Transitioning 2.0
By August, Felicity Giles knew it was time. Her happiness was long overdue. The 36-year-old trucker changed her name, adopted the middle name Saoirse—“freedom” in Gaelic—and started looking into medically transitioning. “It was mainly an attempt to break from who I was and who I grew up as,” she told me. At the start of 2021, she spent weeks calling Planned Parenthoods in Fort Worth, Texas, where she and her spouse live, seeking a consultation for hormone replacement therapy. But the pandemic, and high demand, meant waiting more than a month to get a consultation, let alone begin HRT. Even when appointments opened up, she said, “I called them every day and never got through.”
Scrolling through Twitter one night, Felicity read about Plume, a new subscription telehealth service that makes it easier for trans people to access hormones and lab work or procure
