifically the trans community, which is the community I’ve worked with for over five years, grown to love, and also to love the work. Then, when I was able to get to the point of coming out myself as trans, it was 100 percent in alignment in terms of my vision of what I think healthcare could look like.”

Kirkley is the co-founder of Plume, the cutting-edge telehealth app which provides life-saving, gender-affirming hormone therapy (HRT) treatment to trans and gender-variant individuals. She is absolutely lovely and emotes a kind of warmth which is as inviting as it is admirable.

She speaks of herself with the confidence of a person who has grown to know and accept herself, all while embodying a humility that is down-to-Earth and approachable. OUT FRONT first met Kirkley in 2019, shortly after she and her friend and Plume co-founder Dr. Matthew Wetschler launched their new business.

Through the work that Plume introduced to the Colorado LGBTQ community, folks seeking HRT were introduced to a concept that was rarely provided to them: a pleasant experience in a healthcare setting.

Becoming a doctor was always a part of her plan, even back from the days of high school when she first began imagining what her career path would look like. Kirkley saw a future for herself in a job which incorporated her skills in the realm of science with her desire to enter the field of direct service work. In college, she began to broaden her horizons, considering a global perspective and the understanding of health disparities to marginalized communities to help narrow her vision of exactly what this work for her was going to look like.

She desired variety in the type of care she provided on a daily basis as well as incorporating the social justice approach that appealed to her, so Kirkley entered family medicine. Throughout her residency, she was given the opportunity to enter the specialty field of gender-affirming care via the work her mentor, Chandra Hartman, was involved in.

“She really wanted to create an LGBTQ+ curriculum for the residency program covering those sort of unique characteristics which end up resulting in health disparities for those communities and trying to find ways to turn those disparities around,” Kirkley says. “A piece of that was, of course, the trans community and teaching medical providers how to provide gender-affirming care.

Kirkley describes how she helped develop the curriculum that revolved around creating protocols in delivering HRT and other gender-affirming treatments in which both in-training residents and licensed physician faculty members new to providing gender-affirming care could open a book with all the tools available to them.

In her experience, most often, any physician hesitant to provide HRT to a patient stemmed from a lack of knowledge and education about that type of treatment. This hesitation can now be alleviated because of the work Kirkley did in creating this empowering book of resources, care options, and treatment plans.

After med school, Kirkley took a job at a community health center to return to the original vision of aligning her work with marginalized communities and folks who don’t have access to health insurance or a higher quality of care. She worked at Salud Family Health Center in Commerce City for five years and continued to build a panel of trans patients who were seeking the gender-affirming care in which she had become an expert in providing.

Kirkley helped develop a gender-affirming care structure for Salud so the community health center could create a network of providers who were skilled and competent in this work, and a partnership with The Transgender Center of the Rockies was developed.

“It was an amazing thing to be a part of, and as we created these little access bubbles, people would just flock to them, ” Kirkley reminisces. “It was very clear in my mind that as many people that were coming to care, there were so many more who were not being reached. That ultimately became the starting point of Plume.”

The idea was to provide increased access to HRT and other forms of medication for gender-affirming care in a convenient, comfortable, and enjoyable format. The list of barriers for trans folks to receive the care they need is exhaustive and downright unacceptable. Whether it’s due to the fragile connection of health insurance to employment, the geographic location of a person and the lack of access to a safe healthcare facility, or the likely uncomfortable, harassing, and abusive interactions many trans folks have in medical establishments, many trans people simply go without seeking care. However, Plume saw the possibilities as well as extreme benefit in removing these barriers and quickly found their medical practice booming with demand.

When Plume launched, which was prior to COVID, the idea of acquiring medical care through an app and never needing to physically share space with a clinician was nearly unheard of. However, this approach that was once scoffed at is now becoming common practice, and with the trial-and-error phase of their systems already figured out, this put Plume in a place to quickly and easily meet the demand of the community.

In less than one year, the team grew from a handful of employees to more than 20 medical providers, care coordinators, and clinical management specialists. With a true understanding of how traumatizing the process of navigating gender-affirming care can be, the entire process with Plume is gentle, compassionate, and informative. From the moment a person inquires through the app until they get their first round of medications delivered to their doorstep, the typically confusing system is made easy, approachable, and affordable.

Patient reviews reflect how life-saving the services that Plume offers are, and how the format fits their needs unlike any other option out there. This is a true success story for the patients, the business, and for Kirkley. Through the process of developing Plume, Kirkley not only found a long-term career path that would eventually help countless trans folks receive the crucial care they needed, this was also opening the door to her finding her true self.

“It’s kind of like a coming-of-age story where, like, the company that I started and myself were both basically born at the same time,” she says with a smile. Nearing the edge of burnout before Plume even opened its virtual doors, it was taking a step back and being authentic to her own identity that made the next generation of gender-affirming care possible.

In putting a retrospective lens on her life, Kirkley takes a pause to think about what in her career makes her most proud. Her answer even surprises herself.

“I’d probably have to pick my own coming out. It’s hard to imagine a lot of this happening if I couldn’t be honest with myself. I think it can sound cliché, but you have to take care of yourself before you can take care of others. That was a huge piece of it that let everything else fall together,” she explains.

“It was a lot of upheaval in my personal life, and really challenging to do it, but I think it enabled me to love myself more, find clarity and direction in my own life, and then be able to dedicate myself fully to something like Plume in a way that I don’t know if I ever have.”

There is true value in being a doctor who has been through the process of transitioning. She can provide her patients the comfort of knowing she has been through exactly what they are going through now. Building a deeper level of rapport has created another element of safety for everyone who crosses paths with Kirkley.

While she carries a great sense of responsibility in providing the trans community, and every individual person within it, the best service possible, she is humbled at the fact that she is able to be a part of something that is so helpful to so many.

To learn more about Plume and to access Dr. Kirkley’s gender-affirming care services, visit getplume.co.