Fluid realities: Exogenous testosterone and the multiplication of transgender worlds

Rillark M. Bolton

A thesis submitted for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences The University of Sydney

2020

Declaration of originality

This is to certify that to the best of my knowledge, the content of this thesis is my own work. This thesis has not been submitted for any degree or other purposes.

I certify that the intellectual content of this thesis is the product of my own work and that all the assistance received in preparing this thesis and sources have been acknowledged.

Rillark M. Bolton 27th January 2020

2 Author attribution

Parts of this thesis is published as the following:

Bolton, R. M. (in press). Reworking testosterone as a man’s hormone: Non-binary people using testosterone within a binary gender system. Somatechnics.

These publications are wholly the product on my own research design, intellectual analysis and written work.

Rillark M. Bolton 27th January 2020

3 Abstract

Despite the proliferation of material and discursive resistance by both trans people and trans studies, the emergence and experience of being trans/gender/sexual is still deeply embedded in and oftentimes constrained by a medical “treatment” paradigm, typically conceived as the need to intervene in a perceived misalignment between the sexed body and the gendered mind; the solving of the wrong body. This wrong body narrative (WBN) has extended beyond medical boundaries to become an explanatory model for why trans people exist at all, immersing itself in a range of features associated with trans experience. “Gender dysphoria” is situated as the negative trans affect, the trigger for gendered medical interventions into the body. As trans scholars have argued, this has the potential to institute a politics of ressentiment in trans discourse; where trans people become self-defined by an attachment to being unwell (Heyes & Latham, 2018). And, for trans masculine encounters with medicine, the WBN also reinforces a belief in testosterone as a man’s hormone, and as the sole actor in a binary transition into manhood.

This thesis draws on thirty qualitative interviews with trans/gender/sexual men and trans and non- binary exogenous testosterone users living in Australia. Alongside the reflections of my own testosterone use, I centre trans masculine people’s experiences of their bodies and lives to theorise trans and non-binary people’s relation to testosterone, away from the WBN and its totalising explanation of trans gender existence. I do so by drawing upon work within science and technology studies (STS) that approaches reality as multiple, as formed in practice and emerging from encounters between phenomena. This allows us to understand trans gender relations with medicine and the body as creative experiments with embodied subjectivities, without getting trapped inside the binary and essentialising aspects of the WBN.

This thesis argues that framing exogenous testosterone use as a creative rather than corrective practice has a number of conceptual and practical advantages. First, it enables us to situate the increased visibility of trans masculine gender practices in relation to broader cultural and historical changes surrounding the body, gender and medical activism. Secondly, it intervenes in the politics of ressentiment associated with the WBN and discourses of gender dysphoria that trans scholars have begun to discuss. Transition can be situated as a vital socio-technological experiment, rather than the medical correction of an innate pathology. Finally, it enables a better understanding of non-binary identities and practices that refuse discourses of binary gender on which the WBN is based. No longer a means of aligning an internal male

4 gender identity with an external body, testosterone use becomes a practice, one that is shifted away from an internal identity dictating specific actions, and as a way of unmaking gender. In re-framing these features of trans experience new potentials arise. Possibilities for new coalitions, for new practices and experiences and new ways of more fully or comfortably holding trans bodies and lives emerge.

5 Acknowledgements

This thesis could not be done without the various human and non-human beings that make up my world. Each are due more thanks for than the words in this thesis.

The biggest thanks go to the thirty participants that agreed to share their lives, their time and their energy with me. Thank you for every conversation and every shared thought that have carried themselves (often unwillingly) into my self and into this thesis. I am count myself lucky every day to share a community with you all.

I also wanted to thank from the core of my now wasted being Professor Kane Race. Thank you for your intellectual generosity, your humour and your stories. Your pointed words that cleared the path for where to take the soup inside my mind. Thank you for emailing me about my singulars and my plurals from the various continents on which you were typing. For giving me the pep when I had no pep left and for having faith in the impact of this work when all I could see were letters on the page. Thank you also to Dr Astrida Neimanis, for your insights, perspectives and politics, especially during the final hurdles. To Professor Catherine Driscoll for your insightful and attentive work in the beginning. And to Associate Professor Ruth Barcan for reading and commenting on earlier work and for generally being someone so admirably generous of spirit. A phenomenal thankyou to the Gender and Cultural Studies department, and the students and academics working there (especially Professor Elspeth Probyn and Professor Meaghan Morris as in-house enforcers of attendance and cultivators of community). I feel truly blessed to have fallen into such a supportive, engaging and wonderful collective of people and ideas, I would not have finished without your support.

To my PhD friends- Rachel, Jan, Paul, Mia and Arpita and my non-PhD friends, Frankie S., Frankie G., Kanami, Ell, Kit, Clark and Lucky, thank you for commiserating when things were tough, celebrating when things were good and tolerating my absence towards the end. And a special thank you to Rosie and Paul for lending me those extremely valuable extra eyes.

To my non-human kin- Ru, Bronte, Wash, Zoe and Sedgwick thank you for the cuddles, the keyboard sitting and the forced walking that kept me (just) sane enough to complete.

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A massive thankyou to my blood family, I could not have asked for a more accepting, funny, warm, delightful and ever so slightly odd group of people to have been born into, thank you for getting me here and for continuing to be around for whatever is next.

And finally, to my non-blood kin: Dylan, Kate, Tee, William, J and Liz thank you for all the groceries, food prep, dog walking, cleaning, chats, laughs, condolences, rage quitting support, glandular fever health care recommendations and “you got this” text messages. My heart is warmed by your presence and I am blessed by the strange turn of events that brought you all into my life. You shall all find yourselves ingrained into the (digital) paper of this thesis. Thank you.

7 TABLE OF CONTENTS

DECLARATION OF ORIGINALITY 2

AUTHOR ATTRIBUTION 3

ABSTRACT 4

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS 6

TABLE OF CONTENTS 8

VIGNETTES 11 EXPERIMENTS IN TESTOSTERONE 11 A LOVE LETTER TO TESTOSTERONE 11

INTRODUCTION- PREPPING THE AREA: TESTOSTERONE BONDS AND THE WRONG BODY NARRATIVE 12 THE WRONG BODY NARRATIVE 14 ENACTED REALITIES AND EMERGENT PHENOMENA FOR TRANS STUDIES 21 THE THESIS CHAPTERS 24 METHOD 30

VIGNETTES 35

CONTAMINATION 35

CHAPTER ONE- AT THE INTERSECTIONS OF TESTOSTERONE: TESTOSTERONE’S HISTORY WITH GENDER, SEXUALITY AND RACE 36 MASCULINITY AND TESTES “BEFORE” SCIENCE 36 TESTOSTERONE, SCIENCE AND SEX 37 HORMONES BEYOND SEX-GENDER: SEXUALITY AND RACE 41 CONCLUSION 47

VIGNETTES 49

ROUTINES 49

CHAPTER 2- MALLEABLE BODIES, PERFORMATIVE GENDER AND MEDICAL ACTIVISM: THE ARRIVAL OF WESTERN TRANS MASCULINITY 50 TRANSSEXUALITY, MEDICINE AND THE ABSENCE OF TRANS MEN BEFORE THE 1990S 52 THE MOMENT FOR TRANSGENDER ACTIVISM 56 THE MALLEABLE BODY AND GENDER AS PERFORMATIVE 59 MEDICAL ACTIVISM 73 CONCLUSION 80

8 VIGNETTES 82 THE BODY IN FLUX 82 SINGED TREETOPS 82

CHAPTER THREE- FEELING DYSPHORIC, BEING UNWELL: HOW DYSPHORIA AS AN EMERGENT PHENOMENON CAN DISRUPT A POLITICS OF TRANS RESSENTIMENT 83

GENDER DYSPHORIA AND A MIND-BODY DISCREPANCY 85 EMERGENT PHENOMENA 90 DYSPHORIA AS EMERGING WITH ATTENTION TO THE BODY, BODY POTENTIAL AND HOPE FOR THE FUTURE 91 CONCLUSION 106

VIGNETTES 109

FORMALISING MEDICINE 109 DAY FIFTY-TWO 109

CHAPTER 4- TRANSITIONING WITH MORE THAN TESTOSTERONE: THE ROLE OF AUDIO-VISUAL TECHNOLOGIES IN THE EMERGENCE OF TRANSITION’S EFFECTS 110 THE PRE-DETERMINED TRANS TESTOSTERONE TRANSITION 113 TRANSITION AS EMERGENT 116 GIFTS OF THE DISPOSITIF 118 CONCLUSION 137

VIGNETTES 139

NOT MY KIND OF PEOPLE 139 GETTING TESTOSTERONE 139

CHAPTER FIVE- UNMAKING GENDER: NON-BINARY PEOPLE USING “MEN’S HORMONES” 140

NON-BINARY PARTICIPANTS 141 NON-BINARY IDENTITIES – A BRIEF HISTORY AND CONTEXT 142 ACADEMIC ENGAGEMENT WITH NON-BINARY EXPERIENCES 145 NON-BINARY TESTOSTERONE USE 152 THE MULTIPLICITY OF TESTOSTERONE 155 SHIFTING NON-BINARY RELATIONSHIPS TO TESTOSTERONE 161 CONCLUSION 166

VIGNETTES 167

A RETURN TO INJECTIONS 167

CONCLUSION- WITHDRAWING THE SYRINGE 168

9 REFERENCES 173

APPENDICES 197

APPENDIX 1- INTERVIEW PLAN 197 APPENDIX 2- PARTICIPANT DEMOGRAPHICS 198 APPENDIX 3- LUCAS’ DRAWING FULL SIZE 200 APPENDIX 5- ORDER FORM: TESTOSTERONE GEL 203

10 Vignettes

Experiments in testosterone

Before Day One A friend offers me their old testosterone gel. I’ve been on testosterone for seven years now, all injections, never any gel. I figure if I’m going to write about testosterone in its many varied forms I should at least try it. An experiment. And I am the rat.

A love letter to testosterone The first time I did my own injections, the first week of my PhD project, I finally “saw” testosterone. Like a long-term friend turned lover, the beauty of this pure, clear substance was suddenly so acute. How could I have missed it? Oh dear, I might have a little crush on my testosterone. I look upon this fluid and my heart flutters just a little bit. An unexpected turn, pulling me towards it every ten days, or whenever I can build up the courage to push a needle into my muscle. I have even periodically thought about getting its chemical structure tattooed on me (like a bikie who has a heart tattoo with “Mum” injected under their skin).

My obsession with this object culminated in a fairly non-erotic oral encounter. Yes, after one of my shots, some clear residue remaining inside the syringe, I did it, I licked my testosterone. Just once. And perhaps this sounds defensive, but I was curious; I wanted to see what other dimensions this love of mine could hold for me. As my taste buds detected an altogether new experience, I had a realization, and with it this mini obsession seemed to culminate… it tasted like nothing. Unsurprising now that I say it, it tasted like oil, that is its base after all. Perhaps a sunflower, or an olive oil, the kind you cook with and put in salads, but with none of those peripheral flavors that make it a desirable addition to any culinary experience. And with this quick tongue flick so ended my minor love affair with testosterone, and a kind of calm washed over me. No more adoring gazes, no sly looks to its packet resting on the shelf in my room, no more thoughts of if and how I would get the pharmacist to give me more, just to have it pile up, waiting for me beside my bed. And like a past ex, I occasionally wonder what became of this testosterone, what my tongue, saliva, stomach and digestive system did with this tasteless love of mine. Dissolved it I suppose.

11 Introduction Prepping the area: Testosterone bonds and the wrong body narrative

This thesis is bonded by testosterone; a mellifluous hormone that has, for me, always been both tantalising and fraught. It pulls me towards it in unexpected bodily ways, ways that do not attach easily to my gender identity as non-binary.1 I am in many ways not supposed to want testosterone, this man’s hormone. I am not supposed to want some of the changes to my body that testosterone affects. Peers, colleagues and family ask me to answer the question: “Why do you use testosterone? Why look like a man, when you are not one?” I have no answer for this. I do not want to look like a man, but perhaps the gendered dice was rolled when I began testosterone because I do. And, for better or for worse, I am wedded to the substance in ways I cannot explain.

This unexpected pull characterises so much about this thesis.2 Doing thirty semi-structured interviews with trans3 people who were oriented towards exogenous testosterone elicited an abundance of surprising content. Despite my eight years of using testosterone, and my even longer existence within trans masculine4 spaces, I had still not expected the focus of so much of what I ended up writing about.

1 Non-binary is both an umbrella term and an identity label for people who do not feel strongly attached to the binary gender options of man or woman. 2 This thesis’ emergence, like perhaps all thesis, is very much analogous to lightning in both its unpredictability and in its varied non-linear development. As Barad (2015, p. 398) writes “the path that lightning takes not only is not predictable but does not make its way according to some continuous unidirectional path between sky and ground”. 3 I use “trans” throughout the thesis in a way that includes both trans and non-binary identities. I also use a variety of different terms throughout this thesis to describe non-cis people, identities or groups (who have been mostly assigned female at birth). This includes: trans testosterone users, trans masculine, trans men, FTMs, trans/gender/sexual people, trans and non-binary people, transsexual, transgender or trans. The differences between the terms can be highly relevant in some moments, and at other times the terms are largely synonymous with one another. Sometimes I use terms that other writers have used, or have been most appropriate in specific times and contexts. At other times the terms are descriptive, for instance using “trans testosterone users” for the variety of trans and non-binary people using testosterone, or using “trans masculine” to include people who identify with trans masculinity but who are not using testosterone. These terms are sticky and tricky but my specific use is always an attempt to validate people’s individual and collective identities. 4 I use the term “trans masculine” to describe people assigned female at birth (AFAB) who feel in some ways pulled towards masculinity, manhood or maleness, as well as AFAB people who identify as trans or non-binary and who use testosterone or access surgical interventions like top surgery. As someone who has identified with a wide array of labels, I have felt frustrated with the term “trans masculine” for as long as it has been in favour. My frustrations arose initially from a sense that this term reinforced a normative attachment between gender identification and gender expression; that those who fall within its boundaries identify as men and desire a masculine gender presentation. Now I find equal frustration with how it assumes and reinforces a relationship between masculinity and testosterone; that testosterone’s effects are inherently masculine and that those who use testosterone are inherently attached to masculinity. And yet, there is hardly another (simple) term that encompasses (mostly AFAB) non-binary people who use testosterone and

12 Chapters Three, Four and Five arose largely from the interview material. Some of this content I had no particular interest in writing about, thinking much of it mundane, besides the point or politically fraught. Some of this material, especially concerning gender dysphoria, I had been downright resistant to even discuss in the interviews, let alone write about in this thesis. Fortunately, because of the semi-structured nature of the interviews, and my desire to allow participants to speak to their own experiences, this content was very present, screaming to be discussed; I had to oblige. Chapter One tends to follow more closely my own desire to understand testosterone’s history, trying to give texture to my orientation towards it, or at the very least, to better understand what it is as a material-cultural product. Chapter Two arises from the questions I was asked at the beginning of my own transition in the early 2010s; why has trans masculinity come about now? Why so much later than trans femininity? Because of the cultural moment in which I was transitioning, so frequently was I asked these questions and so insufficient did I feel my response to it that when I started to hear it coming it would set my teeth on edge. Finding some answer to this question, and to the other questions in each chapter, while maybe not “solving” my curious relationship to testosterone, has at the very least provided me with the tools to destabilise the questions being asked and created the scaffolds with which to structure my gendered life.

Because we should know where we’ve been to know where we are going, this introduction outlines how trans experience, theories of trans gender5 and trans testosterone use have been shaped and constrained by the wrong body narrative. This thesis speaks back to the wrong body narrative and its associated impacts, trying to find new ways to circumnavigate this rigid scaffold defining the contours and possibilities of trans existence. Each chapter of this thesis re-conceives some of the features of trans masculine experience defined by the wrong body narrative; the over-determining place of medicine, the shaping of dysphoria and transition as specific phenomena, and the limitations on the use of testosterone by trans people. Testosterone weaves through the thesis as I try to address how it feels so deeply attached to masculinity and manhood; how it is situated as the biochemical tool of transition. How it “creates” men from female assigned people. And how its use is justified by its ability to address gender dysphoria arising from having been born in the “wrong” body. In doing so, I aim to elaborate the creative and experimental ways of thinking and being with trans and testosterone, without getting trapped inside the binary and trans people who identify with masculinity, manhood or maleness. So, I am forced to use trans masculine when speaking of this group and the individuals who exist within it. 5 I use “trans gender” as a verb rather than as a noun here to emphasise the doing of transgender rather than the object- ness of transgender.

13 essentialising aspects of the wrong body narrative.

Before discussing the wrong body narrative, it should be noted that this work does not aim to suggest that trans experience held within this paradigm are inherently flawed or entirely wrong. All people, cis6 or trans, binary or non-binary, create themselves from the discourse and materials available to them, that resonate most closely and make the most sense of their lives. And, as there are trans and non-binary people who do not desire testosterone at all, there are also trans and non- binary people who feel the most seen and whole when they use testosterone within these discursive and material networks. I do not intend to discard these attachments, because testosterone and trans experience can be all of these things, it is all of these things for some people, some of the time and in some contexts. But it is also more than this. This thesis tries to find, theorise and hold some of the ways it is always already more.

The wrong body narrative Many of the ways that testosterone and trans masculinity have been understood and expected to exist have been attached to two dominant narratives arising out of Western medicine’s engagement with trans people and Western conceptions of persons, bodies and genders. These two dominant narratives are the trans narrative and the wrong body narrative. While both can be seen to permeate popular trans discourse, the wrong body narrative in particular continues to play a significant role in trans self-articulations (Chu, 2017) and trans encounters with biomedicine (Hughes, 2018).

The first highly influential critical trans engagement with medical trans narratives was in Allucquére “Sandy” Stone’s (2006/1987) “The empire strikes back: A posttranssexual manifesto”. Broadly considered the genesis text from which trans studies emerged in the 1990s, “The empire strikes back” critically interjected into ongoing feminist debates on trans women’s womanhood. Crucially, this text outlined how trans people were required to assert highly normative gendered experiences and desires by early trans medical gatekeeping practices in the U.S. in order to access trans gendered bodily interventions. Stone (2006/1987) demonstrated how many of these normatively gendered assertions made by trans people were strategically deployed by trans people to gain access to medical interventions. Trans

6 “Cis” here refers to people whose gender identification aligns with their assigned sex at birth. The inclusion or exclusion of intersexuality into the cis-trans binary is a political issue yet to be resolved, but always an important consideration when thinking about these kinds of border making practices.

14 people accessed the narratives expected by medical gatekeepers through intra-trans networks that distributed the materials7 being used by medical practitioners to determine who was a “genuine” trans person and who was not. While deeply sympathetic to these transsexual narrativising practices, Stone (2006/1987) argues that the continual reassertion of these narratives to medical practitioners ultimately reinforces the norms of trans existence and limits trans people’s gendered possibilities and political activism.

As Stone (2006/1987) elaborates, trans medicine taking place in U.S. universities during this time cultivated and relied upon what has become known as the trans narrative. The trans narrative was typified by an unrelenting identification with the “opposite” gender to that of one’s assigned sex at birth. This identification had to have begun from early childhood, understood to be the beginning of an individual’s gendered self. People moving through this medical system also had to desire to live entirely as their felt gender, a life aspiration that was judged based on certain normative ideals including those of heterosexuality, class and race.8 Trans people were also only able to access medical interventions if they intended to deny, hide, or obfuscate their past as another sex-gender, and to refuse any identification with trans experience. This narrative and its requirement by medicine reinforced minimal disruption to what Judith Butler (1990) terms the “heterosexual matrix”; the normative coherence and expected alignment between one’s sex, gender, gender expression and heterosexual orientation.

The trans narrative gave rise to another narrative to explain the phenomenon of trans existence and provide a justification for trans gendered bodily interventions. This was the born in the wrong body narrative. This narrative is the assertion that being trans is the result or quality of having a body on the outside that does not match one’s gender on the inside (Bettcher, 2014; Engdahl, 2014). This coheres strongly with Western Cartesian dualism and the division between the internal (gendered) self and the external (sexed) body. According to Bettcher (2014, p. 383), medical systems problematise the mind9 and its mis-matching with the body, while transsexuals take issue with the body, and its mis-match with the mind.

7 For instance, Harry Benjamin’s (1966) The transsexual phenomena. 8 See Gill-Peterson (2018) for an illuminative discussion of race and the resistance to binary medical interventions during this early trans medical moment. 9 The underlying cause of transsexuality can also be divided: as emerging from one’s innate biology, or from a process of socialisation (see Sullivan, 2008, p. 108).

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After Stone’s (2006/1987) article and the emergence of trans studies, critiques of the wrong body narrative flourished and lead to a host of back and forth arguments about its accuracy, its usefulness and the possibility of an alternative explanatory model for the phenomenon of trans gender (Hughes, 2018; Prosser, 1998; Salamon, 2010). Some of the initial rejection and querying of the wrong body narrative was held within the anti-medicalisation transgender movement of the 1990s. Key theorists include Leslie Feinberg (1992/2006) and Kate Bornstein (1994) who catalysed the use of the term transgender to incorporate a greater variety of gender non-conforming identities and to destabilise the centrality of genital surgeries to validate trans gender. Bornstein’s (1994) book Gender outlaw: On men, women and the rest of us was an early and significant intervention into Western cultural awareness of a binary (trans) gender system, one that used auto-biographical experiences to elaborate the potential of being neither a cis man nor a trans woman but rather a “gender outlaw”. Similarly, Feinberg’s (1992/2006) technically non-autobiographical novel Stone butch blues gives texture and voice to the experiences of the main protagonist Jess, who is neither a cis woman nor a trans man.

Capitalising on the increasing awareness and influence of social constructionist theories of gender during the early 1990s and an intensification of trans activism and critiques of medicine’s support of a binary sex-gender system, some of these early trans politics lay siege to the wrong body narrative. Talia Mae Bettcher (2014, p. 384) argues that texts such as Gender outlaw (1994) and Stone butch blues (1992/2006) sparked approaches to trans experience, bodies and practices that are defined by an, admittedly over- simplified (see Bettcher, 2014, footnote 3), “beyond-the-binary” model. The beyond-the-binary approach broadly aims to highlight the essentialising work of the wrong body narrative and the power of trans medical systems to uphold the wrong body narrative as the penultimate requirement for a valid trans identity (Crawford & Jones, 2015). Alongside these critiques of the wrong body narrative there are also assertions that trans people have always existed outside the binary and that the wrong body narrative can be problematic for those trans people who cannot, will not, or do not want to undertake gendered bodily interventions (Radi, 2019). This is especially true when considering the racial and class implications for attaining genital surgeries, often situated as the definitional trans surgery,10 an intervention that can be

10 While genital surgeries are often situated as central ways to validate trans gender identification, the cost, difficulty and pain of phalloplasties for trans men has resulted in a very small number of trans masculine people choosing them. This in turn reduces, although in no ways removes, the intra-trans expectation of those interventions. Alongside the cultural relation to the phallus (see Bremer, 2013), the focus on genital surgeries is currently a pressure placed much

16 extremely painful, time consuming and expensive, especially when there is limited government support for these interventions (Bettcher, 2014). Embedded within the tensions between some advocates of the beyond-the-binary model and some advocates of a more binary model of trans existence are debates around people’s desires to undertake any gendered bodily interventions11. Specifically, some advocates of a beyond-the-binary approach position the desires of trans people to undertake bodily interventions as suspect because of how it apparently conforms to a cis-gender norm (Bettcher, 2014).12

Sullivan (2008) continues with a critique of the wrong body rhetoric through a critical approach to transsexuals and self-demand amputees’ desires to access bodily intervention. She emphasises how acceptable interventions into the wrong body, permitted for (some) transsexuals, rely on a split between the mind and the body and positions the body as the property of the self. This “rational self” must evidence a “wrong body” but a “right mind” to appropriately and validly lay claim to the ownership over the body, which then permits access to medically sanctioned bodily intervention (Sullivan, 2008, p. 110). As Sullivan (2008, p. 112) argues this “functions to pathologize difference, reaffirm the mind/body split, idealize integrity [and] universalize and decontextualize ‘wrongness’”. A small number of theorists have also queried the pull of the wrong body narrative when it is so extensively used and required of trans people such that “some individuals may believe or may come to believe that they are in the wrong body or at least use language that imparts the same meaning” (Cromwell, 1999, p. 104). Some critics assert that “trans people have ended up adopting the metaphor, to the point of even believing in it” (Overall, 2009, p. 23). An example of this can be seen in the arguments, although they are frequently critiqued, made in Jay Prosser’s (1998) book Second skins: The body narratives of transsexuality. Here Prosser (1998), a transsexual man, attempts to validate the materiality of transsexuality through, in part, a reliance on the wrong body narrative. He says: “my contention is that transsexuals continue to deploy the image of wrong embodiment because being trapped in the wrong body is simply what transsexuality feels like” (Prosser, 1998, p. 69).

more on trans feminine people than trans masculine people. Although, there is some suggestion that genital surgeries for trans feminine people are beginning to take a back seat to, for instance, facial feminisation surgeries as the most important to gendered self-representation (see Plemons, 2017). 11 There are of course those theorists who could belong to the beyond-the-binary model, such as Preciado (2013), who see gendered bodily interventions as a significant mechanism for disrupting a binary gender system. 12 During my undergraduate queer activist career, I heard one non-binary person state that they would never undergo genital surgery because they weren’t going to be “shoehorned” into societies’ ideas of gender.

17 The wrong body narrative has been critiqued for enforcing an attachment to medicine and medical control, the deeming of some trans people as “real” or “valid” while deriding others as “fake” or “wrong”, and for reiterating an essentialist view of gender that exists on the “inside” of the body. And yet, the critiques targeting the wrong body narrative have also received their own criticisms. Some of these concerns assert that the more social constructionist approaches to gender imply a false consciousness for any trans person who does wish to undertake gendered bodily interventions (Namaste, 2005). This is particularly aimed towards interventions that bring trans people into a closer approximation of cis norms (itself something to query). Bettcher (2014) also critiques the beyond-the-binary model for its failure to accommodate people who feel strongly attached to a binary gender. And, for positioning the desires of people who seek out medicalised interventions as incorrect or problematic – a sign of being insufficiently critical of the socially constructed (and therefore apparently false) nature of gender (Bettcher, 2014). Radi (2019) points to how the adherence to the beyond-the-binary model can reproduce intra-trans interactions that marginalise and exclude more binary inclined individuals. Bettcher (2014) offers a solution to these debates by arguing for a kind of proliferation of differently coded gendered terms, including “man” and “woman”, and the detaching of genitals from gender and gender expression.

While Prosser’s (1998) work has been extensively critiqued,13 he does offer a notable point of contention to Butler’s (1990) theory of gender when he says, “in its representation of sex as a figurative effect of straight gender’s constative performance, Gender Trouble cannot account for a transsexual desire for sexed embodiment as telos” (Prosser 1998, 33). While querying the normativising imperative of the apparent “telos” of trans bodily desires, Prosser (1998) does point to the diminished ability of some trans theorising to consider the materiality of experience, something that science and technology scholars also point towards.14 And yet, Prosser’s (1998) reliance on an essentialist “wrong body” approach to trans gender is risky, and continues to be an approach that many are unwilling to fully embrace.

Interjecting into these debates is Salamon’s (2010) Assuming a body: Transgender and rhetorics of materiality. Salamon (2010) attempts to evidence transgender embodiment as real without a reliance on an essentialist gender model (like the wrong body narrative), through the bringing together of

13 Jay Prosser published his second book Light in the dark room: Photography and loss (2004) which substantially re- worked, and in some ways refuted, his work in Second skins (1998). 14 Karen Barad (2003, p. 821) notably argues that Judith Butler (1990, 1993) “reinscribes matter as a passive product of discursive practices rather than as an active agent participating in the very process of materialization”.

18 psychoanalysis, phenomenology and queer theory. In advocating for the inclusion of psychoanalytic and phenomenological theories to trans theorisations of the body, Salamon (2010) advocates for the legitimate consideration of trans subjectivities and bodily experience as vital to understanding all bodies. Her main contention is that no people (trans or cis) have unmediated access to the body, that all experiences of bodily existence include a disjuncture between the “‘felt sense’ of the body and the body’s corporal contours” and crucially “that this disjuncture need not be viewed as pathological” (Salamon, 2010, p. 2). While still holding the sense of one’s body as vital, she also argues that these experiences of the body are produced and effected by culture. Ultimately, Salamon (2010, p.3) wants to dissuade trans theory and discussions of trans experience from relying uncritically on a notion of the bodily “real” because of its “normativizing and disciplinary dimensions” while still emphasising the significance of the experience of the body to all gendered people.15

The debates around the wrong body narrative have provided both politically generative criticisms of the medical requirements of trans gendered articulations, and they have elaborated the limitations of a beyond-the-binary approach to gender. And yet, these debates have largely been attempting to generate an explanatory model for trans existence: If and why trans people exist, why they desire bodily interventions, and if and why those interventions should be provided. They were notably at their most fervent during the 1990s, a moment of critical gender theory that debated what gender is or was, and how trans people should be situated with regards to gender: as dupes, as resistors, or as evidence for or against gender as an internal, biological, or social phenomenon.

These debates, as Hughes (2018) notes, reinforce cis-centrism, a cis norm that trans people are continually held up against, and where “cis” becomes as a position from which trans people are expected to justify and explain their existences. The wrong body narrative firms up the dichotomy between the “wrong” artificiality of the trans body against the “right” authenticity of the cis body which, according to Hughes (2018), serves to reinforce the differences rather than the similarities between cis and trans embodiment. I would also argue that this tension presumes and asserts trans experience as overly unified when placed in problematised opposition to the cis norm. Getting caught up in these explanatory debates is obviously

15 Salamon’s (2010) attempt to bring together phenomenology with Butler’s (1990) work as a way to legitimate trans bodily experience alongside the influence of the social has been argued as unsuccessful by A. L. Chu (2017). A. L. Chu (2017, p. 147) states that “phenomenology and social construction are reconciled nowhere near as readily as Salamon suggests”.

19 a fraught imperative, one that reinforces cis-normativity and trans abnormality while also ignoring the variation within, and specificity of people who may fall within, the realm of trans.

This thesis does not aim to explain what trans gender is, this would be not only an impossible task but also a reductive one. For the most part academia has thankfully also turned away from these debates on trans existence.16 And yet trans studies finds itself continuing to grapple with the wrong body narrative’s tenaciousness (see for instance Chu & Harsin Drager, 2019; Hughes, 2018) and the wrong body narrative’s impacts on the social, medical and legal lives of trans people (Crawford, 2013; Engdahl, 2014; Psihopaidas, 2017). We still encounter the wrong body narrative as the permeating vector for the, at times, oppressive power of trans medicine. Trans medicine, having shaped trans histories, still has moments of unrelenting control over trans lives, possibilities and experiences. This is in no way to suggest that the wrong body narrative is nonsensical – some model held over trans people by a maniacal medical system. Its very power and durability is tied to fundamental logics of Western personhood; Cartesian dualism and the division of the mind from the body. Nor is it to suggest that the wrong body narrative has not been shaped and affected by trans people: Stone (2006/1987) so clearly illuminates the role of trans people in its formation. Trans medicine and medical technologies in the West have also participated in the positive transformation of many trans lives and worlds. I myself can attest to that. The issue of the wrong body narrative arises when it functions as the dominating spectre of trans existence, the single vessel that trans lives are expected to fill but go no further. Boundaries are fundamental to living and thinking.17 But when structures of existence hold too tightly on the way to be, the way to move through the world or the possibilities of bodies, cracks begin to show, subjectivity spills out and new possibilities emerge. A central aim of this thesis then is to consider how the wrong body narrative continues to affect trans people’s lives through its shaping of many features of trans existence in ways that continue to hold to an internal-external discrepancy explanation of trans gender; through encounters with medicine, experiences of dysphoria and transition, and the use of testosterone. This can occur in part through an approach to

16 A few staunch second wave feminists, such as Sheila Jeffreys, maintain a true commitment to a politics of transphobia and cissexism. 17 Barad (2007, p. 139) elaborates how the formation of a bounded (and therefore humanly “conceivable”) reality occurs through agential cuts that occur within phenomena rather than between phenomena. She says: Intra-actions include the larger material arrangement (i.e., a set of material practices) that effects an agential cut between “subject” and “object” (in contrast to the more familiar Cartesian cut which takes this distinction for granted). That is, the agential cut enacts a resolution within the phenomenon of the inherent ontological (and semantic) indeterminacy. (Barad, 2007, p. 139, emphasis in original).

20 trans existence that capitalises on a science and technology studies approach that elaborates all phenomena as co-produced, co-emergent, intra-active, and where agency arises from the particularity of a network.

Enacted realities and emergent phenomena for trans studies The wrong body narrative is highly durable. It has so deeply permeated all features of trans experience that we can easily be brought back into the normativising and essentialist approach to trans experience which fails to proliferate trans experiences and their (material) desires. An STS approach that asserts reality as formed in practice, as multiple and as emerging from encounters between phenomena, may offer a way out of this bind for trans studies. To situate trans gender encounters with the body and medicine as creative experiments with embodied subjectivities without becoming trapped in the wrong body narrative. While the particular threads of STS adopted within each chapter will be woven into each chapter in more detail, I will briefly canvass my approach now.

STS offers ways to conceive of the difference and multiplicity possible in even in the most obstinate of objects. John Law (2009), in “Actor network theory and material semiotics”, traces the evolution of actor network theory (ANT) from its inception in the late 1970s and early 1980s. He summarises ANT as “a disparate family of material-semiotic tools, sensibilities and methods of analysis that treat everything in the social and natural worlds as a continuously generated effect of the webs of relations within which they are located” (Law 2009, p. 2). As Race (2019, p. 9) asserts, STS/ANT provides us with the ability to be able to trace “how heterogenous elements become associated in more or less durable formations to produce particular kinds of agency”.

How phenomena come to encounter one another produces the specificity and durability of reality and the emergence of agency in any one moment. As Barad (2003, p. 816) says, “a concrete example may be helpful”. Barad (2003, p. 816) explores the wave-particle duality paradox where, under certain experimental conditions, and using particular measuring apparatus, light exhibits wave-like properties. Under other experimental conditions and using other apparatus, light exhibits particle-like properties. This is not merely a case of trying to find the “true ontological nature of light” (Barad, 2003, p. 815), but rather as Fraser and Moore (2011, p. 4) state, light “is both – physically, in its materiality, in reality – and what it is depends on what instruments are used to measure it”. That is, the phenomenon of light, and

21 for instance its wave-like or its particle-like properties, is produced, in its materiality, by its encounters with different apparatus.

In a similar vein to other STS/ANT scholars, Barad’s (2003, p. 818) argument asserts that reality is not composed of “things-in-themselves or things-behind-phenomena but ‘things’-in-phenomena”. Phenomena, as the primary component of reality, are “things” that are formed and exist only in their encounters with other phenomena. As Fraser and Moore (2011, p. 5) make clear in their deeply accessible and elaborative discussion of the usefulness of Barad’s (2003, 2007) work in the field of drug studies, all things: events, objects, practices, texts and the human are phenomena, and all phenomena are “made only in its encounters with other phenomena”.

Some work has been created at the intersection of STS and trans studies, largely by trans and STS scholar J. R. Latham (2016, 2017a, 2017b, 2019). Latham (2016, 2017a), elaborates the productive potential of the work of Annemarie Mol and Karen Barad in navigating some of the central concerns of trans studies. For instance, trans medicine is often problematised as both a crucial site of potential and a structure of control over trans lives (see Stone, 1987/2006; Stryker, 2008, p. 36; Spade, 2003). Latham (2016, 2017a) using auto-ethnographic analysis of his own encounters with trans medicine as well as analysis of trans men’s auto-biographies, evidences how trans gender itself is formed within trans medicine in multiple, and sometimes contradictory ways. Latham (2019, p. 13) also extends a similar multiplicity to transsexual sexualities often situated through clinical encounters with medicine as singular, an approach which “flattens out the complexities of trans people’s experiences of gender and sexuality, and simultaneously disavows many trans people’s sexual lives”. Latham’s (2016, 2017a, 2017b, 2019) work evidences how an STS approach “better allows us to take seriously the necessarily complex ways of being trans” (2016, p. 349).

The potentials for an STS approach, itself a broad field, to contribute to trans studies is significant. However, trans studies is also a very broad field. As Susan Stryker (2006, p. 3), a significant player in the field, states: The field of transgender studies is concerned with anything that disrupts, denaturalizes, rearticulates, and makes visible the normative linkages we generally assume to exist between the biological specificity of the sexually differentiated human body, the social roles and statuses that a

22 particular form of body is expected to occupy, the subjectively experienced relationship between a gendered sense of self and social expectations of gender-role performance, and the cultural mechanisms that work to sustain or thwart specific configurations of gendered personhood.

In a more recent critique and attempted invigoration of trans studies,18 Emmett Harsin Drager asserts a similar unboundedness19 of trans studies, stating: When I say trans studies I refer to the medical, cultural, aesthetic, and political theory that has come about since the creation of transsexual and transgender as identity categories in the mid-twentieth century (Chu & Harsin Drager, 2019, p. 113). The potentials for STS on this broad field are myriad, but for the purposes of this introduction, I shall focus on a few small sites encountered in this thesis that contribute to a better understanding and greater possibility for “the many and diverse ways trans people experience their bodies” (Latham, 2016, p. 349).

As discussed earlier, the wrong body narrative and the associated debates between an essentialist approach or a constructionist approach to explain trans existence occupy much of previous and contemporary trans studies. As Gerdes (2014, p. 149) argues “transgender studies is inextricably invested

18 Trans studies, according to commentators such as Chu and Harsin Drager (2019) is either in a period of demise or radical shift. As Andrea Long Chu succinctly states: “let’s face it: Trans studies is over. If it isn’t, it should be” (Chu & Harsin Drager, 2019, p. 103). Perhaps a somewhat overly harsh and rash critique, Chu does point to trans studies’ lack of significant monographs (and arguably theories) that the field can debate, and thereby produce some solidification as a field, especially one that is different from gender or queer studies. While also articulating adjacent concerns around trans studies, Harsin Drager sees trans studies as not over, but at a crossroads, and that for trans studies to cohere as a field it must learn to “stand on its own” (Chu & Harsin Drager, 2019, p. 104). Both Chu and Harsin Drager (2019, p. 104) point not only to the lack of critical texts in trans studies, but also the incongruence of placing all work that concerns trans people under its umbrella. Further, they point to the political and ethical difficulty for the many cis writers who work within trans studies to elaborate critical interventions into trans experiences, such as dysphoria, when faced with the potential for accusations of anti-trans sentiments, a fear that may reduce the critical rigour of work within trans studies. Finally, Harsin Drager points to how trans studies continues to assert narratives from the stance of either victimhood or resistance. They advocate for satire, “a genre about how truly disappointing and sometimes even boring it is to be a trans person in this world” (Chu & Harsin Drager, 2019, p. 104). 19 The ambiguous boundaries and “unteatheredness” of trans studies is not only something to lament, but something to capitalise on, if situated in a productive way. A recent and delightfully astute elaboration of this potential occurs in Emmanuel David’s (2018) “Transgender Archipelagos”. Attending to transgender beauty pageants in the Philippines, David (2018, p. 332) makes the argument that trans studies “with its discontiguous and decentered character, can also be characterized in archipelagic terms”. With an orientation to bodies, identities and practices that bring out the “relationality, connection, and tension among sometimes scattered, disparate, and discontiguous ways of being and knowing” (David, 2018, p. 335). This embracing of the interconnected segmentation of trans studies, according to David (2018), allows an escape from the production of a normative object of study. Crucially, it also may allow trans studies to be better situated to resist the diffusion of “transgender” along colonial and imperialist lines, resulting in “the erasure of indigenous, racialized gender-sexuality terms or to an imposed categorical separation of gender and sexuality in locations where such distinctions are not so clear” (David, 2018, p. 335).

23 in the question of intentionality: is the subject of gender in charge or not?”. An STS approach avoids the debate between the trans person as a gender agent, or the trans person as fully subordinate to culture, as “in charge” or as merely succumbing to the pull of external forces. Fundamental to STS is a rejection of the distilling of reality into “things-in-themselves or things-behind-phenomena”; the world as essential or as constructed. Rather STS asserts that reality is only “‘things’-in-phenomena” (Barad, 2003, p. 818). Considering trans gender as an emergent phenomenon (a material and discursive arrangement) dislodges the centrality of this explanatory debate and shifts critical attention into how the phenomenon of trans gender exists in its particularity.

This shift also avoids dysphoria as a symptom of being in the wrong body, that it exists internally and statically within the trans person (see also Latham, 2019, p. 13). It rejects a singular imperative of transitioning being attributed to the need to rectify having been born in the wrong body (see Prosser, 1998). Through STS we can remain attentive to the materiality of trans worlds, to validate the material desires and actions of trans people without a recourse to an essentialist or social constructionist explanation of trans gender experience. Further, when both dysphoria and transition, like trans gender, become through intra-actions between objects, discourse and other phenomenon, we can attend to the co- formation of these phenomena and extend out what phenomena may be playing a role in their formation. We can include the place of trans people, trans medicine, testosterone, audio-visual technologies, trans digital publics, or hormones and surgeries, without instituting one or more as the determining factor in any one version of trans transitions or gender dysphoria. And finally, in extending beyond Cartesian models of the mind/body, we can consider agency, and crucially trans agency, as emerging from and formed within intra-actions in ways that evidence the crucial role of otherwise subordinated actants in, for instance, transition practices.

The thesis chapters Chapter One, “At the intersections of testosterone: Testosterone’s history with gender, sexuality and race”, focuses on the scientific and social history of testosterone and functions as a kind of backdrop to the content of the rest of the thesis. It brings together work from researchers of gender, sex and hormones (for instance Fausto-Sterling, 2000; Fine, 2017; Oudshoorn, 1994; Roberts, 2007) to elaborate how testosterone has been tied, and continues to be understood as attached to; masculinity, manhood and male bodies, as well as race and deviant sexualities. This brief foray into testosterone not only positions it as

24 a particular kind of discursive-material substance, it also indicates how testosterone, as a treatment for trans masculine people, is underpinned by attachments of testosterone to certain cultural logics of gender, sexuality, race and sex.

Chapter Two, “The new visibility of trans masculinity: Malleable bodies, performative gender and medical activism”, is sparked by the need to account for the different histories of trans femininity and trans masculinity. Often situated as central to trans/gender/sexual history is the role of medicine, often framed as trans/gender/sexuality’s catalyst. This is understandable, when transsexuality arose through its negotiations with Western trans medicine, sexology and psychiatry in the mid-twentieth century (Hausman, 1995; Meyerowitz, 2004). But, in attending more closely to intra-trans differences, is it evident that there are substantial differences in the emergence of trans masculinity when compared to trans femininity. While trans femininity became more present and visible at the beginning of transsexual medicine, it was only in the 1990s and 2000s that trans masculine identities and publics received the kind of attention that trans femininities had been receiving (for better and often for worse) since the 1940s and 50s. While the emergence of trans femininity has been discussed and theorised (see Meyerowitz, 2004; Stryker, 2008), trans masculinity and its notably later arrival has received limited attention.20

Chapter Two extends the limited work on trans masculinity’s emergence and argues that it arose during the 1990s and 2000s due to changes in transgender organisations, broader cultural understanding of the body and gender, and changes to counter-cultural medical activism. The cultural shifts in transgender politics and activism during the 1990s and 2000s saw a de-centralising of binary gender and transitions that also created space for transgender men who were unwilling or uninterested in undertaking phalloplasty surgeries. The broader social and cultural changes to gender as performative and the body as malleable are elaborated through a closer inspection of bodybuilding, sports doping and drag king practices. Alongside the cultural changes to the body and to gender were substantial shifts in the power relations between doctors and patients driven by feminist and HIV medical activism of the 1980s and 1990s. These movements demanded a radical renegotiation of the power differentials between medicine and consumers of medicine and the legitimate medical consideration of subordinated populations. Capitalising on these reconfigurations, trans masculine people and groups could begin to

20 Wickman (2003) and Rubin (2003) are the exceptions to this.

25 assert the requirement to be taken seriously and could participate in the construction of medical networks that supported the provision of gendered medical interventions for trans masculine people. Attention to these cultural and trans medical changes shifts a consideration of the emergence of trans masculinity as no longer a sole product of medicine and medical categorisation of trans/gender/sexuality, but rather as a phenomenon emerging from “below” through the crucial practices of counter-cultures and medical activism.

Chapter Three, “Feeling dysphoric, being unwell: How dysphoria as an emergent phenomenon can disrupt a politics of trans ressentiment”, attends to gender dysphoria, often situated as deeply central to contemporary trans experience. Gender dysphoria is positioned as the negative body or psychological experience arising from the difference between the gendered mind and the sexed body; the effect of having been born in the wrong body. This can be seen most clearly in the Diagnostics and Statistics Manuel of Mental Disorders (DSM). Since the introduction of trans/gender/sexuality into the DSM some genre of gendered “distress” attached to the “wrong body” has been a requirement for diagnosis and permission for access to treatment. In the most recent and fifth iteration of the DSM, DSM-V (2013), gender dysphoria has been elevated to the single most central feature of trans/gender/sexual diagnosis with “Gender Dysphoria”21 becoming the primary diagnostic category for trans/sexual/gendered people. Gender dysphoria is situated as the definitional trans experience, a painful divergence between the (sexed) body and the (gendered) mind. This experience is taken to validate biomedical interventions into the body and support the calls for policy and government intervention and mental health support for trans people.

However, as Heyes and Latham (2018) have elaborated, the centrality of gender dysphoria in trans medicine, and the requirement of a diagnosis for Gender Dysphoria to permit gendered medical intervention has the potential to institute a politics of trans ressentiment. Heyes and Latham (2018) argue that trans medical systems such as the DSM require trans people to speak from a position of (mental) illness, and to assert such negative relations to the body that they should be permitted access to gendered bodily interventions. This, Heyes and Latham (2018) fear, encourages a context where trans people may become substantially attached to, and defined by, this illness and this subordinated subject position.

21 I use Gender Dysphoria, with capital letters, to differentiate the diagnosis from gender dysphoria, without capital letters, which I understand as a more amorphous affective experience of the body or self.

26

Chapter Three considers alternative ways to encounter gender dysphoria that may dislodge a politics of ressentiment for trans people. Specifically, how gender dysphoria for some participants is an emergent discursive-material phenomenon. As such a phenomenon, gender dysphoria becomes not entirely pre- existing and therefore static, but rather something that arises in relation to shifts in attention to the body, an altered understanding of the body’s potential, and an orientation to hope. The variabilities in the emergence of dysphoria was found to be notably different for trans participants of colour, whose experiences were affected by a lack of representation of racially and culturally similar experiences in online trans spaces.

This chapter in no way argues that gender dysphoria does not exist for some people some of the time. Dysphoria should still be alleviated wherever possible and in whatever ways desired by trans people. I also do not suggest that dysphoria be discounted as a potential feature of trans experience when clinicians encounter trans people, although the context of this should always be scrutinised. In shifting an approach to trans subjectivity that situates dysphoria as emergent, my aim is not to re-solidify an alternative but still concrete set of boundaries on what dysphoria is and what constitutes a trans person. Rather, the aim of this chapter is to extend the possibilities of what dysphoria is, how it exists for trans people, and to destabilise it as the central feature of trans existence arising from a mind/body discrepancy. In considering and validating the particularities of dysphoric encounters with attention, body potential and hope, there also exists the potential to disrupt some of the “unjust and oppressive social hierarchies” shaped by some trans medicine (Stryker, 2008, p. 36).

Chapter Four, “Transitioning with more than testosterone: The role of audio-visual technologies in the emergence of transition’s effects”, critically approaches trans transitioning with testosterone. Within trans medicine and trans discourse, transitioning is permitted to rectify the body’s incongruence; to resolve the experience of dysphoria (Bray, 2015, p. 129). The shift from the wrong body to the right body is situated as the sole product of medical interventions into the body, a purely biochemical phenomenon. For trans men and trans masculine people, transition and bodily realignment is understood as the effect of the administration of testosterone. However, this approach fails to account for the ways that sex-gender is not purely biological, but also formed with a host of socio-technological apparatus (de Lauretis,

27 1987).22

When transitioning with testosterone is considered only the effect of the administration of testosterone to the body, we fail to see the ways that socio-technical apparatuses constitute and participate in the formation of testosterone transitions. Participants in this study articulated this orientation to transitioning, seeing transition’s effects as purely a biological process, one in which participants did not consider themselves to have control, or more importantly, to participate in the effects of transition. This approach ignores the work of online trans networks that embed meaning within, and normalise the practices of, audio-visual technologies. It also discounts the role and significance of trans participant’s practices with audio-visual technologies that participate in the creation of the transitioning body. And it depends too much on situating transitioning as a medical process controlled by medical pharmacological products and medical practitioners.

In attending to some of the apparatus for transitioning – the extensive networks of online trans publics and the abundant use of audio-visual technologies – transitioning becomes a process of somatic- ontological experimentation. One where audio-visual technologies enact transition’s changes rather than merely “observe” the effects of biology’s encounter with testosterone. Transition becomes a phenomenon tied to particular styles of attention to the body, particular temporal flows, and allows certain kinds of “good” attachments to emerge. These features of transition are also tied to the racialisation of certain bodies and the lack of representation of trans people of colour within digital trans publics. This limited the possibilities of trans participants of colour to enact and envision their own transitions.

Shifting transition results in the reformulation of transition as a dynamic process that is crucially attached to audio-visual technologies, and the practices with audio-visual technologies that are shared amongst trans people in online trans spaces. In this reconfiguration, the transitioning trans person becomes a participant in the effects of transition, not merely a passive bystander of the pharmacological effects on the body brought about by testosterone. Trans medicine and pharmacology also remain crucial participants in trans transitions, but without becoming the singular or definitive players.

22 It is of course not just sex-gender that are formed through and with technology but the human body itself. In an attempt the emphasise this within trans studies Susan Stryker, among others, coined the term somatechnics to highlight the enmeshing and indivisibility of the body and technology and the materials and discourse that permeated these non- discrete phenomena (Sullivan, 2014, p. 187).

28

Both Chapters Three and Four propose new configurations for how we understand dysphoria and transition: as dynamic intra-actions between phenomena that span beyond the trans person in the case of dysphoria, and beyond testosterone in the case of transitioning. In this reconfiguration, there also appears to be a shift in the potential impetus for transitioning. Dysphoria emerges with attention, body potential and hope, while capacities for attention, time and good attachments emerge with audio-visual technological transitions. This suggests, perhaps, that for some trans people, the impetus for transitioning is attached not (only) to dysphoria, but also dysphoric encounters with bodily attention, body potential and hope. And, the (potentially positive) effects of transition may emerge within an audio-visual technology transition that co-constitutes particular encounters with attention, time and good attachments. This radically shifts and multiplies the impetus for affecting the body with gendered medical technologies, not solely as a means to shift the wrong body into the right one, but as a desire to intervene into a bodily encounter with attention, body potential, hope, time and attachments to the body.

Chapter Five, “Unmaking gender: Non-binary people using ‘men’s hormones’”, returns to testosterone and its attachment to men, masculinity and manhood, elaborated in Chapter One. Testosterone is used within trans masculine treatment protocols to address an alignment between the external (female) sex and a binary23 identification with manhood. Because of this attachment to masculinity and manhood, the treatment of the wrong body for trans men is perfectly aligned with testosterone. Trans men’s bodies, within the wrong body narrative, are lacking in maleness, a state that can be solved through the administration of testosterone. And yet, this logic is confounded when people who do not identify fully as men, who claim non-binary genders, use testosterone to enact changes to the body. Theorising their testosterone use allows us to reconceive of testosterone as not purely linked to masculinity and manhood, and not solely as a means to correct a trans man’s wrong body. What their use elaborates is how testosterone can become multiple, and how it can be used not to confirm to an internal gender but as practice; a practice that de-centralises gender identification, and as a substance that unmakes gender. These shifts substantially alter the standard (oft repeated and almost always required) justifications for hormonal administration and proliferates the ways we think about trans gender, transitions, and how people can be testosterone users.

23 People with binary gender identities feel strongly attached to being a man or woman. People who are trans or cis can have binary identities.

29 Method The majority of this thesis is based on thirty interviews conducted in early 2017 with non-binary and trans people using exogenous testosterone, and trans/gender/sexual men or masculine identified people not currently using testosterone. Participants were accessed through my social networks, particularly through my Facebook statuses and some trans specific Facebook groups I was already embedded within. I also used snowballing to access trans people who experience intersectional oppression like trans people of colour. All participants were required to contact me concerning the interviews to allow appropriate consideration of the desire to participate. Participants were sent an initial document outlining what the interview would entail. Some participants requested further information and so were provided with the Participant Information Statement and the Participant Consent Form, as well as explicit answers from myself.

Because the project was open to any trans or non-binary person with some experience of, or desire for, exogenous testosterone use, one participant who identified as a “non-binary, transwoman” and was using exogenous estrogen, progesterone and testosterone elected to participate. After the interview was conducted, transcribed, and sent to her email address she no longer responded to my emails. One prompt email was sent which was not responded too. She did not give me final permission to use her interview material and so her interview material has not been used in this thesis. Her demographics remain embedded as a representation of the sample of participants accessed for interviews.

A second participant also requested a follow up interview to clarify some materials from the first interview; the second interview was conducted shortly after the first. The participant was given the transcription of the first interview which he then used to clarify his experiences during the second interview.

All names have been anonymised, with gender and cultural similarities maintained where possible.

A one page summary will be sent to participants on completion of the project.

The dominant demographics24 of participants were:

24 Demographics can also be seen in Appendix 2.

30 • White Australian (18/30 participants).25 • Aged between twenty and thirty (20/30 participants).26 • University educated (25/30 having completed or completing a bachelor level university degree).27 • Currently or previously having used testosterone (29/30 participants).28 • Non-binary or genderqueer (16/30 included non-binary or genderqueer as a part of their gender identification). • Sydney residents (19/30 currently living in Sydney, Australia).

There were also some non-dominant but notable trends in the groups which included: • 14/30 noted some form of physical dis/ability, neuro-divergence or mental health issue. • 12/30 grew up or were currently “lower” socio-economic status. • 11/30 participants had grown up or lived for longer than ten years in rural or regional Australia. Four participants had spent 3-5 years in rural or regional Australia.

About half way through recruitment, it became evident that there was an abundance of trans people who were white, university educated and in their twenties interested in being interviewed. At that point I stopped accepting those participants and started actively recruiting people of colour, older trans people and people without university education. While this did shift the sample somewhat, it remained skewed towards white, younger and university educated trans people.

The majority of interviews that took place face-to-face occurred in the major Australian cities of Sydney, on the land of the Gadigal29 of the Eora Nation, and Melbourne, on the land of the Boon Wurrung and Woiwurrung (Wurundjeri) peoples of the Kulin Nation. Interviews were also sought from people living

25 The other eleven identified themselves as Argentinian born Australian, Greek and Italian Australian, Maltese Australian, Chinese Australian (two), “living/experiencing life as a non-white person”, Filipino and Australian, Middle Eastern/Anglo Australian, “mixed race Indigenous, Chinese, Indian, Caucasian” and “Sri Lankan ethnicity”. 26 The rest were dispersed between thirty and seventy. 27 Of the rest, one person was undertaking an apprenticeship, three had TAFE qualifications and one a year twelve certificate completed. 28 The average time on testosterone was just over two and a half years, with a range of a few weeks to twenty years on testosterone. 29 This phrasing is slightly different from the usual sentence of “the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora Nation” because “gal” in Gadigal means “people”.

31 in rural and regional New South Wales, although were only conducted in Lismore, on the land of the Widjabal people of the Bundjalung Nation. Two interviews were conducted via Skype, one for accessibility reasons and the other because of distance.

The interviews were semi-structured30 with questions being asked about participants’ current and previous testosterone administration regime, their initial encounters with testosterone, their feelings, expectations and experiences of testosterone use, and how testosterone may have affected their familial, social and sexual lives. Because this thesis aims to think beyond standard approaches to trans experience, one way that I attempted to create space for participants to speak outside of commonly articulated trans experiences was by asking participants towards the beginning of the interview to draw their relationship to testosterone.31 In my experience this was a reasonably effective tool for most participants. The verbal content expressed prior to the drawing tended to be more embedded in the wrong body and trans narratives, while afterwards there were more moments that indicated a complex relationship to, or distance from, these narratives. While the drawings were not intended to be used as stand-alone images for analysis (a practice that may have too greatly assumed experiences, thoughts or beliefs that participants did not intend) one participant Lucas expressed such similar sentiments verbally as he did in his drawing that his drawing was used as a site of analysis in Chapter Four.

The interviews conducted were both helped and hindered by my being a trans person. Curiously, participants often seemed to assume my gender identification was the same as theirs, with participants only occasionally asking explicitly how I identified. Non-binary participants, and participants not long on testosterone who did ask seemed to find my identification as non-binary a source of comfort and lack of judgement. While the more binary identified trans men who asked seemed to find my physical appearance and apparent similarity in bodily experience a site of resonance and familiarity. While allowing people to discuss their lives, hopefully without fear of judgment, the apparent similiarity of my own experiences tended to result in a diminished elaboration of apparently common terms, trends or experiences. I often had to ask what people meant “for the transcript”.

Trans people are remarkably good at giving narratives about themselves. When you have been asked to

30 The outline for the interview can be seen at Appendix 1. 31 Some of these drawings can be seen in Appendix 4.

32 account for yourself within culturally intelligible paradigms by innumerable people, it is easy to fall into standard accounts that will be palatable to those you are speaking to. I can hear in my own voice a particular tone when I tell my “trans narrative” to others. This constraint is situated as originating, and in some ways continuing, through the restrictions of trans medicine, a critique which has been fundamental to trans studies since its inception (Stone, 2006/1987; Stryker, 1997). This is especially true in discussions of gender dysphoria, which Latham and Heyes (2018, p. 175) argue “constrains trans people’s narratives about themselves”, or the wrong body narrative (Cromwell, 1999, p. 104; Overall, 2009, p. 23). As Andrea Long Chu (2017) notes, these narratives are hard to escape. Even the most critical and literary oriented trans person cannot quite fully escape the rhetoric of being born in the wrong body when one is trying to explain the complex, contradictory and indefinable experience of being a gendered being in the world (see Chu, 2017).

While one solution is to look at how trans people deploy, usurp and disrupt the trans and wrong body narratives,32 my approach has been much more oriented to the cracks and slips in what participants have said, the whispers at the edges of dominant meaning. I do so to establish, from the refuse of discourse, alternative materials to construct new frameworks for thinking and being trans gender. But this approach comes with risks. Trans studies and trans politics highlight the political and ethical need for trans people to have the ultimate authority over their gender identities and desires (Bettcher, 2009). This is an approach I fully support. However, trans people, like all people, articulate themselves through the use of logics and frameworks that mostly already exist in the world, and that make sense to them. But we are limited if all that is said exists only within these frameworks. My approach then has been to piece together from the differences. The differences between participants, the differences from my own experiences, or the differences from standard trans narratives. This has allowed me to hold to the words and the intentions of what participants have said, while also extending out the collective meaning making that can occur when multiple people whisper their alternative realities.

This thesis also contains some of my own experiments and experiences with exogenous testosterone.33 Over the course of six months, during the middle of my candidature I varied the dose rate and the type of

32 For a compelling discussion of the use of the wrong body narrative in trans youth online spaces in ways beyond the standard medicalised frame, see Psihopaidas (2017). 33 Here I am aligned with many trans theorists who argue for usefulness of insider accounts and the trans person as central to the production of trans research. For an elaboration with regards to phenomenology, see Rubin (1998).

33 testosterone I used: from two-weekly Primoteston injections to daily low dose testosterone gel, and then back again. I kept a diary about my thoughts and feelings during these self-experiments, writing long, short, succinct or elaborate entries. I did not pre-determine when I would write about the differences, I merely let my attention turn to my body when it called me towards it. I use both these reflections and a number of anecdotes about my life as a trans person and my experiences with testosterone. Some of these anecdotes I had written prior to this thesis, and others I have written specifically for this thesis. Much of this material is situated between each of the chapters. Sometimes these anecdotes foreshadow the content of the chapters, sometimes they are unexplored threads that add myself to this thesis, at other moments they touch on the overarching themes of the thesis. These encounters with testosterone were an intention to materialise the overall aim of this thesis, my own form of creative somatic experimentation ingrained biochemically into my body.

34 Vignettes

Contamination

Day One I meticulously read the instructions on the testosterone gel pump pack: Prime the pump by pushing down on the pump three times – Throw the gel that comes out away – One pump is 50mg, four is equivalent to an injection – Apply it to your upper body – Use it daily – Wait six hours to have a shower or exercise (pity it’s the middle of an Australian summer).

I apply the gel, and can’t believe how quickly it dries. After all the complaints I’ve heard about how inconvenient it is, I find the absorption simple. I wonder if I am very warm, or if my body absorbs the water quickly, sucking it into itself, thirsty skin. It’s not taking the testosterone with it, that’s deposited on the skin, slowly absorbed over the next few hours. I like that it happens over time, that it happens regularly, that it’s a less invasive process than ramming a needle into my hip muscle every ten days. I feel more attached to the spaces my body occupies, even if I feel a more tentative and vulnerable relation to the testosterone itself; it can be washed off, or left on others, it is not as fully mine as perhaps it was in an injection when the safety of my body surrounded it and held it in place. It is not fully mine and therefore it can be others. The instructions warn about not coming into contact with others, especially pregnant women. I don’t know any pregnant women, but I have a partner, cats, a dog. I feel contaminated, cautious, holding myself in as if I could adhere the testosterone molecules more closely to my skin.

Day Two I still feel worried about putting the gel left on my hands onto other inanimate things. I feel much less contaminated than yesterday, though similarly cautious. I can’t help thinking about the safety instructions, that even with through t-shirt the rate of passing on the testosterone gel is 9%. 9%. Even with that material barrier it seems like a risk to be passing on so much to another being with only a touch. I am a contaminant. Am I perhaps impacting inanimate objects too? ‘roiding up my phone, towel and doona cover?

35 Chapter One At the intersections of testosterone: Testosterone’s history with gender, sexuality and race

Testosterone is not a biological phenomenon laid open to inspection by a radically independent and unfettered science. Testosterone has been and continues to be formed through and with the science that has “discovered” it (see Fausto-Sterling, 2000). Science itself is also not neutral, an approach that merely unveils the hidden truths of the world if given the enough time and the right instruments. It is informed and shaped by the cultural, temporal, and local contexts in which it occurs (see Oudshoorn, 1994; Roberts, 2007). This chapter explores the science and cultures surrounding the phenomena of testosterone, with a focus on hormonal research taking place in the early twentieth-century and travelling into the contemporary cultural and scientific moment. I focus on testosterone’s attachments to bodies, norms and cultural anxieties that surround the Western binary sex-gender system, and that weld testosterone to masculinity, maleness and manhood. I also canvass some of the facets of class, race and the international flows of testosterone’s production that shape how we understand what testosterone is as a bio-cultural phenomenon. I conclude with a brief discussion of how these social and scientific logics surrounding testosterone shape the use of exogenous testosterone by trans masculine people, as a treatment aimed to embed chemical masculinity into the body of “female” people, and as substance shaped by race and racism. While these implications will be more extensively elaborated in the forthcoming chapters, this initial canvass is central in establishing the socio-pharmaco-logics of testosterone and its attachment to science, medicine and society.

Masculinity and testes “before” science Testosterone and associated biological substrates attached to male bodies have been imbricated with masculinity and manhood since before biochemists isolated it in the early 1930s. The use of male gonads to enhance men’s bravery, sexuality and vitality dates back from at least the ancient Greek and Romans who used wolf and goat testicles in preparations believed to act as sexual stimulants (Oudshoorn, 1994, p. 17). The 17th century also saw the attempt to enhance virility and treat “imbecility” through the use of teste extracts. This included more formalised systems, like the London College of Physicians who, in 1676, outlined how to use the reproductive organs of animals to treat illness and act as sexual stimulants.

36 While the use of animal testes for virility and vitality was abandoned from official pharmacopias in Europe by 1800, they still remained a popular product sold by European quacks who capitalised on the folklore belief in testes as sources of masculinity (Oudshoorn, 1994, p. 17).

Testes and their ongoing attachment to men’s fears of ageing and a loss of masculine conditioning were re-introduced in the late 1880s into the scientific arena, in part through the work of French physiologist Charles-Edouard Brown-Séquard (Oudshoorn, 1994, p. 17). In Séquard’s 1889 address at the Société de Biologie in Paris, he elaborated the effects of self-injecting guinea pigs and dog testicles. Taking this elixir to try and ameliorate “the most troublesome miseries of advanced life”, he recalls his first injection as producing “a radical change” and an increased physical and intellectual vigour (Brown-Séquard, 1889 in Karkazis, 2018; Preciado, 2013, p. 156). During his speech he suggested that secretions from the testes were both a mechanism for control of the male organism, and could be used to treat certain diseases (Oudshoorn, 1994, p. 17). This approach did not receive widely positive responses. Many of Brown- Séquard’s colleagues were hostile to his claims, fearing a return to the quackery of the Dark Ages (Oudshoorn, 1994, p. 17). The Boston Medical and Surgical Journal for instance stated that “the sooner the general public, and especially septuagenarian readers of the latest sensation understand that for the physically used up and worn out there is no secret of rejuvenation, no elixir of youth, the better” (Nanninga, 2017). However, demonstrating the imbrication of “culture” with “science”,34 Brown-Séquard’s own prestige alongside his assertion that semen contained masculinity, and the need to retain said masculinity through a conservative approach to sex and masturbation aligned with Victorian (upper/middle class) norms of sexuality. This gave his claims an impetus that they might not otherwise have had, and shortly after, science returned to the consideration of testes and their extracts as pertinent to animal biological processes (Oudshoorn, 1994, p. 17). The attachment between the biological (male) body and the social (masculine gender) continued entwined to permeate scientific research on these about-to-be hormones.

Testosterone, science and sex The science of hormones during the 1920s and 30s was deeply contingent on the availability of specific biological and technological apparatus which, alongside pre-existing social and medical networks, manifested particular directions for scientific research (Oudshoorn, 1994). These networks and apparatus were not the only structures shaping hormonal research, so too were Western society and Western

34 Science and culture are of course never separate but mutually co-constituted.

37 science’s pre-existing and ongoing investment in a binary sex-gender system (Fausto-Sterling, 2000; Roberts, 2007). This structuring of bodies and hormones into binary opposites was crucial to testosterone’s ongoing association with its cultural correlate of masculinity and manhood. What these hormonal research flows demonstrate is not only how testosterone remained embedded with masculinity and manhood, but also sciences’ inextricability from cultural norms, and science’s role in upholding and solidifying a hormonal sex-gender binary. This hormonal history, situates the contemporary landscape of social and medical attitudes to testosterone as a product of the inheritance of some of these early scientific and Western sex-gender negotiations.

While testosterone, or its gonadal counterparts, had occupied pre-scientific attention, most scientific research into hormones35 during the early 1900s focused on women and oestrogens rather than men and testosterone.36 Nelly Oudshoorn (1994) in her book Beyond the natural body: An archaeology of sex hormones argues that this focus occurred due to the pre-existing structures that existed surrounding women’s bodies and a comparative lack of structures surrounding men’s bodies. For instance, much of the initial work prior to the chemical synthesis of these hormones required very large amounts of urine to extract enough testosterone and oestrogen to study. But the availability of this was uneven. As Oudshoorn (1994, p. 65) notes, gynaecologists had easy access to pregnant women’s urine, while pregnant mares’ urine was also cheaply available, both of which contained high quantities of oestrogen. Comparatively, there was less access to testosterone because of a lack of analogous social and medical structures, and the limitations in human male (and animal) biology. For instance, the study of men’s sexual or reproductive lives was minimal during this period and men who were unwell and became enmeshed in medical systems (one potential source of sufficient access to the quantities of urine needed) had insufficient testosterone in their urine due to their illnesses. There were also no viable animal substitutes available. While military and police men were one source of quantities of urine, the strategic difficulties of attaining sufficient quantities inhibited the process (Oudshoorn, 1994, p. 76).

35 In 1905 Ernest H. Starling used the term “hormones” to mark these “chemical messengers” as substances understood as vital for the body’s physiological functioning (Preciado, 2013, p. 157). This initial approach to hormones situated these messengers as delivered from the organ where hormones were produced to the organ that is affected by them. This view doesn’t account for the fluidity of hormones and the ways that, for instance, they change during transportation or are altered by the tissue that receives them (Roberts, 2007, p. 7). 36 This attention was hardly benign and often involved mechanisms of intense gendered regulation, especially around sexuality and gender. See Preciado (2013, pp. 223, 167), Fausto-Sterling (2008) and Fine (2017).

38 This availability began to change as hormonal science grew. In 1931, German biochemist Adolf Butenandt isolated a substance he termed androstone from policemen’s urine. This structured chemist Leopold Ruzika’s synthesis of the hormone in 1934. And, in 1935, in the oft cited paper “On crystalline male hormone from testicles (testosterone)”, Laqueur, with the Organon group, described the isolation of, as well as coined the term, testosterone. It was synthesised in that same year by Butenandt and Hanish in Berlin and a week later, Ruzicka and Wettstein published the paper “On the artificial preparation of the testicular hormone testosterone (Andro-sten-3-one-17-ol)” and applied for a patent (E. R. Freeman, Bloom, & McGuire, 2001).

It was not just the medical, social and biological structures that shaped hormonal research. The very formation of sex endocrinology as a coherent field in first decade of the twentieth century was contingent on a two sex-gender system. Situating testosterone as attached to masculinity and oestrogen and progesterone to femininity functioned to hold together otherwise disparate hormonal knowledges, research practices and networks (Oudshoorn, 1994, p. 19). Extending a sex-gender critical approach to hormonal research is the work of feminist science and technology studies scholar Celia Roberts (2007) in Messengers of Sex: Hormones, biomedicine and feminism. In this book, Roberts (2007) turns her attention to how a binary sex-gender framework was maintained within scientific research. This is especially notable when science is often situated as an objective endeavour to discover the truth of the world. Attending to biomedical and techno-scientific accounts alongside the socio-cultural entanglements with hormones, Roberts (2007) argues that hormones are neither the messengers of a pre- existing or inherent sex or solely cultural constructs. Rather, Roberts (2007, p. 14) argues that hormones are active participants in the socio-biological networks that make up the semiotic-material phenomena we call sex. That hormones’ messages are “received and responded to within bio-social (as opposed to purely biological) systems or worlds” (Roberts, 2007, p. 14).

In chapter one, “Folding hormonal histories of sex”, Roberts (2007) revisits the period in the 1920s and 30s that saw the flourishing of endocrinological research. Roberts (2007) points to the abundance of scientific knowledge from the very beginning of scientific research into hormones that evidenced the ongoing and vital role hormones play in non-sex related processes. This includes, for instance, supporting

39 the physiological functioning of the body in both men and women.37 Roberts (2007) also points to knowledge of hormonal differences between men and women as existing only in degrees and not in kind. Hormones are themselves fluid and changeable, a feature seen in the conversion of testosterone into oestrogen with the help of the biological catalyst aromatase (Fine, 2017). And yet, despite scientific knowledge of the non-dualistic and fluid nature of hormones, the two-sex model remained ubiquitous in Western science and society. The “male hormone” testosterone and the “female hormone” oestrogen continued to be entwined with masculinity and manhood and femininity and womanhood, despite the scientific evidence that disrupts these apparent inherent divisions.

Roberts (2007) explains the failure of scientific research into hormones to shift away from a two-sex model through Haraway’s (1991) work on embodied knowledge and Michel Serres’ (1995) proposal of time as “crumpled”. Haraway (1991) resists ideas of the objective scientist or science as discovering a truth independent of its context, and rather asserts that scientists and scientific knowledge is always situated and embodied, it is always a product of the specific networks of materials and semiotics existing “beyond” the domain of science. Serres (1995, p. 46) elaborates time as non-linear and “crumpled”, where events, including those attached to science, always “combine aspects that are archaic and before their time – that the spaces between past, present and future are crumpled, or folded”. This, Roberts (2007) asserts, accounts for the ways that a dualistic relation to sex hormones still holds, despite endocrinological research that has thoroughly undercut this paradigm: scientific knowledge arises from its situatedness and its history, it does not and can not exist purely in a singular attachment to scientific fields where each scientific discovery wipes clean all the “false” scientific historical detritus that has come before it.

Fausto-Sterling’s (2000) book Sexing the body: Gender politics and the construction of sexuality also takes issue with the processes of the dualistic and enforced gendering of sex, biology, hormones and scientific studies of human biology and their social correlates. She says: “the scientists who first learned how to measure and name the testes and ovarian factors entwined gender so intricately into their conceptual framework that we still have not managed to pull them apart” (Fausto-Sterling, 2000, p. 179). She, like Roberts (2007), points to the 1920s and 30s as forming the scientific foundations of our current historical inheritances. Fausto-Sterling (2000, p. 151) argues that this period of scientific attention to the

37 Testosterone affects liver metabolism, heart function, and bone development (Karkazis, 2018, p. 2).

40 study, distillation and synthesizing of hormones also occurred at a moment where gender and sexuality (as well as race and class) were being debated. This intense social upheaval added impetus to explain and maintain the gendered social order through the validation of the two-sex system and their hormonal correlates (Fausto- Sterling, 2000, p. 154). While not all research aimed to uphold this system, the pull of the dual sex model in studies of hormones was so strong that even scientists who argued against such a model weren’t able to fully extricate themselves from it. For instance, Fausto-Sterling (2000) discuses Frank Lillie, a zoologist and embryologist who articulated a critical approach to the “pre-scientific anthropomorphism” that assumed a trueness of the two-sex system that pervaded scientific studies of hormones. She notes however, that despite Lillie’s critical approach to the two-sex system, he still concluded of hormones “as there are two sets of sex characters, so there are two sex hormones, the male hormone… and the female” (Lillie, 1939 in Fausto-Sterling, 2000, p. 178).

As Oudshoorn (1994) demonstrates, scientific research on sex-hormones emerged from pre-existing cultural and material networks that more easily established knowledges around oestrogen and progesterone than testosterone. However, as Roberts (2007) and Fausto-Sterling (2000) elaborate, early scientific research into testosterone, oestrogen and progesterone worked to align these hormones with their cultural correlates of masculinity and men, and femininity and women. This process illuminates how hormonal science evolved through its attachment to prior scientific and cultural knowledges that reinforced and upheld a strong attachment to a Western binary sex-gender system. The bonds between hormones and binary sex-gender are so tight that they continue to permeate contemporary social and scientific encounters with testosterone38 and oestrogen.39

Hormones beyond sex-gender: Sexuality and race While the contemporary understanding of sex and gender align well with our understanding of hormones’ biological and social functions, it is not only sex and gender that have been implicated in research into

38 For a contemporary critique of testosterone’s attachment to masculinity and manhood see Fine (2017). 39 When people find out the topic of this thesis I am often inundated with various facts, stories and suggestions of what I should talk about (including one time during an electrolysis appointment). Occasionally people provide me with extremely useful materials. An early career researcher in my department relayed the words of family member, an endocrinologist, who said about non-binary people’s use of hormones “you know, there is no such thing as gender neutral hormones”. I would assume this endocrinologist was talking specifically about oestrogen and testosterone since there are a massive array of hormones not tied to secondary sex characteristics. What this indicates is how overwhelmingly attached testosterone and oestrogen are to a binary sex-gender model, such that it continues to effect currently working endocrinologists.

41 hormones (Preciado, 2013, p. 153). Sexuality, in its attachment to sex and gender, is deeply bound to hormone knowledges and practices. The clinical treatment imperative to “cure” sexuality-gender deviants began in the 1930s and 40s where, despite being the very early days of testosterone synthesizing, homosexual men in the U.S. were administered testosterone to “cure” their “abnormalities”. The treatment paradigm of intervening in the sexuality of men with testosterone relied upon a belief in the (incorrect) feminine gender of homosexual men and testosterone’s attachment to masculinity (Oudshoorn, 1994, p. 56).40 In a time where sex, gender and sexuality were more closely attached, one could intervene into the sex-gendered body to attempt to rectify the gender-sexuality failings of these men. This regime was a total failure and the approaches to “cure” homosexuality largely shifted to behavioural and psychoanalytic treatment (Terry, 1999 in Roberts, 2007, p. 117).

The explanations for and attempts to “fix” gender and sexuality were also thoroughly embedded in age, race, class and ability. For instance, in a 1935 Time magazine article discussing the synthesis of testosterone from the cholesterol in sheep’s wool, it states: “German and Swiss chemical laboratories are already prepared . . . to manufacture from sheep’s wool all the testosterone the world needs to cure homosexuals, revitalize old men” (“Testosterone”, 1935). Clifford Wright in the 1930s also believed in the potential for a hormonal solution to the aberrant sexualities of homosexual men. His claims were problematised by his apparent need to differentiate different classes of homosexuals which were defined by the “white, middleclass, law abiding homosexual” and the “so called criminal type, who was poor, uneducated, and usually an immigrant” (Kenen, 1997, p. 204). Within the scientific paradigms that reflected, upheld and validated the eugenic politics of the time, hormones, and especially testosterone here, is implicated in the attitudes to race and class embedded in a treatment approach to deviant genders and sexualities.

The embedding of race, class, nation, sex and gender not only permeated testosterone but also oestrogen and progesterone. As Preciado (2013, p. 174) discusses, the earliest contraceptive pill trials were

40 The use of hormones to treat sexuality variant individuals shifted towards “feminising” men, a kind of resignation to preventing “abnormal” practices, rather than the “curing” of them. For instance, in the 1950s in the United Kingdom, Alan Turing, the inventor of theoretical artificial intelligence and computer science, was compelled to undertake an oestrogen hormone therapy after being accused of homosexuality (Preciado, 2013, p. 229). We can also see this in global use of chemical castration for people convicted of child sex offenses. The state of New South Wales, Australia was considering a proposal for chemical castration at the end of 2017 (SBS News, 2017).

42 conducted with the express intention of curtailing the fertility and non-normative practices of non-white, urban, disabled, homosexual and other gender variant individuals. The first large scale trial conducted by pharmaceutical company Searle, from 1956-57, was performed on female psychiatric patients for birth control and male prison inmates to reduce homosexuality. Not a sufficiently acceptable trail to the FDA because of its rigid institutional setting, the next trial location was the island of Puerto Rico, conducted during the 1950s and 60s. The women here were understood to be “not only as docile as laboratory animals, but also as poor and uneducated” and as such were considered prime candidates for these trials (Preciado, 2013, p. 180). Gill-Peterson (2014, p. 411) also highlights the imbrication of race, sex and endocrinology in discussing a 1920 paper was published by Austrian endocrinologists Eugen Steinach and Paul Kammerer who proposed that the warmer temperature in tropical climates stimulated the production of sex hormones. This “explained” the apparent earlier onset of puberty and the hyper- sexuality of girls and women in colonised countries.

As an aside the associations between animals and racially marginalised people that facilitate the mistreatment of both is clearly indicated in Preciado’s (2013, p. 180) above quote, and is something that has been argued and documented within critical race studies and critical animal studies. LeDuff (2000) elaborates the racialisation of slaughterhouse practices while Lemire (2009, pp. 103, 130) discusses the racism tied to both animals and plant breeding practices. Fielder (2013) also indicates the potential for, and critique of, the use of familial attachments to animals in anti-racism praxis.

While the historical imperatives for the ‘treatment’ of homosexuals using testosterone are evident, the racial paradigms for testosterone during this period are less clear (Roberts, 2007, p. 134). However, the associations between testosterone levels and racialised subjects are typified in a paper published in 1990 by Richard Lynn. Lynn (1990 in Roberts, 2007, p. 134) compares the apparent differences in men’s care of their children with their testosterone levels. “Negroid” men, with apparently the highest testosterone levels, are compared to “Caucasian” men, who have the second highest level of testosterone, and “Mongoloid” men, who have the lowest testosterone level. Lynn (1990 in Roberts, 2007, p. 134) argues that the different levels of testosterone in each group effect the libido, the amount of sexual activity and the care investment in offspring, i.e. black men have less investment in their offspring than white or men from South East and Central Asia because of their testosterone levels. This disturbingly racist analysis demonstrates the link between gender, sexuality and race that permeates discussions of hormones. White

43 heterosexual men are positioned as having the “correct” levels of testosterone and the correct degree of parental investment, while black men’s testosterone levels are “too high” and they have inappropriately low parental investment. Asian men’s testosterone levels are, compared to the norm of white men, considered “too low”.

The “racial T hypothesis” which attributes different testosterone levels to different racial groups continues to abound scientifically and socially (Kramer, 2019). The continuation of this paradigm occurs, according to (Kramer, 2019, p. 12), in large part because the “ideology of race as essentially biological and… testosterone [as] a key biological component that animates racial differences, is already enough rationale to empower false positive findings” in scientific research. This approach is concerning for several reasons, one of which is that reiterates white bodies as the norm with which all other racialised groups are compared, while also affecting the material possibilities for diagnosis and treatment protocols for testosterone-related health issues for people of colour (Kramer, 2019).41 The racialisation of testosterone at the individual level is echoed in the racialised flows of testosterone at the national and international levels. Beauchamp (2013) in “The substance of borders: Transgender politics, mobility, and US state regulation of testosterone” attends to the initial synthesizing and production of exogenous testosterone by pharmaceutical companies. As was discussed above, the early research into testosterone was marked by a difficulty in accessing sufficient quantities of raw materials for study. This was rectified when, in the early 1940s, a plant native to and abundant in Mexico was determined by chemists from Mexico, Hungary and the U.S. to be a viable and inexpensive material to synthesise testosterone. At the time, companies from Germany, Switzerland and the Netherlands, along with their subsidiaries in the U.S., held the patents and controlled early production of synthetic hormones, but they still required large quantities of raw materials for the mass production of hormones. The Mexican pharmaceutical company Syntex was founded to capitalise on these plant-based materials, and by the late 1950s they were providing 80-90% of the worlds steroids (Beauchamp, 2013, p. 70).

However, U.S. firms began to encroach into Mexico and, when Syntex resisted, the Mexican company

41 In the diagnosis of poly-cystic ovarian syndrome in cis women, symptoms of heighted testosterone levels are attached to body hair growth and balding, which are believed to vary across race, despite limited and contradictory evidence (Carlin & Kramer, 2019). While different rates of prostate cancer, cardio-metabolic disease and bone mineral density issues are explained through the higher levels of testosterone in black cis men, compared to white cis men (Kramer, 2019, p. 9).

44 was brought before the U.S. senate for patent violations. This resulted in Syntex agreeing not to impede other countries’ access to Mexican materials. By 1963 all Mexican pharmaceutical firms had been replaced by several transnational firms. These racial and national flows tied to testosterone demonstrate the broader dynamics and the global inequalities in the divergent capacities of some countries to assert a firmness of national boundaries and the forced fluidity of others (Beauchamp, 2013, p. 71). It also demonstrates how certain norms of access and denial get instantiated, and how particular (racialised) bodies (be they human bodies or national bodies) can lay claim, or not, to the substance of testosterone.

These racialised dynamics embedded in relations to and depictions of hormones, especially testosterone, remain present in contemporary popular culture. One example of how testosterone is tied up in global geopolitics that are colonial, racist and sexist can be seen in the moments of heightened public scrutiny of black female athletes from countries in the ‘global south’. This is most recently seen in the case of South African middle-distance runner and 2016 Olympic gold medalist Caster Semenya.

Scrutiny over Semenya’s body began in 2009 when the International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) failed to maintain the confidentiality of Semenya’s “sex testing”. Semenya was subsequently cleared to compete in July 2010 and her results were never released. In 2015 the Court of Arbitration for Sport suspended the IAAF (2011) and the International Olympic Committee’s (IOC) (2012) policy that dictated the upper limit of testosterone levels for females for two years. This was enacted after an appeal made by the Indian sprinter Dutee Chand and largely relied on the inability to find a clear link between testosterone levels and undue superior performance (Karkazis & Jordan-Young, 2018, p. 4). As Semenya continued to win at the international level, she also continued be scrutinised for apparently high testosterone levels. In 2018, the IAAF announced new rules for female athletes with “differences in sex development”, such as hyperandrogenism. Athletes wishing to compete were required by the IAAF to medically lower their testosterone levels to within “normal” female parameters. This rule was only applicable to those athletes who compete in the 400, 800 and 1500 meters, races in which Semenya competes. That year, Semenya unsuccessfully challenged the IAAF rules, with the new regulations coming into effect on the 8th of May 2019 (Meyers, 2019). Semenya has appealed the decision in the Federal Supreme Court of Switzerland (Bishara, 2019).

As Karkazis and Jordan-Young (2018) argue, Semenya’s experiences are the effects of the racist and

45 colonialist logics being upheld within athletics and the subsequent media furore. Their piece “The powers of testosterone: Obscuring race and regional bias in the regulation of women athletes” (2018) gives an extensive account of the negotiations and discussions around testosterone, gender and the regulation of women athletes’ bodies during these debates. Central to their argument is that there is greater literal and conceptual attention paid to the regulation of women of colour athletes and women athletes from the global south (Karkazis & Jordan-Young, 2018). While not explicitly tied to race, testosterone levels become a stand in for “abnormal” sex-gendered bodies and their apparent sporting prowess. Testosterone, as discussed above, is deeply attached to the gendered and sexed presumptions made about certain racialised bodies. The rhetoric, rulings and actions of organisations like the IAAF rely on a series of presumptions about testosterone, many of which have yet to be, at least according to Karkazis and Jordan- Young (2018), fully evidenced, and many of which are unspoken. The main assertions include: testosterone helps the athletic abilities for all individuals, there are “normal” levels of testosterone for female women, women who have abnormally high levels of testosterone are not women and therefore their ability to compete in women’s sports is suspect, and women of colour and women from the global south are more likely to have higher testosterone levels.42 While the particularities of these assumptions and the way that they manifest are manifold, the most exemplifying of these practices are the test for ascertaining high functional testosterone in women athlete’s bodies; an intention to establish how affected the body is by endogenous testosterone. This effect is largely established by the visual inspection of hair, muscles, voice pitch, a “lack” of female sexual characteristics (breasts and menstruation) and the presence of a “larger than typical clitoris” (Karkazis & Jordan-Young, 2018, p. 42). These are deeply subjective assessments that “vary by historical period, place, racial ideologies, and individual situation” (Karkazis & Jordan-Young, 2018, p. 42). These kinds of mechanisms rely on certain racialised and subjective norms that exist at the intersection of gender, race and sex and create contexts where athletes like Semenya are situated as intense sites of cultural attention, anxiety and regulation. The role of Semenya’s race and other athletes like her, their competing for countries in the “global south”, their appearances (often situated as too masculine) and their sporting prowess (considered too good) are significant and powerful factors in the determination of the (un)acceptability of their bodies and genders. These facets are filtered through the debates about testosterone and testosterone levels, made “objective”

42 The underlying principle of this assumption involves the attribution of modernity to countries in the global north, and an “incompetent or uncivilized ‘neglect’ of bodies” through a lack of early detection and redress of “abnormal” sexed characteristics in the global south (Karkazis & Jordan-Young, 2018, p. 31).

46 by science and medicine.

Conclusion I conclude now with some suggestions of how testosterone, imbricated with gender, sex, sexuality and race, may shape and make possible a particular kind of trans testosterone use. The most relevant feature of testosterone elaborated here is its attachment to masculinity and manhood, inherited by pre-scientific beliefs, socio-scientific “discovery” and Western cultural knowledges, upheld through the logic of a binary sex-gender system. Trans testosterone treatment logics, as discussed throughout the following chapters, are deeply reliant on the notion of distilling into a “female” person a kind of liquefied masculinity through testosterone administration. It is situated as a way to shift the wrongly sexed (female) body and to align it with the male mind. In terms of the early use of testosterone as a treatment, contemporary trans testosterone treatment protocols have an eerie resonance with early attempts to fix the failed masculinity of homosexual men in the 1930s and 40s through exogenous testosterone. This treatment paradigm relied on the scientific and cultural bonds established between heterosexual masculinity, appropriate expressions of manhood and testosterone. While perhaps the underlying conditions of social homophobia compared to trans validation may differ, trans treatment with testosterone relies on the similar attachment between testosterone, male sex and masculine gender.

Although the relation between testosterone’s embedding in racial logics is not quite as clear for trans treatment regimes, there are three pertinent points to make regarding the experiences of trans participants of colour in this project. The first is the ways that “ideal” testosterone levels have been attached to cis male heterosexual whiteness. Whiteness as a norm is deeply evident in digital trans masculine publics (Horak, 2014; Raun, 2015a). A context where white trans masculine people receive the greatest attention, and the ideal of white masculinity is tied to the most desirable effects of exogenous testosterone use. The dominance of these white masculine depictions shaped the use of, desire for, and possible futures with testosterone available to participants of colour. This is discussed further in the following chapters.

The second is how popular cultural anxieties that surround testosterone often focus on black men and women. While this thesis had a variety of participants of different racial and cultural identifications, most of the explicit commentary on race and racism was articulated by participants with parents originating

47 from Central, South East and South Asia. This is obviously highly relevant when the racialised associations adhering to people coming from or with ancestry in these countries is quite different to those adhering to black people and blackness. For most participants of color in this thesis, all of whom are based in Australia, the associations with passivity, femininity and low testosterone levels tended to be more relevant.

Finally, the racialisation of testosterone, as Kramer (2019) and Carlin and Kramer (2019) have noted, has effects on the treatment and diagnosis for different illnesses. While there is no quantitative or qualitative data on the possible differences in the administration of testosterone to different racialised trans groups by doctors and endocrinologists, it would not be surprising if the access to testosterone or the levels of testosterone considered “normal” for different trans people were being affected by race. This requires further investigation beyond the scope of this dissertation.

Testosterone has been situated as masculinity made chemical by medicine and science, themselves inextricably attached to social ideals of sex and gender. It has occupied a position as a new frontier for the detection of, and intervention into, deviant genders and sexualities, as a potential source of redemptive masculinity and as a deep threat to the seamlessness of a binary sex-gender system. It has become a precarious nexus of anxieties and potentials, varying in its form by its attachment to different racialised, classed and national bodies. These medical and cultural flows have, and continue to shape the possibilities, expectations and desires of trans masculine people and the rhetoric surrounding the treatment of trans masculine people with exogenous testosterone.

48 Vignettes

Routines

Day Five The skin on my hands feels dry from the alcohol, and my thinking about the now dry gel or noticing my dry hands throughout the day takes me from one to the other. They are the psychological and physical imprints of this new practice, one looks at me and the other one blinks with the same eyes.

Day Six The contamination feeling is almost gone, I can still think it, elicit it, bring it into existence with my attention. But I don’t feel it on my body, that sense of stickiness, the slight burn on the skin like a blush. I can attend to those areas but they don’t feel in the way that they did in the beginning.

Using the gel has become part of my morning rituals. I refine the routine. I apply the gel, wash my hands and wait for it to dry while I do my teeth. I’m a bit saddened by the apparent efficiency, no longer forced to be with my body, feeling the cold gel evaporate and the warmth return to my skin. But it seems silly not to do it this way.

49 Chapter 2 Malleable bodies, performative gender and medical activism: The arrival of Western trans masculinity

The phenomenon of Western trans/gender/sexuality is often situated as emerging from and deeply entwined with trans medicine. Beauchamp (2013, p. 58) notes that “the very production of the transgender subject depends largely on Western medicine’s investment in curing or correcting gender deviance through medical transition” such that the transgender subject is “inextricable from medical intervention — a discursive link that frequently moves beyond medical contexts to influence law, policy, and social relations”. The formation of the trans/gender/sexual subject through and with medicine, especially through the 1940s and 50s, as well as the transgender-medicine relation, has been accounted for in different ways. Trans/gender/sexual people have been positioned as dupes of a medical system, artificially constructed symptoms of an over-technologised patriarchal world.43 Or, more reasonably, trans/gender/sexual people have been positioned as active participants in negotiations with medicine and clinicians in the creation of systems for gendered medical interventions (see Hausman, 1995; Meyerowitz, 2004). Regardless of the specificity of the account, the emergence of the figure and treatment of the trans/gender/sexual in contemporary Western culture is considered indebted to Western medicine and its categories and technologies.

Much of the discussion relating to the emergence of trans/gender/sexuals has focused on trans women. These accounts range from the pejorative rhetoric of Raymond (1979), to archival research on the production of transsexuality by Western medicine, as in the case of Hausman (1995) and Meyerowitz (2004). While attempting to account for trans femininity’s emergence, what has yet to be fully accounted for by literature from earlier periods, are the particular relations of medicine, gender and broader social trends that led to the emergence of trans men and trans masculinity. This is because trans masculinity has a different aetiology, a different set of conditions under which it emerged, one that has been largely under-theorised.

43 See Raymond (1979). This is no longer the pervading Western cultural sentiment but marks a Western historical relationship to trans/gender/sexual interactions with medicine.

50 Trans men and trans masculinity, as a popular cultural figure and as a more available identity, gained notable traction during the late 1990s and early 2000s in the U.S., U.K. and Australia (Wickman, 2003). This chapter looks to transgender activism, changes to gender and the body, and counter-cultural health practices as participants in the emergence of trans masculinity. These cultural moments appear to play significant roles in the emergence of specific trans masculine potentials, making certain bodily materialities and identities more available through giving space for experiments with the sexed and gendered body.

The arrival of transgender politics in the 1990s radically shifted transgender organisations and proliferated the possibilities of a host of new transgender identities (Wickman, 2003). Threaded through these new transgender politics was a deep critique of medicine and its dictation of the terms according to which transsexuals could be constituted as acceptable subjects of medical intervention (Stryker, 2008). Transgender politics were also shaped by new work on the materiality of the body, which considered all bodies, not just trans bodies, as formed with technoscience. These shifts had notable effects on the inclusion and attention to trans masculine and trans men’s experiences and needs, something that had previously been largely invisible or unavailable in transgender activism and organisations prior to this moment.

Following the transformative shifts in transgender politics that took place in the 1990s, this chapter attends to the specifics of bodybuilding and sports doping, as well as drag kinging. These practices are paradigmatic of broader social changes taking place during this period. And particularly as they are tied to notions of the body as malleable and gender as performative. The social changes to the body and to gender provided key conditions of possibility for the collaborative manifestation of individual and collective trans masculine identities and the potential for experiments with the trans masculine body and self. With these new ways of thinking about the body and gender, distributed through discourse and mainstream cultural practices, new bodily and gendered possibilities emerged.

This chapter also adds to discussions of the emergence of trans masculinity by considering the role of activism in re-negotiating the transgender-medicine relation. The relationship between medical authority and consumers underwent radical changes through both women’s health activism and HIV activism during the 1980s and 90s. The shifts enacted by activist networks such as ACT UP marked a substantial

51 re-negotiation of power differentials among patients and health care providers in which consumer activists demanded greater attention by medical providers to the needs of subordinated populations. The changes enacted by medical activism flipped the early limitations of medicine’s approach to trans men, approaches marked by a lack of interest or belief in “female transsexualism”. This suggests that while trans masculinity has not only a different aetiology to trans femininity, it was also embedded in a different relationship to medicine, one typified by counterpublic activism.44

In illuminating some of the conditions and cultural threads that existed alongside, and likely participated in, the emergence of a highly visible trans masculinity in the 1990s and 2000s, this chapter does not aim to conduct a comprehensive discussion of all the various mechanisms that led to this emergence. Nor does it suggest that these changes are causal; that certain social conditions changed and therefore trans masculinity could become more possible. To make this argument would require the word count of an entire thesis and would have to use a methodological approach that failed to see the deep complexity and inter-play of cultural knowledge and practices. Rather, this chapter points towards some of the participants that likely played roles in the emergence of trans masculinity as a more accessible and culturally present identity and set of practices, and fleshes out how these connections and knowledge flows may have arisen. It is not so much speculative as observing and highlighting specific nexus of gendered and sexed practices, the discourses around the body and individuals’ identities, and the place of counter-cultural activism during this period. In doing so I attempt to assist further investigation of trans masculinities’ history.

Transsexuality, medicine and the absence of trans men before the 1990s Medicine has been situated as the cause, or at least the trigger, for the emergence of modern transsexuality in the mid twentieth-century.45 This period was characterised by the increasingly attentive and detailed

44 This is not to suggest that trans femininity’s relation to medicine was not one of activism. As Stone (2006/1987) makes evident, the kinds of negotiations between (mostly) trans women and medicine were marked by a network of underground information sharing. The work of Meyerowitz (2004) also demonstrates the complex negotiations that trans women (and some trans men) enacted to access medical intervention alongside the negotiations of medical powers. And the work of Stryker (2008) demonstrates the myriad ways that trans women and trans feminine people navigated law, policy, discrimination, and medicine to further the politics, life possibilities and medical interventions available to trans people during the late twentieth century. 45 The formation of trans/gender/sexuality is deeply linked to the power of medicine. As Stryker (2008, p. 36) notes: Medical practitioners and institutions have the social power to determine what is considered sick or healthy, normal or pathological, sane or insane—and thus, often, to transform potentially neutral forms of human difference into

52 work of medicine, science, sexologists, biologists and psychologists to find, categorise and define deviant individuals and practices, as well as “abnormal” sexes, genders and sexualities (Rubin, 2006). This period also instantiated the typology of contemporary identification and “diagnosis” along the apparently divergent lines of sex, gender and sexuality (Stryker, 2008, p. 18). A number of theorists have discussed medicine’s formative role in the figure and presence of the transsexual in the West. One of the more sympathetic, albeit still critiqued,46 texts is Changing sex: Transsexualism, technology and the idea of gender by Bernice Hausman (1995). Hausman (1995) situates herself against a trans-historical account of transsexuality, which positions transsexuality as having always existed and merely finding relief in the technological interventions of the 1950s.47 Instead, Hausman (1995) attends to the role and place of medical technologies in the very formation of the transsexual. She argues that like homosexuality, transsexuality is “a category of experience and identity that can be read as a result of specific social and cultural conditions” (1995, p. 3). These conditions were comprised of “developments in medical technology and practice” which became “the necessary conditions for the emergence of the demand for sex change, which was understood as the most important indicator of transsexual subjectivity” (1995, p. 3). Succinctly summarising her approach, Hausman (1995, p. 3, emphasis in original) argues that “transsexuals must seek and obtain medical treatment in order to be recognized as transsexuals”.

Meyerowitz (2004) in How sex changed: A history of transsexuality in the United States provides a very comprehensive and expanded view on the emergence of transsexuality in the 1950s and 60s. Significantly, Meyerowitz’s (2004) account includes, but is not limited to, a discussion of the development of medical technologies. Using extensive archival research, Meyerowitz (2004, p. 5) points to how technological interventions to “change sex” had been occurring since hormonal and surgical developments in the early twentieth century. She states: In explaining why transsexuality and sex-reassignment emerged in the twentieth century, one might cite new developments in medical technology, especially new plastic-surgery techniques and the

unjust and oppressive social hierarchies. 46 Stryker and Whittle (2006, p. 362) take issue with Hausman’s (1995) book, and especially Chapter Five “Body, technology, and gender in transsexual autobiographies”. Stryker and Whittle (2006) argue in their introduction of Hausman’s (1995) chapter in The transgender studies reader that Hausman (1995) over-emphasises the power of the transsexual in their encounters with medicine, and further that she attempts to provide a “compelling argument for the discontinuation of medical gender-reassignment procedures” (Stryker & Whittle, 2006, p. 362). 47 Hausman (1995) is speaking back to Janice Raymond (1979).

53 invention of synthetic hormones. Indeed, medical technology placed a significant role in the history of transsexuality. But technology alone provided neither a necessary nor a sufficient precondition for modern transsexualism. (Meyerowitz, 2004, p. 21).

Meyerowitz (2004) elaborates how transsexuals and clinicians delicately navigated the politics, protocols and interventions surrounding the treatment of transsexuals during this period. Further, she argues that alongside these medicine-transsexual negotiations, sensationalistic journalism, a norm of selfhood that emphasised “self-expression, self-improvement and self-transformation”, gender and sexuality-based activism, and the analytic distinction between sex, gender and sexuality all played roles in the emergence of the figure of the transsexual (Meyerowitz, 2004, p. 9). Meyerowitz (2004) convincingly explicates transsexuality as formed through an attachment to trans medicine, through trans depictions in the media and popular culture, as well as through norms of gender and selfhood.

The work of Meyerowtiz (2004) and Stryker (2008) demonstrate the centrality of trans women and trans femininity in these transgender-medical negotiations. Meyerowitz (2004) repeatedly asserts that much of her archival work does not contain nearly as many mentions of people assigned female at birth as those assigned male at birth. The difference was numerical and present from the beginning of formalised transsexual medicine. For instance, the numbers of MTF (“male-to-female”) and FTM (“female-to- male”) transsexuals accessing medical intervention in the 1950s and 60s in Europe and the U.S. ranged from 8:1 to 2:1 (Meyerowitz, 2004, p. 148). While trans masculinity’s diminished presence in the 1950s and 60s is hard to explain (it is hard to evidence something that didn’t exist), Meyerowitz (2004) has proposed a few reasons as to why trans masculinity did not gain popular traction at the same time as trans femininity. This includes; the different relations between trans medical gatekeepers and people considered men (trans women) and people considered women (trans men), social attitudes to gender, and a concomitant lack of media interest in trans men’s lives and experiences. Despite a lack of abundant evidence, Meyerowitz’s (2004) explanations are compelling due in part to the changes that occurred from the 1980s through to the 2000s that I discuss below that rectified these differences, manifesting conditions for the surge of trans masculine publics and identities.

Meyerowitz (2004) elaborates the limits that medicine placed on recognising and treating transsexuality in people assigned female at birth. For instance, when thinking about “female transsexuality” and the

54 potential for gender confirmation surgery, Harry Benjamin, one of the top experts in transsexualism at the time, said that “there is no operation possible…that would change a female into a male” (Meyerowitz, 2004, p. 149). The limited material and surgical technology, evidently seen to produce a poor imitation of a phallus, also extracted a high financial cost that was really only available to a wealthy few (Meyerowitz, 2004, p. 150). Further, medicine considered “female transsexuality” such a rare occurrence that any one person attempting to access interventions was highly suspect. Meyerowitz (2004, p. 149) argues that this in part was because the numbers of FTMs approaching medicine were so comparatively small that, some researchers considered transsexualism in the same way they considered fetishism or transvestism, as a largely, if not wholly, “male” condition…for this reason, FTMs sometimes had trouble convincing doctors to take them seriously as candidates for surgery.

Questions around the very existence of “female transsexuality” also abounded. In the 1960s doctors at the UCLA Gender Identity Research Clinic debated if FTMs “even qualified as transsexuals”, a debate that was present in a total of fifteen meetings from 1968 to 1970 (Meyerowitz, 2004, p. 149). The role of medical technology, and the differences in the development of these gendered technologies has also been posited as affecting the delayed emergence of trans men. Rubin (2003) argues that the availability of exogenous testosterone occurred much later than oestrogen or progesterone. Because medicine required intervention to legitimate transsexuality, Rubin (2003, p. 42) argues that this difference resulted in “nascent FTMs remain[ing] unrecognizable as transsexual subjects”. While perhaps a useful explanation for the numerical differences in trans people in the early twentieth century, this argument does not hold after testosterone’s increased production by the 1950s and 60s (Beauchamp, 2013, p. 71).48

Meyerowitz (2004) asserts that gendered norms may also have permeated the dynamic between medicine and people seen and treated as women. Meyerowitz (2004, p. 150) states that: The subordination of women may also have played a role. Those who had grown up as girls may not have had the same sense of entitlement to medical services as did MTFs or the same insistent

48 Meyerowitz (2004, p. 150) and Rubin (2003, p. 12) among others point to the ability for testosterone to affect the body in ways that allow trans men to shift more seamlessly into cis-society. While a compelling argument, it does not account for the substantial differences in people trying to access medical interventions, or the subsequent emergence in the 1990s and 2000s.

55 attitude with doctors, and those who lived and worked as women may have had fewer economic resources to finance medical intervention.49 Evidently, medicine had a notable role to play in the lack of recognition and presence of transsexual men. Medical systems were less interested in transsexual men, they debated their existence, or outright denied their presence, and so transsexual men were less likely to be treated and encountered by medical professionals.

Meyerowitz (2004) also points to the converse gendered norms that lead to a fascination with people assigned male at birth who wanted to transition, and a degree of social permissiveness for masculine people assigned female at birth. As Meyerowitz (2004, p. 150) notes: Females-to-males could dress as men with less risk of arrest. By mid-century, women frequently dressed in pants. On the streets, onlookers often treated masculine or butch women with hostility and contempt, but police rarely arrested her simply for her attire. Comparatively, “highly feminine men were increasingly reviled, even among gay men” during this period (Meyerowitz, 2004, p. 150).

Meyerowitz (2004) also points to the media’s role in the distribution of the bodily and life possibilities for MTFs compared to FTMs. Much like medicine, the media “found men who became women more titillating than women who became men” (Meyerowitz, 2004, p. 87). While there was some early media attention focused on “women” who became “men”, these were mostly cases of intersexuality. And, as the difference between intersexuality and “transvestitism” was made more apparent to social spectators when Christine Jorgensen’s transition was publicised, public interest in FTM transitions diminished. Further, in any media discussions of FTMs that did take place they “rarely included any details of medical intervention” (Meyerowitz, 2004, p. 87).

The moment for transgender activism As was mentioned in the introduction, and as is evident to anyone alive over the past twenty years, trans

49 Wickman (2003, p. 44) argues that sexism towards people believed to be women cannot be the cause of this discrepancy, because sexism was not eradicated in the 1990s and early 2000s. While true, Wickman (2003) does not account for how feminist medical activism of the 1980s re-negotiated, although did not eradicate, sexism in medicine.

56 masculinity went from a relatively unheard of phenomena to ragingly present from the 1990s and early 2000s in countries such as the U.S., U.K. and Australia (Wickman, 2003). Trans masculine visibility abounded in popular culture, in trans activism and in the waiting rooms of doctors, endocrinologists and gender attentive surgeons.50 The delay in the emergence of trans masculinity compared to the emergence of trans femininity is substantially under-researched. Wickman (2003) is one of the few writers who has theorised the burgeoning of trans masculinity in the 1990s and 2000s. His article “Masculinity and female bodies” largely attributes trans masculinity’s later emergence to new cultural attitudes to the body and to masculinity. Specifically, he argues that the “late modern/postmodern concept of the body as malleable in service of (gendered) identity”, alongside the shifts to understandings of (masculine) gender as performative and enacted, created the conditions under which trans masculinity could emerge (Wickman, 2003, p. 40). Wickman (2003) also discusses changes to the landscape of trans activism and trans politics during this period. He argues that these shifts, which were bolstered by trans activism and theorising and inspired by the groundswell of scholarship on sex, gender and the body, shifted the kinds of claims and assertions available to trans people and trans organisations. This created alternative potentials for transgender (as opposed to transsexual) activism and opened space for a host of new identities, terms and experiences, including the voices and presence of trans masculine individuals within trans politics and activism.

The following section introduces some of the broader trans political threads that were taking place during this time. While this political and intellectual fervour was often located in specific U.S. cities, such as San Francisco,51 as well as England, it had notable flow on effects to other countries and cities, facilitated by the increasing availability of the Internet and home computers in the 1990s (Raun, 2015b; Whittle, 2006, p. xii). Often situated as an emerging tension between the experiences and desires of transsexuals and those attached to more postmodern transgender politics, the 1990s was marked by highly critical attention among trans people and organisations towards the constraining practices and requirements of medicine. The most notable catalyst of this emerging politics was the work of Allucquére Stone’s 1987

50 This continued into the early 1990s, where Meyerowitz (2004, p. 9) notes that research in the Netherlands in 1993 estimated that 1 in 11,900 people assigned male at birth took hormones to change sex, a substantially higher number than the 1 in 30,400 people assigned female at birth who took hormones to change sex. 51 Cheryl Chase (1998) in “Hermaphrodites with attitude: Mapping the emergence of intersex political activism” gives an account of San Francisco as a hub of queer, gender, sexuality activism during the 1990s. She added to this space a radical critique and resistance to medicine’s non-consensual, violent and damaging intervention into the intersex bodies of (mostly) children.

57 piece “The empire strikes back: A posttranssexual manifesto”. In this manifesto, she meticulously undercuts the anti-trans feminist accusations of a capitulation to a binary gender system, made by the likes of Janice Raymond in The transsexual empire.52 Stone (2006/1987) elaborated the strategic ways in which trans people expressed particular forms of normative gender in order to access gendered medical interventions controlled by medical systems that aimed to uphold these normative models of gender. She ends her piece with a shiver-inducing call for trans people to refuse concealment and to radically multiply the discourse of trans self-expression. Other writers like Leslie Feinberg (1992/2006) in Transgender liberation: A movement whose time has come, Kate Bornstein (1994) in Gender outlaw: Men, women and the rest of us and Stephen Whittle (1996) in “Gender fucking or fucking gender” extended a call to theorise transgender experiences away from the restrictive and reductive terms determined by medicine, and society, extending the potential for the proliferation of transgender identities and experiences.

The transgender movement of the 1990s created alternative avenues for engaging in non-cis gender identities and bodily practices away from the definition of transsexuality that had intensely focused on genital confirmation surgeries. This was especially significant for trans men and trans masculine people whose access to genital surgeries were prohibitively expensive, required extensive recovery and often had fraught outcomes. Surgical interventions were largely unattainable for most trans men and without the ability to “fully” transition they were often situated as less able to “be” transsexuals. Shifts away from genitals and sex as the most notable site of gender realignment and transsexual validation occurred alongside and in attachment to the proliferation of identities beyond butch or FTM transsexual, which saw more people assigned female at birth taking up transgender identities and politics (Wickman, 2003).

In this newly cultivated transgender political terrain, trans masculine people’s participation in trans politics and organisations, especially in the U.S., U.K. and Australia, also blossomed. Transgender organisations having mostly considered the needs of trans women began to include and address the

52 The emergence of trans studies of course can be seen as stemming from this early period and work. There were a number of crucial insider texts by trans men, FTMs and trans masculine people that contributed to trans studies. This included Aaron Devor’s (1997) FTM: Female-to-male transsexuals in society, Jay Prosser’s Second Skins: The body narratives of transsexuality (1998), Henry Rubin’s “Phenomenology as method in trans studies” (1998) and Self-made men: Identity and embodiment among transsexual men (2003), Jason Cromwell’s Transmen and FTMs: Identities, bodies, genders, and sexualities (1999), Stephen Whittle’s “The trans-cyberian mail way” (1998) and “Respect and equality: Transsexual and transgender rights” (2002), Jamison Green’s (2004) Becoming a visible man and Max Wolf Valerio’s (2006) Testosterone files: My social and hormonal transformation from female to male.

58 presence and needs of transgender men (Wickman, 2003, p. 42). The extensive use of, and participation in, online activism and publics further contributed to the inclusion of trans masculine people in trans activism due to the ability to participate in “disembodied” ways that did not rely on material “evidence” of trans/gender/sexuality. The vastly extended possibilities of gender identities and practices that occupied subcultural spaces, for instance in queer scenes, also permeated mainstream visual and written media further disseminating alternative possibilities of sex-gender realities (Stryker, 1998, p. 146).

At the same time as this critical approach to gender and the proliferation of these new identities, practices and experiments abounded, so too were there increasing discussions of the materiality of the body. The attention to the body sits neatly alongside the tensions taking place within trans/gender/sexual spaces; the burgeoning of new identities dislocated from a seamless and deterministic sex-gender relation, and the need to account for the materiality of the (trans/gender/sexual) body. Stone’s (2006/1987) piece “The empire strikes back” for instance was highly influenced by Haraway’s (1983/2006) “A cyborg manifesto: Science, technology, and socialist-feminism in the late twentieth century” while she was completing her doctorate under Haraway. Haraway’s (1983/2006) “A cyborg manifesto” is also present in The transgender studies reader (2006), marking it as a significant intervention into the formation of trans studies. “A cyborg manifesto” (1983/2006) grapples with the explosion of the binaries between nature/culture, human/animal and body/technology and theorises the body as never discrete from technoscience.53 The potential for considering all bodies as emerging from interventions (considered external) facilitated a reconceiving of the apparent artificiality of interventions into the body, an obviously notable concern for many trans/gender/sexual people. In situating all bodies and all genders as “technocultural”54 constructions, Haraway’s work opened up the potential for bodily interventions and experiments with the very materiality of the sex-gendered body. These bodily possibilities became newly imaginable without predicating a totalising and deterministic attachment to medicine.

The malleable body and gender as performative The changes to social understanding of the body as malleable and gender as performative facilitated

53 Preciado’s (2013) Testo junkie: Sex, drugs, and biopolitics in the pharmacopornographic era draws on the work of Donna Haraway (1991) to elaborate the increasing construction of the body with exogenous technologies and pharmacologies from the 1950s into the twenty-first century. 54 A term used by Haraway (2011, p. 95) to describe Patricia Piccinini’s visual and sculptural art that elaborates “worlds full of unsettling but oddly familiar critters who turn out to be simultaneously near kin and alien colonists”.

59 alternative possibilities for the cultural comprehension of trans desires and trans existence (Wickman, 2003). These changes formed a conceptual shift, allowing an increased public interest in all trans phenomena, not just trans masculinity. However, Wickman (2003) argues that these conceptual shifts affected masculine genders disproportionally moreso than feminine genders and therefore had a concurrently disproportionate effect on trans masculinity. The two trends of the malleable body and the performativity of gender (see Butler, 1990) discussed next are filtered through a closer inspection of the cultural practices of bodybuilding and sports doping, as well as drag kinging. These practices hold particular resonance with trans masculinity and highlight specific cultural moments where experiments in the materiality of the sex-gendered body and the performativity of gender were taking place at unprecedented levels in the West.

The body as malleable The 1990s and 2000s saw an intensification of the approach to the materiality of the body as both alterable and as a site for the cultivation of morality and aesthetic desirability in the West. The body was increasingly penetrated and altered by pharmacological, silicone and metallic products in increasingly common ways. As Preciado (2013, p. 127) notes, “the same testosterone that helps turn the wheels of the Tour de France serves to transform the bodies of F2M transsexuals”. And, compared to earlier in the 20th century, the alteration of the body in permanent and semi-permanent ways through exogenous substances, such as tattoos, piercings, plastic surgery, and gym exercise, became increasing normalised, mundane and expected (Wickman, 2003, p. 49). As the possibility of and impetus to alter the body in the service of the self permeated Western cultures, so too did the social comprehension of the practices and desires of transgender people to change the sexed body in alignment with their felt gender (Wickman, 2003, p. 50).55

I focus on bodybuilding and sports doping as two cultural threads that occupied media and social attention in the lead up to and during the 1990s and 2000s. While neither bodybuilding nor sports doping began in the 1990s and 2000s, as is evident in discussions below, it was during this period that images and discussions of bodybuilding and sports doping became, increasingly present within popular culture, in part due to the uptake and ubiquity of the internet. The Western cultural shifts distilled in the practices

55 Another avenue to develop is how the rhetoric of early transsexuality, specifically around the need to align the external body with the internal self, affected other body altering practices such as bodybuilding or dieting cultures.

60 of bodybuilding and the unintended side effects of sports doping resonate with (some of) the desires of trans masculinity; to alter and masculinise the materiality of the body with testosterone. Bodybuilding and its popular cultural representations marked the normalising of men’s work and altering of the body into more desirable states. Cultural anxieties around sports doping emphasised the potentials of these “newly” alterable bodies through the demonstration of sex’s fluidity as well as the ability for people assigned female at birth to cross the sexed/gendered divide. While I would not argue that the presence of bodybuilding and sports doping lead to trans masculinity’s emergence, I do however suggest that they are examples of cultural moments and practices where experiments in the (gendered) materiality of the body were increasingly visible for both people assigned male and female at birth. Bodybuilding and sports doping practices point to broader cultural relations to the alterability of the body while also bringing the very possibility of these practices into the popular realm. These cultural shifts lead to an increased awareness and a degree of acceptability56 around altering and masculinising the body with technologies such as testosterone.

While increases in the normalisation of material interventions into the body and the sense of the body as malleable affected all bodies, these changes had proportionally greater effect on white heterosexual cis men (Wickman, 2003, p. 41). The 1990s and 2000s saw the increased “sexualisation and commodification of the male body as an aesthetic object” in popular culture; it was a moment where men and men’s bodies became objects to be worked on, to be enhanced aesthetically, functionally or with regards to health (Wickman, 2003, p. 41). Prior to these cultural moments masculinity for men was considered natural and inherent, and the impetus for the cultivation of the gendered body was largely seen to rest at the feet of women (Wickman, 2003, p. 47). By the 1990s, when trans masculinity began to take root, the requirements on men to intervene in their bodies was in full swing. This was occurring in mainstream as well as counter-cultures. For example, gay men living with HIV were provided testosterone treatments to prevent muscle wastage and increase appetite (Race, 2018). This, alongside shifts in desirable masculine gendered presentations, like the clone look of the 70s (Stryker, 2008, p. 95) facilitated the ubiquity of the use of testosterone and associated steroid practices within gay men’s countercultures from at least the 1990s (Race, 2018, p. 7). In the West, practices like bodybuilding and

56 One of these claims includes drawing on the wrong body narrative, and an internal self as a man/male and the need to align the external body with the internal binary gender identity. This claim in some ways avoids the social regulation and cultural anxieties around the masculinisation of people believed to be women (seen in sports doping anxieties).

61 working on the aesthetics of the male body permeated popular culture, with an abundance of public representation of men from advertisements, to fashion shows, to erotic male performers sporting six- packs (Wickman, 2003, p. 46).

Bodybuilding became increasingly popular during the 1970s, and took centre stage with the release of the film Pumping Iron starring Arnold Schwarzenegger in 1977. This film saw the publicisation of massive muscular men and the drama of bodybuilding competitions like Mr Olympia. The Mr Olympia contest, one of the pinnacle competitions in the world of bodybuilding was held in Sydney, Australia in 1980. This was also the last time Schwarzenegger won a bodybuilding title. This is of note in terms of the timing as aligning with alterations to ideals of masculinity in Australia. Additionally, in the forty- nine years of its running, Mr Olympia was only held in nine countries other than the U.S., which suggests a sufficient interest and investment of Australian culture in sculpting the body within certain aesthetic conventions.57

Speaking in Pumping Iron (1977), Arnold Schwarzenegger, the pinnacle of media’s representations and cultural associations with bodybuilding during the height of his career, discussed his manipulation and cultivation of his body. As Schwarzenegger states: Bodybuilders have the same mind when it comes to sculpting that a sculptor has. If you analyse it, if you look in a mirror, and you say “ok I need a little bit more deltoids, little bit more shoulders”, so you get the proportions right, so what you do is you exercise and put those deltoids on. Whereas an artist will just slap on some clay on each side, you know and maybe this is the easier way, we go through harder ways because you have to do it on the human body. (Jerome & G. Butler, 1977).

During the 1970s, steroid use was also beginning to become standard for professional bodybuilders and was not yet illegal. According to Arnold Schwarzenegger, the use of steroids to help cultivate the muscularity of the body was being talked about openly amongst bodybuilders. As Arnold Schwarzenegger notes: one of the most common questions I get is did you take steroids, because now, drugs is such a big issue in sports and the answer is yes, ah it was just in the beginning stages, because

57 This aligns nicely with the attachment between the Australian national imaginary and an investment in the fit male body (see White, 2007).

62 bodybuilders in those days just experimented with it, but it was not illegal. We talked about it very openly, anyone that you asked ‘do you take steroids’ ‘yeah, I take three dianabol a day’ or someone else would take this this and that. It was not an illegal thing. Now after it became a big problem then our Federation said ‘okay bodybuilders ought not to take steroids and there will be testing done, ah surprise testing done’58 (Skupien, 2007).

The overlap between the “sculpting” of the body by bodybuilders alongside the use of anabolic/androgenic steroids has intense connections with the construction and representation of trans masculinity during the 1990s and 2000s. As Wickman (2003, p. 46) notes, the self-portraits of Loren Cameron in his 1996 book Body alchemy: Transsexual portraits “illustrate the crossing point of the appreciation of the aesthetic values of the muscular male body and FTM transsexuality”. In these pictures Cameron displays his muscular lithe body alongside his visible transsexualism, his chest scars and his crotch. Of particular note is the black and white cover photo of Cameron’s naked body from thigh upwards injecting testosterone into his hip muscle. While Wickman (2003, p. 46) notes that in this image Cameron appears like a “classical sinewy Adonis torso”, I would argue that the combination of clenched fist, strained neck and O shape outline made by his arms looks much closer to a bodybuilding pose than a depiction of an ever-youthful Greek god of vegetation.

Only three years later, Jason Cromwell (1999) in Transmen & FTMs: Identities, bodies genders & sexualities more clearly teases out the relationship between some of the physical practices of trans masculinity and bodybuilding. Cromwell (1999, p. 129) discusses with a correspondent the cultivation of the trans body, stating: Surgeries allowed me to reconstruct my body, just as bodybuilding allows me to construct my body. Surgeries allowed a removal of parts or the addition of parts. Bodybuilding is a similar removal and addition. Removal of fat, addition of muscle. The point is that my body has been constructed to better suit my self-image as a man. Here Cromwell (1999) brings together the surgeries he has used to “reconstruct” his body alongside his bodybuilding activities, implicitly reliant on testosterone for muscle building and fat redistribution, to “construct” his body and create his “self-image as a man”. Manhood for Cromwell (1999) is a process of

58 This occurs at 2 minutes 55 seconds.

63 construction, of creating a particular body and self through the use of techniques and technologies that had become normalised for cis men and are understood to cultivate a masculine male body.

Ten years after Cromwell’s book, S. Bear Bergman in The nearest exit may be behind you (2009) seems to have even further enmeshed notions of trans masculinity produced through exogenous testosterone, surgeries and bodybuilding. He states: Some of us59 are making changes to our bodies. We’re taking hormones, we’re having surgeries, we’re at the gym. . . We are making our ways and we’re looking in the mirror every morning for signs of change, and when they happen we are so excited! So pleased to be moving toward what we need to look like…what it is we need to see when we examine our reflections in the mirror for ourselves. We’ve taken change in hand, and we’ve made it, and that is so satisfying. (Bergman, 2009, p. 198).60 Bergman’s reference to the gendered bodily modifications of typically “trans” activities like taking hormones and having surgeries is held alongside cis male expectations of gym attendance to build muscle, sometimes in combination with steroid use. These experimental practices and technologies become in his articulation indivisible from one another; activities that are deployed in the production of the trans masculine body. Bergman (2009, p. 198) demonstrates the formation of the body through individual practices; “we’ve taken change in hand, and we’ve made it”.

The enmeshing of bodybuilding and trans masculine gendered practices continues into contemporary trans masculine discourse. There is an intense attention to building muscle and the adoration of muscular bodies in online trans masculine spaces including a dedicated trans masculine bodybuilding group Beefheads Fitness present across Facebook and Instagram.61 The public adoration of trans man Aydian Dowling also marks the centrality of muscular bodies and bodybuilding to trans masculinity and its representation. Dowling, in his re-creation of Adam Levine’s prostate and testicular cancer campaign photograph in FTM Magazine (2015) achieved two hundred and fifty thousand views (Karlan, 2015). Dowling is a muscular, white-appearing, able-bodied appearing trans man from the United States. His

59 While Bergman (2009) identifies as non-binary, his account is highly relevant to broader trans masculine practices. 60 Bergman (2009) here also suggests that these experimental practices are being undertaken (at least in part) away from a treatment based framework dictated by trans medicine. 61 Beefheads fitness can be found at https://www.facebook.com/beefheadsfitness/ on Facebook and https://www.instagram.com/beefheadsfitness/?hl=en on Instagram.

64 success is deeply contingent on his normatively attractive face and his muscular body. In discussing the process of taking the photographs he discussed his discomfort with being photographed naked: “It’ll be like one of those ‘imagine the audience naked’ deals... Only I’m the naked one. I better hit the gym!” (Neese, 2015). He says that “the way I enjoy… stay[ing] fit and healthy is keeping with body-building style routine” (Danny, 2015). Further, in a remarkably similar sentiment to Arnold Schwarzenegger in Pumping Iron, Dowling, in his Ultimate Guy profile, states that: “I also love my day to day routines, smashing though thresholds and sculpting the body” (Mohney, 2015, emphasis added). This focus on going to the gym to occupy a state of bodily acceptability for public consumption, as well as his reference to his bodybuilding practices and his “sculpting the body” demonstrates the overlap in the normalization of altering the body with bodybuilding practices and trans masculine practices and publics.

The altering of the body through bodybuilding and the administration of hormones marks an increasingly intense cultural moment of experiments into, and practices with, the (gendered) materiality of the body. This was evidently a strong feature of trans masculine discourse and remains present today. This is not to suggest that all trans masculine people partake in bodybuilding practices or for that matter that all trans masculine people take testosterone. And yet, these rhizomatic threads between bodybuilding and trans masculine experiments in “cultivating” the body evidence changes to social and cultural logics around the masculine and the male body as something to be worked on. It points to a shifted norm in the masculine and male body as cultivated and as an achievement facilitated by work on the body and its penetration by pharmacological substances. This becomes something more available to people assigned female at birth, and something no longer counter to a masculine or male identity. It also demonstrates the popularity and the presence of steroid use within the cultural imaginary, proliferating the possibilities and potentials for intervening in the body with medicalised technologies.

Sports doping further evidences the presence of steroid use within the cultural imaginary and the proliferation of possibilities and potentials for intervening in the gendered body with testosterone. Steroids and performance enhancing drugs were being deployed very soon after the refining of mass production techniques in the 1950s and 60s. In the 1950s John Zeigler’s German laboratories produced the steroids Dianabol and Methandrosterolone which were used by the American Olympic weightlifters (Preciado, 2013, p. 172). And in the 1952 Olympic Games, weightlifters from the Soviet Union also began to use steroids to maximise results and by the 1960s many countries were using anabolic steroids

65 in competitive sports (Irni, 2016, p. 516). The public commentary and anxiety about steroid use in sports arose alongside the increasingly visual access to these sporting events, in particular through the spread of the home television to the general population during the 1950s and 60s (Irni, 2016, p. 516). This anxiety, particularly present in mainstream competitive sports, resulted in ongoing debates, the regulation of athletes’ bodies, as well as changes to legal classification regulations during the 1990s and 2000s.62 While the rhetoric around sports doping often concerns “fair play” and youth wellbeing, it also becomes a site of increased cultural anxiety around the fluidity of sex-gender, the blurring of the sex-gender binary through “cross-sex” hormone use and the virilizing effects of steroids used by women.

One of the first notable occasions of public anxiety around doping was the highly suspicious and even tested, although never verified, use of anabolic steroids by the 1972 East German Olympic Games team. Much of the commentary on the belief in their steroid use focused on the women as gender variant and their masculinity as “proof” of their steroid use. Commentators stated that the competitors “didn’t look exactly like they’re girls” and that “the only way you can tell it’s a woman is by their bust” (Hunt, 2011 in Irni, 2016, p. 516).

In an echo of the anxieties of the 1970s, during a U.S. hearing on sports doping in 1990, Carl Lewis, the sprinter who was awarded Ben Johnson’s gold medal after Johnson was disqualified for doping, said of anabolic steroids: Women that have taken steroids experience lowering of their voice, in many cases it doesn’t come back. A lot of times you have women that end up with voices lower than mine for the rest of their lives… A female might take a steroid, and she may become sterile. Their heads grow. Their hands may grow. Their voices lower and their skin becomes leathery. That’s it for the rest of their lives. (Beauchamp, 2013, p. 66).63 Testosterone and steroid use is positioned in both cases as dangerous, counter to national health and importantly, disruptive to normative gendered roles and bodies. These anxieties evidence the fear of

62 Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria re-classified testosterone in 2014 to increase the penalty for illicit use and distribution aligning the penalties with those of heroine, cocaine and ice (van de Ven & Zahnow, 2017). 63 The more permanent effects of steroids are usually considered male pattern baldness and body hair growth (although it seems to reduce in thickness and coarseness when people end testosterone use). Voices can lower permanently, but not for all people, and unless people assigned female at birth are using testosterone before their growth plates fuse in their early twenties they are unlikely to experience bone growth.

66 cross-sexed potentials of female bodies, especially when affected by exogenous substances.

The overlap between trans masculinity and professional athletes’ sports doping may not be fully coherent, however it is important. Given to me in a bundle of clippings by a Sydney based trans man active in FTM organising in the early 2000s was an article kept for twenty-one years. It is an article published in the Australian newspaper The Sun-Herald about a European shot-putter Andreas Kreiger titled “Sports drugs turned this woman athlete into a man” (Sherwell, 1998). The article begins with a critical discussion of Chinese swimmers and East German sports doping practices. Then, in a slightly odd turn, it moves on to present an interview conducted with Kreiger. Kreiger, assigned female at birth, discussed being given steroids by his coach at the beginning of his career, when he competed as a female. Kreiger however went on to identify and live as a man and he accessed testosterone and top surgery. Kreiger’s articulations are in part a demonstration of the possible crossing point between steroid use in sports and FTM testosterone practices. That this was notable enough to be present in popular culture demonstrates a shift in media interest in testosterone use and trans masculine identities during this period.64 Crucially, the collection and storage of this piece by a non-athlete trans man demonstrates the significance of the dissemination of the sex-gender altering potentials of the body to broader society and trans masculine people.

Testosterone and steroid use is consistently positioned in these accounts as dangerous to the idealised differences between men and women that the Western sex-gender binary rests on. Simultaneously, the public discussions surrounding these anxieties also facilitated a proliferation of discourse on the permeability and malleability of the sexed body and the potential of steroids to enact masculinising effects on the bodies and appearances of females. These accounts I discuss here demonstrate how cultural and media discourse around sports doping, especially by female athletes, was an attempt to curtail the gendered and sexed experiments in the materiality of the body taking place during this period. But that

64 The depictions of trans masculinity in the publicity surrounding Brandon Teena’s murder, including in the film Boys don’t cry (Sharp & Pierce, 2009), can also not be understated as a significant moment in the emergence of trans masculinity. As Meyerowitz (2004) notes, Christine Jorgensen’s transition was a key cultural moment that facilitated an abundance of trans feminine people seeking out medical assistance to enact bodily transitions. Boys don’t cry, alongside other films including a smaller scale documentary called You don’t know dick: Courageous hearts of transsexual men (Schermerhorn & Cram, 1997), facilitated an explosion of awareness of trans masculine possibilities, and, in the case of Brandon Teena’s murder, a notable outcry of horror and frustration from trans activists, a number of whom protested at the courthouse during the trial (Sloop, 2000, p166).

67 in even in their reproach these depictions facilitated significant levels of social and media awareness of sex-gender experiments.

The concept of body as malleable and alterable in the service of the gendered self reached heightened peaks during the 1990s and 2000s (Wickman, 2003). This was particularly acute for the white cis heterosexual male body which became subject to new forms of increased scrutiny around health and aesthetics, a position previously held only by women, deviants and racialised subjects (Wickman, 2003, 46). These shifts were made possible in part through the availability and ubiquity of techno- pharmacological and behavioural interventions into the body; experiments into the (sex-gendered) materiality of the body. Bodybuilding, as one example of these shifts, became a site of potential experimentation with the masculine male body, marking social changes to the understanding and normalisation of the construction of the body for (certain) cis men. While the male body was situated as actively cultivated, as a site for intervention, the female sexed body was anxiously understood as more fluid, as dangerously alterable through these pharmacological and behavioural experiments. The public concern about steroid use by female athletes reinforced steroid use as a threat to the gender normativity of the bodies of women and the (undesirable) permeability of sexed bodies. The practices, discourse and anxieties attached to bodybuilding and sports doping also facilitated the proliferation of cultural knowledge about the use of steroids and testosterone while unwittingly demonstrating the very potential for bodies assigned female at birth to undergo a process of masculinisation when using testosterone. For trans masculine people these changes to male bodies and genders and the cross-sexed potential of the female body, facilitated the shaping of new possibilities for enacting masculine bodies and genders and an increased potential to conceive of female sexed bodies’ potential malleability, especially with testosterone.65

Gender as performative During the twentieth-century, white middle class masculine men’s gender was typified by a distinct lack

65 The anxieties surrounding sports doping, including those that concerned the gender crossing potential of the pharmacological products, resulted in the shifting of the formal regulation and restriction of testosterone in most Western countries. In the U.S., anabolic steroid use became increasingly controlled through, for instance, making the distribution of steroids without a prescription a felony offense in 1990 (Huges, 1990). In Australia in 2014, anabolic steroids were shifted from being classified as a prescription drug within the Poisons and Therapeutic Goods Act 1966 into a narcotic under the Drug Misuse and Trafficking Act 1985. This shifted the penalty from a maximum of two years imprisonment if convicted, into a maximum of two to twenty-five years imprisonment.

68 of performativity; male gender was largely positioned as inherent and naturalised (Wickman, 2003, p. 47). However, during the latter part of the twentieth century the “masque of inexpressiveness that used to constitute the only legitimate performance of hegemonic masculinity” began to break down (Wickman, 2003, p. 48). Wickman (2003) argues that these fissures in the otherwise seamless exterior of male masculinity was a product of the increased sexualisation of cis men’s bodies in popular culture. He gives the example of male fashion shows or Chippendales’ strip shows, as well as the absorption of more evident styles of black and gay masculinities into white middle-class masculinity (Wickman, 2003, p. 48).

The abundance and popularity of drag king performances during this period reflects, and affected, the shift in the cultural understanding and perception of male gender as performative and “done” rather than merely inherent (Wickman, 2003). Drag kinging is a stage performance typically performed in queer women’s spaces by cis women who adopt the persona, aesthetics and swagger of a man. These performances became exceedingly popular during the 1990s, in the U.S., and in the 2000s, along the east coast of Australia (Wickman, 2003, p. 43).

The following section takes a closer look at drag kinging as an instance of the increased performativity of masculine gender. I argue that for people with masculine or male identifications, these performances offered spaces for individual identity exploration, an affective experience of the body as masculine, and an avenue to critically approach the oppressive associations with hegemonic masculinity. Drag kinging is also a practice deeply embedded in lesbian and queer women’s sub-cultures. These spaces have a long history of associations with different forms of trans masculinity and many trans masculine people were coming out as trans while embedded in these communities during this time.66 Drag kinging then, demonstrates a historical imbrication of trans masculinity with queer women’s sub-cultures, and an alternative route for experimenting with male gender identification and expression outside of medicine.

Drag kinging offers an accessible site of community supported practice and performance of masculinity for people who are not cis women. Hanson (2007), along with other theorists of drag kinging (e.g. Maltz,

66 I was deeply involved in queer women’s spaces, as were many trans masculine people coming out during the initial upwelling of trans masculinity in Sydney, Australia.

69 1998) often focus on drag kinging as a performance of “maleness” by cis women.67 In fact, Hanson (2007) argues that the significance, and the enjoyment, of viewing drag kinging is a product of the play between the performer’s gender (as a cis woman) and their presentation (as a man). Other than ignoring the pleasure one may experience in a variety of performances, as well as the practice of stage makeup that may prevent one from assuming the gender identity or the body of the drag king, Hanson’s (2007) perspective also ignores the complexity of gender, and the way that identity can play out contextually. As trans scholar Bobby Noble (2006, p. 259) states “the power of the drag kings lies in their exposure of the impurity of categorization itself, especially those categories which have historically understood themselves to be bound, distinct, somehow discrete and separate”. This “impurity of categorization”, I argue, is of particular relevance for both spectators as well as the drag kings themselves in instances where one’s articulated gender identity may not align entirely with what is felt experientially on stage.

Rupp, Taylor and Shapiro (2010) in “Drag queens and drag kings: The difference gender makes” discuss the gender transgressive work of drag kings and drag queens. They quote Mike Hawk, a member of the drag king troupe, Disposable Boy Toys (DBT), who states that: I wasn’t out as trans when I joined DBT or when I started getting interested, but there was something about going in drag that was really appealing and something about being in this male character that was comfortable for me. [I was] able to experience this other gender, this male gender that now I understand was fitting my identity, but at the time I didn’t really understand that. (Rupp

67 Trans masculinity and lesbianism have entwined histories. This is evident at least in part through the tensions that took place in the 1970s between second wave lesbian feminists and butch and femme people in San Francisco in the US. Henry Rubin’s (2003), book Self-Made Men explores the ways in which the rise of second wave lesbian feminism, and the exclusion of butches from these communities ignited a catalysing of trans men’s community and identity formation in San Francisco in the 1970s. Rubin (2003) analyses a series of historical events (such as the lavender menace protests at the Second Congress to Unite Women in New York City) and materials associated with the rise of feminism in lesbian and heterosexual women’s organisations. Rubin (2003) argues that the lesbian feminist communities during this period progressively excluded butches and femmes because of an apparent capitulation to patriarchal “gender stereotypes”. The result of the exclusion of butch and femme people from lesbian spaces, Rubin (2003) argues, was the formation of separate butch/femme communities and the opening up of individual and community space for an engagement with (trans) masculine identities. Stryker (2008, p. 114) also notes that the antagonism and exclusion within and from these spaces may have encouraged some of these butch/femme couples to integrate into mainstream heteronormative populations after the “butch” transitioned. Regardless of the precise direction people chose, to integrate or to form alternative spaces, likely both, the exclusion from previously supportive lesbian spaces facilitated an increase in the number of people identifying more strongly with masculinity or manhood and beginning processes of hormonal or surgical changes. While antagonism against some trans masculine people from lesbian communities in the early 1990s did occur in Australia, discussed by some participants as well as Jasper Laybutt in an interview with the Australian Lesbian and Gay Archives, there seemed to be limited catalyzing of a notable trans masculine community in places outside of San Francisco from similar encounters.

70 et al, 2010, 283). Identities and practices are slippery states, that do not always “cohere” in expected ways, even for ourselves. Hawk’s “character”, and his comfort in this “character” altered the ways in which Hawk experienced his own gender. As Rupp et al (2010, 284) notes “what is striking is that participation in DBT facilitated self-reflexivity about gender identity at a very high level, which led to significant changes in the identities members claimed”. The “performance” of Hawk’s “male character” altered his engagement with his gender, allowing him to explore and elaborate different gendered identifications outside of his drag persona.

The relationship between identities and practices is not discrete, not only in the exploration of identity differences through drag kinging practices but also because of the kinds of identities that might be drawn to certain practices. For instance, the Australian Drag King Association of Perth (DKAP) had a significant number of performers who were trans masculine identified prior to their consolidation.68 There is also a great deal of cultural overlap between drag kinging and the cultivation of aesthetic masculinity for people assigned female at birth. YouTube for instance offers a host of videos that canvass non-hormonal and non-surgical alterations to one’s body and face available to drag kings, trans masculine people and cosplayers.

The cultural and social enmeshing of masculinity and maleness with misogyny, particularly in spaces with second wave lesbian feminist histories, has often been a barrier for trans masculine people engaging with maleness and masculinity. I for one battled my desires for testosterone and a desire to move away from womanhood when I had been so attached to womanhood and the feminism that I had been (happily) indoctrinated with by my second wave lesbian feminist mother.

Patrick Califia (2006, p. 435), in his reflection on masculinity in “Manliness” also centralises the difficulties he had in taking up and engaging with normative cis-hetero-centric masculinity. He grapples with the oppressive and violent tendencies imbued and present in male masculinity. He says: When I was equivocating about whether to keep taking testosterone or not…I tripped over an amazingly deep well of shame about maleness, and antipathy toward it… Everybody, even men,

68 Personal correspondence with a founding member of DKAP.

71 know that they are at best stupid, wrong, and backward; at worst, evil. The good people, the people who will transform the world and make it a safer, better place, are women. (Califia, 2006, p. 435). Concerns about masculinity and patriarchy are of particular significance to those who, like Califia and myself, have been embedded in feminist and leftist political spaces. Another trans masculine person, Jay Sennett in the introduction to Self-organizing men (2006) reflects similar sentiments and concerns as a result of “The Feminist Questions”. When concerned with his post-transition sexual relationships with women, he asks: How could I have sex as The Objectifier? Can a woman truly make a consenting decision to have sex with a man within patriarchy? If I were straight, how could I be queer? Is all sex between men and women rape? (Sennett, 2006, p. 6). A desire for masculinity and male appearance for those otherwise critical of the surrounding power and cultural associations with cis masculinity can be a significant stumbling block for thinking about one’s gender identification and accessing gendered bodily interventions.

Drag kinging can be a place to access masculine expression that also highlights the political possibilities of masculinity outside of misogyny or sexism. Halberstam, in Female Masculinities (1998a) discusses various drag king scenes and styles ranging from “Butch Realness” to “Femme Pretender” to “Male Mimicry”. Of particular relevance here is “Denaturalized Masculinity”, which is the active parody of male masculinity, a way to highlight sexism and misogyny within a performance of masculinity (Halberstam, 1998a, p. 255). I would argue that not only does this particular style of “Denaturalised Masculinity” provide sites of pulling apart the relationships between masculinity, men, sexism and misogyny, but in various ways, and to varying degrees, much drag kinging always elicits this separation.

While Halberstam (1998a, p. 256) elaborates how drag king’s performance of masculinity highlights how misogyny is embedded in masculinity and maleness, the humour of drag kinging is often reliant on an over performance of misogynist masculinity. Rupp et al (2010, p. 278) discuss the result of drag kings’ later development in relation to queer theory and the way that these politics have infused a critical engagement with masculinity and gender within their performances. In making explicit the enmeshing of masculinity with misogyny, and its performative function, I would argue that the clearer lines between masculinity and misogyny, and the possibility of detaching the two become more evident. This is significant for those individuals turned away from masculinity and maleness due to the associations between masculinity and

72 misogyny, but who remain pulled towards a male social gender or identity.

Drag kinging can be, and has been, a site where concerns between the connection of maleness, masculinity and misogyny are disrupted. Even the most misogynist of performances, due to the carnivalised elements of the performance, frame the experience of viewing as a constant tension between “belief” and “performance”, where the viewer navigates the belief in the misogynist “male” character and the understanding that this performance is by a non-cis man. The glimmers of less oppressive forms of masculinity within these models may have provided spaces to eke out and explore more feminist or anti-oppressive trans masculine identities.

During the 1990s and 2000s, the performativity of gender infiltrated everyday and queer subcultural encounters with gender (Wickman, 2003). This marked a moment of potential for the explorations and experiments with expressions and attachments to gendered possibilities. Drag kinging is one practice that marks the proliferation of some of these gendered experiments taking place during this period and reflects and contributed to considerations of masculine gender as a performative practice for people assigned female at birth. For some people it allowed an exploration of their masculine affective, bodily and identity based desires. While for others it facilitated a critical attention to men’s associations with sexism and misogyny while accessing cis-man adjacent masculinity. The enmeshing of trans masculinity and drag kinging in queer women’s spaces notes a significant moment of attachment between the two groups, often considered divergent,69 and the highly attentive consideration of questions of gender and sexuality taking place in these subcultural spaces and through these subcultural experiments. This also suggests the need for experimental relations to masculine genders to facilitate a groundswell in the subsequent consideration of other forms of bodily experiments, for instance the use of testosterone.

Medical activism Feminist and HIV medical activism taking place during the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s radically altered the landscape of the power relations between medicine and consumers of medicine. Changes to medical- consumer dynamics, and to gender, the body and trans organising and politics were key features in the emergence of trans masculinity during the 1990s and 2000s. These changes are of particular note as they address the limiting factors placed on trans masculine medical systems, highlighted by Meyerowitz (2004)

69 Halberstam (1998b) discusses the border wars occurring rather acutely during trans masculinity’s increasing visibility.

73 and discussed in the beginning of this chapter. “Female transsexualism”, according to Meyerowitz (2004), was a “condition” less interesting and less researched by medical professionals and so it was less validated and “treated” by medical systems. The lack of medical consideration contributed to the diminished ability for the individual and collective emergence of trans men and trans masculinity. The following section attends to changes in the topography of medicine brought about by feminist medical activism in the 1970s and HIV medical activism of the 1990s highlighting the echoes in FTM activism taking place in Sydney, Australia in the early 2000s. Trans masculine activism during this period marks a moment in the emergence of Australian trans masculinity where networks were established, materials that made possible the bodily and life potentials of trans masculinity were created, and a consumer and activist driven approach “from below” formed pathways and systems for trans masculine people to access medical services.

While Wickman (2010) attends more closely to non-medical social and cultural changes, he does note one significant change to medicine-trans relationships: the dissolution of the primary model of U.S. trans medicine during the 1990s. Prior to this moment, trans/gender/sexual treatment structures centralised power within the university medical systems, systems that upheld a narrow and constrained understanding of transsexualism (critiqued by Stone, 2006/1987). In the 1990s many of the university clinics and research centres were shut down, and trans treatment was shifted towards privatised medical provision. According to Wickman (2010), this facilitated a loosening of the stranglehold on trans experience, desires, identities and bodily interventions. The shift into the privatised sphere also aligned with the marked turn towards a transgender politic within trans activism.

The late twentieth century also saw altered relations to medicine. In the 1970s, feminists began to organise and to speak back to medicine’s patriarchal structures and to highlight medicine’s participation in the subordination of women, the violation of women’s bodies in the name of medicine, and the failure to take women’s health needs seriously (Epstein, 1996, p. 10). The publication of texts like Our bodies, ourselves70 by the Boston Women’s Health Book Collective in the late 1960s disseminated materials about women’s health, bodies and sexualities. This moment marked a collective resistance to medicine’s participation in the oppression of women and articulated a clear politicised anger with medical power,

70 The first book titled Our bodies, ourselves was published in 1973, prior to this the booklet was called Women and their bodies (Boston Women’s Health Book Collective, 1973).

74 clinicians and systems. As Epstein (1996, p. 10) notes of Sheryl Ruzek (1978) in The women’s health movement: Feminist alternatives to medical control, the aims of feminist medical activism was to: [Reduce] the knowledge differential between patient and practitioner, [challenge] the license and mandate of physician to provide certain services, [reduce] professionals’ control and monopoly over related necessary goods and services… and [transform] the clientele from an aggregate into a collective.

This critical approach to medicine threads throughout both HIV activism and informs FTM activism in the early 2000s, discussed shortly. However, it also speaks to the re-negotiations of the relationship between medicine and consumers of medicine, by women, who were typically positioned and made passive by medicine. Again, as discussed in the introduction to this chapter, the experience of people believed to be women by medicine during the early period of transsexuality’s emergence in the 1950s and 60s was typified by this kind of dynamic; one of dismissal, a lack of interest or outright denial. As such, this re-negotiation would have had some effect on medicine’s encounters with people they believed to be women, as well as people embedded in these feminist spaces who may have moved on to identify as trans men.

Feminist medical activism shaped subsequent HIV activism when the epidemic began in the 1980s (Epstein, 1996). The discourse and underlying assertions made by feminist medical activism were absorbed into HIV activism, and many of the feminists present in feminist medical activism spaces were also present in the activism surrounding the HIV epidemic. HIV activism saw significant shifts in the relations between HIV affected individuals and communities, and treating clinicians and HIV researchers (Epstein, 1996). The activities of groups such as ACT UP shifted the normalised relations and the power differentials between medicine and patients and implicated parties, while individual patients and collectives became activists, who claimed roles in the discourse surrounding HIV. These activists radically altered the treatment possibilities and health decisions available for individuals affected by HIV which occurred, in part, through various forms of self-experimentation and the development of expertise used to shape the scientific and biomedical research being conducted (Epstein, 1996). HIV medical activism was a moment of radical re-negotiation of the relations between HIV affected people and HIV medicine, it shaped the course of the HIV epidemic and the treatment options and protocols available to people living with HIV. Before this moment there had been no comparative medicalised movement with

75 “the breadth, depth, and, certainly, the militance of the AIDS movement” (Epstein, 1996, p. 10).

The renegotiations between people affected by HIV and HIV-based medicine re-shaped broader dynamics between non-HIV medicine and consumers of medicine and proliferated possibilities for other medicalised groups to dictate the terms of medicine’s encounters with consumers (Epstein, 1996, p. 348). Patients with breast cancer, prostate cancer, chronic fatigue, Alzheimers, to name just a few, “have displayed a new militancy and demanded a voice in how their conditions are conceptualised, treated, and researched” (Epstein, 1996, p. 348). While these groups may not have been explicitly linked to HIV activism, the shifted cultures of medicine and the presence of these possibilities arising from HIV activism were, in this moment, at the very least “in the wind” (Epstein, 1996, p. 348). These shifted relations of power and knowledge created the conditions for alternative negotiations with medicine for FTM activism in Australia in the beginning of the 2000s.

There were notable links between trans people, trans activism, cis gay men and HIV activism. As Stryker (2008, p. 113) notes, the conservative and moralising approaches to HIV seen in the U.S. and U.K. that saw an abstinence, monogamy and quarantine approach to the epidemic71 significantly affected trans people in the U.S. The rates and effects of HIV were particularly devastating for trans people who participated in sex work, needle sharing (especially for hormones) or who were present in gay men’s spaces. The precarity of many trans people’s relationship to their healthcare providers added extra limitations to accessing health support.

Lou Sullivan is one example of the meeting point between trans masculinity, HIV and gay men’s communities during this time. Lou Sullivan was one of the most active and vocal trans men participating in gay and trans activism from the late 1970s through to the early 1990s (Stryker, 2008, p. 118). He was a gay trans man living in the San Francisco Bay Area; a “Mecca” for queer, trans and alternative people, politics and activism (Chase, 1998). At the end of the 1970s, Sullivan started to work at the Janus Information Facility as the first FTM peer counsellor. In 1980 he published the booklet Information for the female to male crossdresser and transsexual, a widely used guide to how to live as a man, and he

71 The approaches to HIV in Australia were marked much more by a counterpublic health approach which involved the collaboration between affected individuals and groups, and medical systems. See Race (2009), and the documentary Rampant: How a city stopped a plague (2007) for compelling accounts of these differences.

76 cultivated connections with other FTMs in the San Francisco Bay Area as well as nationally and internationally (Meyerowitz, 2004, p. 276). Sullivan also began the newsletter FTM and a group also called FTM in 1986 which later became FTM International (2019), the largest organisation catering to the needs of trans men in the world. Lou Sullivan contracted HIV sometime in 1980 likely as a result of his sexual intimacies with cis gay men and spent the remainder of his life campaigning relentlessly for the DSM to remove the homophobic requirement of heterosexuality in diagnosis of Gender Identity Disorder (Stryker, 2008, p. 120).72 Sullivan died of HIV related illness in 1991 in the company of friends and family; he did not get to see the removal of heterosexuality as a requirement of the diagnosis of Gender Identity Disorder from the DSM which did take place in 1994 (Stryker, 2008, p. 119).

During the early 1990s there was limited presence of FTM’s in Australia. This shifted somewhat through the activism of Sydney based trans man Jasper Laybutt. During the late 1980s and early 1990s, Laybutt co-created the kinky, S&M and fetish publication Wicked Women. In his research for this publication, Laybutt came across an American zine about trans men. He noted that “people [are] doing this and there’s actually a community starting to form around this, at least in America”. Laybutt had found that in Australia “there just wasn’t the information… for trans men… I’d never met anyone. Even if I did, I didn’t know I’d met anyone”. Looking at the depiction of these men’s transitions, Laybutt said that “I decided that that’s what I’m going to do”. Part of Laybutt’s decision was also to form connections with other trans men. He said if “I was going to undertake this journey [transitioning] and I knew no-one… if I can’t find people I’ll let them find me”. Laybutt began the Boys will be boys network in 1992 with a regular monthly zine that continued till November 1993.

While this work by Laybutt should not be understated as forming the initial kernel of possibility for FTMs in Australia, Australian-based FTM activism hit a stronger stride in the early 2000s. Much of this

72 Sullivan himself had faced continual roadblocks to accessing transition related services, especially his phalloplasty, due to this requirement. He did manage to attain his long sought after surgery through a private clinic in 1986. In a recorded interview with Ira B. Pauly, Professor at the Psychiatry and Behavioural Sciences University of Nevada School of Medicine, Sullivan says: It’s almost a poetic justice that I’ve spent my whole life trying to be a gay man and running into a lot of opposition and being told that I couldn’t do it, that it was impossible. I feel that, in a way, this AIDS diagnosis—because AIDS is still seen at this point as a gay man’s disease—that it kind of proves that I did do it, that I was successful. I kind of took a perverse pleasure in contacting the gender clinics that rejected me and said that they’ve told me for so many years that it was impossible for me to live as a gay man, but it looks like I’m gonna die like one. (Lou Sullivan on Honesty and AIDS: 1988-1990, 2010).

77 work was focused around the formation of the group FTM Australia, initially situated as an arm of FTM International, that took place in 2001. In June 2001, the website ftmaustralia.org was established and continued until it shifted many of its functions to Facebook in the middle of 2017. In August 2001, the first edition of Torque was released, a zine made by FTM Australia, which continued until at least February 2008. And in a kind of realisation of the work prior to this moment, in October 2001 a group of twelve trans men and FTMs, including Jasper Laybutt, met in Sydney, N.S.W., for the first working group of FTM Australia. This group centred around trans men’s issues drawing on the experiences of those living in Australia, as well as international commentary on trans men’s experiences of families, romance, community and medical transition.

The initial working group cultivated five goals to address the needs of trans men in Australia. This included “workshops and support groups, health & medical information, [a] newsletter, funding, [and the] promotion of FTM Australia” (FTM Australia, 2001). Many of the central aims of FTM Australia and the subsequent websites continued to focus on the need for social connection, medical support and medical transition for trans men. For instance, in 2015 the website73 states: FTM Australia is a free, confidential, peer based Australia-wide network with a focus on men identified “female” at birth who medically transition to male in Australia. We also provide information and limited support to family members (partners, parents, siblings and others), healthcare providers and other professionals, government and policy makers since 2001. (FTM Australia, 2015). Evidently medical systems and interventions, alongside social networks, were, and continue to be, central to the concerns of trans masculine, FTM and trans men’s organising in Australia.

A strong feature of both activist moments was a strong need to collate and distribute information about FTM experience, medicalised interventions, and to form connections between FTM people. The information about how to transition, let alone the presence of other FTMs in Australia, was hard to find if not outright impossible. These publications and networks provided significant spaces to access answers, or at the very least possible avenues, for people seeking information about social and medical transition. It also provided a network of possible support and examples of individuals undertaking their

73 We can think of this process as “digital bio-citizenship” wherein individuals “involve new ways of making citizenship by incorporation into communities linked electronically by e-mail lists and websites” (Rose & Novas, 2007, p. 442).

78 own transitions. The need to distribute information, social connection and to form a “collective” approach to medicine resonates strongly with the early political impetus of feminist women’s health activism. Alongside these imperatives, this information also shaped the potential emergence of certain bodies and publics. That is, the distribution of information is not only a process of information sharing but a re- configuring of discourse and material possibilities; the dissemination of the very potential for new gendered and bodily possibilities to emerge. These encounters marked notable occasions of self- formation; as Laybutt notes: “people [are] doing this”.

While HIV activism brought new levels of community attention to the medical needs of people effected by HIV, it also affected notable changes to how medical interventions were provided. The production of counterpublics situated as active players in the formation of medical systems resonates with FTM activism during this early period. FTM Australia and its networks not only facilitated trans masculine visibility and activism in mainstream and queer spaces in Australia, it also worked to establish clearer routes to accessing psychological, hormonal and surgical support for trans masculine transitioning. This included the dissemination of lists of trans friendly practitioners to trans masculine people so that trans masculine people access bodily interventions and support. It also included the forming of specific medical pathways for the treatment of trans men within a major hospital in Sydney, Australia. Prior to the development of this pathway, the routes to accessing intervention had been non-existent, deeply precarious and/or invisible to anyone not already connected to these (very small) populations. While the medical professionals in this hospital were open to the possibility of providing services for trans men, it was the crucial work of FTM Australia members in asserting these pathways as needful that sparked the formation of this infrastructure.74

FTM activists as “activist-experts” whose knowledge of the needs and interventions for trans masculine transitioning allowed them to form new treatment pathways and force interest in trans masculine medical interventions. This network, as well as the subsequent website, became a clear way to access this trans masculine treatment information and these services, it made possible certain gendered and bodily ways of being, and created social connections amongst its members. The patient-formed networks with medical systems, alongside these social connections and broader cultural changes, made possible the emergence

74 Personal correspondence with a member of FTM Australia who did not respond to subsequent requests for recorded interviews.

79 of trans masculinity and contributed to the explosion of trans masculine people and publics in Sydney, Australia alongside other major cities and countries in the West.

Conclusion Transsexuality is often situated as arising from medical theorisation and technological development in the mid-twentieth century. Perhaps because of a lack of interest, awareness, or belief in “female transsexualism”, medicine did not attend to or medically support notable numbers of trans masculine people during the early to mid-twentieth century (Meyerowitz, 2004). Trans men and trans masculinity was rarely seen or considered in popular media or medical contexts until the late 1990s and early 2000s; it has had a different historical emergence and aetiology than that of trans femininity.

What did occur during the 1990s and early 2000s was a massive leap in trans/gender/sexual men and trans masculine people in trans organisations and in popular culture (Wickman, 2003). The conditions under which the numbers and representations of trans masculine people could equal those of trans feminine people; the emergence of trans masculinity as an identity and cultural figure, is tied the development of transgender politics. These politics, informed by new theories of gender and the body, worked to dislocate the centrality of genital surgeries and proliferated a host of gender identities beyond transsexuality. New considerations of the materiality of the body permeated Western countries and cultures, occupying notable locations in male bodybuilding and anxieties about female sports doping. The discursive and cultural shifts in considering the body as malleable created potentials for trans masculinity, through both the dissemination of the potentials of testosterone for “female” people, and through shifting the norms surrounding men’s cultivation of bodily aesthetics. This created fertile ground for experiments with the materiality of the sexed body, especially with exogenous testosterone. Gender as performative also saw a concurrent shift with a particular increase in changes to men’s gender. Gender and gender expression were no longer inherent but also became a site of cultivation and “practice”. The manifestation of these changes in drag king scenes opened opportunities for people to begin to identify with trans masculinity and to experiment in masculine gender expression.

Alongside these interlinked cultural shifts, the practices of trans activists in the early 2000s, echoing the work of earlier HIV and feminist medical activism, shifted relations with trans medicine. FTM networks that created social and activist connections and distributed knowledge of trans masculine bodily

80 possibilities also altered formal trans attentive medical systems. This medical-activist shift rectified the limitations placed on trans masculine people in the 1940s and 50s, took seriously the needs of trans people assigned female at birth, and supported gendered bodily interventions for those who desired them.

This chapter has elaborated the social, cultural, political and medical factors that underpinned trans masculinity’s arrival in the 1990s and 2000s as a significant cultural moment and identity category. I have attempted to demonstrate how the possibility of undertaking certain kinds of experiments with the sex-gendered body required specific conditions under which those possibilities may become intelligible. Crucially, these potentials are not fully controlled or enacted by medicine but arise from a counter-cultural nexus of materials, people, technologies and discourse that gave rise to the possibility of becoming trans masculine.

81 Vignettes

The body in flux

Day Forty-Two I must be on a lower testosterone level. I'm worried my fat is redistributing. My shoulders seem smaller, my arms too. My hips seem bigger than they usually are but these subtleties are difficult to prove. It makes me feel more “feminine” which is nice, but don’t like the changes to my hips. I seem to be able to cry more easily. I am not a crier and the changes are strange. It’s nice but this new ability catches me by surprise when in public. I'm worried it'll happen at times I don't want it too or when I can't control it.

Singed treetops My love affair with testosterone has had a few setbacks. I inject myself once every 10 days with 250ccs of testosterone in an oily ester into the muscle. The needle is pushed all the way through the resistant springy skin, the soft buttery fat and the firm muscle, as far as it will go. To ensure you’re in the muscle you have to “pull back” on the syringe. Sometimes this pull back brings blood, dark red iron ore pulsing through liquid stone. You’ve entered a vein and the process must be redone.

Sometimes you enter the muscle and you edge up against a nerve, sparking flares of pain that travel up your body. When this happens you would shift the needle gently inside the muscle tissue, moving away from this nerve fire. But it comes with a risk. Moving the needle can nick a blood vessel but, having already pulled back on the syringe, it’s hard to tell if damage has occurred. On one occasion, I did just this. The oily liquid streamed into the vein, quickly carried along by the heart-pumped blood, it is almost immediately deposited in the soft and delicate lung bronchioles, beginning to burn the fragile tissue. The gentle tops of trees caught by a liquid fire. Hacking coughing spasms soon began, a deep chest pain and an inability to breathe quick to follow. There is little to do in this event but wait it out, possibly for hours, hoping the damage is not too severe and the lung pain soon dissipates. On this occasion, healing was not rapid but a constant ache and a burning with every full breath, the singed treetops of my lungs crackling in testosterone’s wake.

82 Chapter Three Feeling dysphoric, being unwell: How dysphoria as an emergent phenomenon can disrupt a politics of trans ressentiment

I tried not to use the term “dysphoria” in my interviews. As a deeply loaded word I attempted to communicate without it. I would use “bodily discomfort” or “gendered discomfort” or various other terms or sentences to avoid using “dysphoria”. What I often received from participants in response to my euphemisms was a quizzical gaze and a request for clarity. Sometimes there would be a slight pause, followed by the smoothing of the face in comprehension and an answer that invariably and comfortably contained the words “gender dysphoria”. The weight of “dysphoria” is both its frustration and its ease, participants would use the term, describing their relationship to their body, their gender, their social encounters, without explanation, assuming I knew what they meant. And I did, kind of. But it always felt totalising, never specific enough, as if all trans people shared the experience of dysphoria, that it all looked, sounded and acted the same for all people. Eventually, finding no other way that managed to communicate what I needed to, I succumbed to this conceptual chasm. I used the word where I would otherwise have skipped and danced in my attempt to create space for alternative meanings to arise.

Trying to accommodate for my concerns with using dysphoria, I adopted the broadest meaning of the word in the interviews; something that is reflected in this chapter. I used it to describe an unpleasant affective experience attached in some way to an individual’s relation to their gendered self (in all that entails). But this does not entirely alleviate my concerns about the term, about how it holds so much weight, without really saying much at all; about how it is used to validate and contain a trans person’s gendered experience, without allowing them to explicate or fully define what that might look like for them in its deep specificity. How it attaches to the wrong body narrative, as the singular negative trans experience arising from the discrepancy between the gendered mind and the sexed body. And, perhaps my greatest concern, is how the apparent experience of dysphoria has been contained and mobilised within medical systems; and what that does to people who use the term.

This chapter attempts to address some of these concerns by situating dysphoria as an emergent phenomenon that arises from specific modes of attention to the body, the potential of the body to be

83 affected by testosterone, and an orientation to hope. Dysphoria here, also emerges through an attachment to time and race; both of which are briefly canvassed. In encountering dysphoria as emergent, it becomes variable and highly specific. Dysphoria is no longer (solely) a negative experience arising from the discrepancy between the mind and the body. And, with its extended parameters, there is a reduction in the potential for trans people to be singularly defined by the “illness” of gender dysphoria. This dislodges the possibility of a highly constrained and subordinated approach to trans medicine.

While this chapter largely attends to the emergence of dysphoria beyond a discrepancy between the mind and the body, it was also evident that experiences of the (gendered) body and self also had a dynamic relation to the potential of the body to be affected by testosterone and hope for a different future. Some participants, in discussions of their experiences of dysphoria, also spoke of the reduction of dysphoria and different feelings about their experiences of dysphoria when they encountered bodily potential and hope.75 These different orientations to the phenomenon of dysphoria demonstrate additional complexity when considering the emergent and dynamic nature of the gendered body and self. They also indicate some of the ways that dysphoria and experiences of the (trans) gendered body and self, having been tied to the wrong body narrative, require further renegotiation.

Before continuing I think it is pertinent to assert what this chapter is not about. First and foremost, it is not about suggesting that trans people’s desires for gendered medical interventions arise only from their knowledge of testosterone, or their embedding in online spaces. It is not about supporting the idea that the apparent increase in the numbers of trans people is the result of “peer pressure” or the most recent “fad” being taken up by young people. It is also not to suggest that if we refuse to allow young people or children to be exposed to the potentials of the body or their futures, that they will just not be trans. Other than a suggestion that situates trans people as the abnormal and undesirable, this also assumes that people cannot find ways to make of themselves from a whole host of materials that inevitably thread through their worlds. This chapter is about extending potentials, not minimising them; it’s about validating trans desires, not constraining them. Hopefully, this is how it will be received.

75 It is notable that I am not using an alternative to “dysphoria” such as “gender euphoria”. Gender euphoria is often situated as a positive experience of being gendered correctly, as opposed to a negative experience of being, for instance, mis-gendered (Rachlin, 2018, p. 226). When participants talked about the different experiences of dysphoria they did not speak of occasions of feeling positive. Instead, they discussed feeling less negative and feeling less dysphoric.

84 Gender dysphoria and a mind-body discrepancy The term “gender dysphoria” emerged as a diagnostic label originally designed to widen the criteria of transsexuality in the 1960s and early 1970s. This impetus was spurred on by the desires of clinicians to maintain control when faced by a self-educated population of transsexuals, who utilised the diagnostic criteria76 to shore up their eligibility for access to their desired medical interventions (Koch-Rein, 2014, p. 14). Since its inception, gender dysphoria has permeated clinical and diagnostic processes; used as a term to denote the quality of trans “suffering”, an experience that is said to result from the discrepancy between the gendered mind and the sexed body.

This can be seen in early clinical encounters with trans people that have situated gender dysphoria as a primary feature in the diagnosis of “transsexualism”. The DSM-III (1980) and DSM-III-R (1987), assert the first two criteria for the diagnosis “transsexualism” as a “sense of discomfort and inappropriateness about one’s anatomic sex” and a “wish to be rid of one’s own genitals and to live as a member of the other sex” (DSM-III-R, 1987, p. 263). Replacing “Transsexualism” with “Gender Identity Disorder”, the DSM-IV (1994) and DSM-IV-TR (2000) required that “there must also be evidence of persistent discomfort about one’s assigned sex or a sense of inappropriateness in the gender role of that sex (Criterion B)” (DSM-IV, 1994, p. 533).

The DSM-V (2013) fully centralised gender dysphoria through positioning “Gender Dysphoria” as the diagnostic criteria of trans existence and permission for trans bodily intervention. The DSM-V (2013) requires “a difference between one’s experienced/expressed gender and assigned gender, and significant distress or problems functioning” to be diagnosed with Gender Dysphoria. While the shift to Gender Dysphoria could generously be understood as a way to pathologise the associated symptoms of trans experience, rather than the identity of the trans person themselves, Gender Dysphoria is still understood as the deep pain emerging from a discrepancy between one’s “assigned gender” and one’s “experienced/expressed gender”.77 This diagnosis maintains a focus on the wrong body, asserting that

76 Diagnostic criteria were available through texts such as Harry Benjamin’s The transsexual phenomena (1966). This process was thoroughly and seminally discussed by Stone (2006/1987). 77 In this model the gendered mind is situated as “essential, stable, predetermined, and beyond the control or choice of the individual” (Heyes & Latham, 2018, 180) while the body is the site of intervention. The “stability” of the gendered mind mutually reinforces the assertion of gender dysphoria as always present and relatively similar across time for any one trans person. There are some concessions made to this consistency in moments, for instance, of acute mis-gendering or heightened gendered experiences of the body (such as during puberty).

85 tension arises mostly between the gendered mind and the sexed body (although in the new iteration of the DSM it could be considered the sex-gendered body).

Situating trans gender identities and experiences as deeply entwined, if not outright defined, by an experience of gender dysphoria is risky. Some of the concerns with centralising dysphoria in trans lives has been elaborated by the work of Heyes and Latham (2018) in “Trans surgeries and cosmetic surgeries: The politics of analogy”.78 Heyes and Latham (2018) take issue with the validation of trans medical interventions that rely heavily on a diagnosis of Gender Dysphoria79 that must be “accompanied by defined expressions of suffering originating exclusively in the individual …” (Heyes & Latham, 2018, p. 185).80 While Heyes and Latham (2018) pull apart the underlying gender binary logics of trans surgeries alongside cosmetic surgeries for non-trans people; they also speak to the political implications of a reliance on gender dysphoria, as “intense and intrinsic suffering” (p. 174) that may “coerce trans patients into a politics of ressentiment” (p. 174).

Heyes and Latham (2018) use Wendy Brown’s (1995) discussion of ressentiment to elaborate the political risk when trans people are required to assert suffering, in the form of gender dysphoria, to gain access to medical interventions. Ressentiment, elaborated by Brown (1995) involves an attachment and investment in the features or identities of a marginalised subject position. Or, as Heyes and Latham (2018, p. 182) state “ressentiment describes the paradoxical attachment of the socially marginal to the very wounded

78 Heyes and Latham (2018) intervene into a trans politics of ressentiment through elaborating the overlaps and differences in the justifications for, or refusal of, both cosmetic and trans surgeries. Heyes and Latham (2018) are not the first to bring together these practices, or the first look at the political implications surrounding bodily interventions. Sullivan (2006) in “Transmogrification: (Un)becoming other(s)” elaborates an earlier critical approach to the apparent differences between “trans” bodily interventions and “cosmetic” bodily interventions. She situates these apparently different instances of intervention into the body as potentially existing within the same category of “transmogrification”. Sullivan (2006, p. 561) defines transmogrification “as a process of (un)becoming strange and/or grotesque”, which offers the possibilities of embracing the strangeness of ourselves and of others. This paves the way for an approach to justice that is not held within a humanist logic but “is monstrous”, “shape-shifting” and “haunting”, and that “simultaneously, and necessarily, generates an opening onto alterity, to différance, to a future, or futures, yet to come” (Sullivan, 2006, p. 563). 79 The DSM functions as a framework for diagnosis which, as Keane (2012, p. 354) notes in the context of drug use, “identifies and constitutes” the observed problem as a disease and frames the appropriate response as one of treatment. This works to establish medical professionals as sites of authority and the “identity of the patient as a person with a certain condition” (Keane, 2012, p. 354). 80 Heyes and Latham (2018) are of course not the only trans scholars to take issue with this. Gayle Salamon (2010, p. 83) in Assuming a body: Transgender and rhetorics of materiality notes that “the implications of basing subjectivity on a feeling of dysphoria are not altogether benign and would seem to construct that subjectivity in absolute negativity, opposed to both bodily morphology and conventional categories of gender”.

86 identities they claim to want to surpass”. This, in turn, produces an unconscious resistance to actions or politics that might dislodge that marginalisation. Heyes and Latham (2018) take up this concern when discussing the rhetoric employed by medical gatekeeping that requires trans experience and permission for medical intervention to be defined by gender dysphoria;81 as pain arising from the disjuncture between mind and body. They state that: The risk of this rhetoric is that this show of distress will come to signify the essence of the trans individual — and ultimately, for those who take a biomedical perspective to its logical conclusion, the meaning of their bodies (Heyes & Latham, 2018, p. 182). And that “suffering comes to define the trans narrative, the greater the purchase of a political psychology that individualizes gender and disallows critique of the systems that contribute to trans people’s suffering in the first place”, preventing “transformative self-descriptions and action” (Heyes & Latham, 2018, pp. 183, 175).

While gatekeeping practices of trans medicine can attach an individual to gender dysphoria, the expectation of long periods of time in which a trans person is assumed to experience gender dysphoria furthers the totalising of the individual and encourages an attachment to gender dysphoria. Within the DSM-V (2013), Gender Dysphoria is formally only required to have existed for six months, however it is often assumed and sometimes explicitly required, to have begun earlier. Spade (2003) in “Resisting medicine, re- modelling gender” recalls being assessed by a therapist for top surgery. Regarding the extent and validity of their negative feelings about their chest, the therapist asked: “how long have you felt this way?” (Spade, 2003, p. 21). Spade (2003, p.21) asks in return “does realness reside in the length of time a desire exists?”. The assumed response is “yes”. I too was asked by the psychiatrist assessing my application for top surgery to recount my experience of my gender dysphoria from childhood. I, of course, recounted a past of identification as a man, and dysphoria that matched that identification. This was despite identifying as non-binary in that moment, having been attached to womanhood in my late teens and early twenties and not having any particular chest-based dysphoria. At $350 an hour and paying $7000 in actual medical costs for top surgery, more than one appointment—even with the tantalising potential to push back against his ideas of trans experience—was not an affordable option for me at that time. The permission

81 It is also central to note that social discourse around trans experience as well as intra-trans discourse and regulation are also a part of trans ressentiment. Intra-trans encounters can often rely on gender dysphoria and the wrong body narrative as a means to define trans experience and existence. Halberstam (1998b, p. 295) discusses and rejects, the use of gender dysphoria to delimit boundaries and define the differences between FTMs and butch people.

87 for “radical” bodily intervention, especially surgery,82 often requires consistent and long-term experience of dysphoria and bodily distress.

These constraints also structure who can access gendered medical intervention. As Preciado (2013) notes, their intense desire for testosterone can only exist within one of two frameworks according to psychology and trans medicine. They say: I must choose between two psychoses: in one (gender identity disorder), testosterone appears as a medicine, and in the other (addiction), testosterone becomes the substance on which I am dependent, a dependence that must be treated by other means (Preciado, 2013, p. 257). And that: If I don’t accept defining myself as a transsexual, as someone with “gender dysphoria”, … I won’t be able to go directly to the pharmacy to get my doses of Testogel. I’ll have to ask D to send me one or two boxes from London or I’ll have to buy them on expressdrugstore.com, or on the sports black market, and must take what I’m given. (Preciado, 2013, p. 252-253). Preciado’s (2013) experiments with testosterone outside of medicine must be brought into a logic of gender dysphoria and gender identity disorder if they are to be provided formal, valid and safer access to exogenous testosterone.

While often gender dysphoria is used within trans studies, and other trans related discussions, to mark the negative experience of the divergence between the gendered mind and the sexed body, there are of course critiques and alternative definitions of gender dysphoria. Gayle Salamon (2010) in Assuming a body, incorporates gender dysphoria as situated in its intersubjective and social encounters.83 Sarah Schultz (2018, p. 77), in arguing for an informed consent model, also points to the significant role of (transphobic and cis-centric) social worlds in the formation of gender dysphoria. Julia Serano (2007, pp. 85, 126) in Whipping girl rejects the term gender dysphoria altogether, and instead argues for “gender dissonance” to describe the intrinsic internal pain of gender discrepancy as separate from the extrinsic

82 There are hierarchies of gendered bodily interventions and concomitant degrees of “evidence” that must be provided to access those interventions. As Rachlin (2018, p. 236) notes, “hormones are often regarded as more reversible than surgery, so the bar to access is lower”. 83 Durban-Albrecht (2017, p. 195) elaborates the interplay between the social and experiences of dysphoria in an ethnographic study of “trani, trans’, and transgender Haitians’ after the 2010 Haitian earthquake. This piece pays particular attention to one woman’s experience of transphobia, cissexism, misgendering and a lack of appropriately gendered medical and adornment access in post-colonial Haiti.

88 stress of cissexism and transphobia experienced by trans people. Sarah Rachlin (2018, p. 226) differentiates gender dysphoria from gender euphoria, arguing that “some individuals are gender dysphoric, experiencing distress surrounding their assigned gender and gendered body” while “others do not experience dysphoria but do experience gender euphoria—exceptionally good feelings from a gender expression or from the experience of a gendered body different from that of their birth- assigned gender”. And finally, Eva Hayward in “Lessons from a starfish”, queries the ubiquity of gender dysphoria when she says the “agonising experiences of bodily disownment are true and important for some transsexuals” (2008, p. 256, emphasis added).

Even Gender Dysphoria in the DSM-V (2013) nods to the potential complexity of dysphoria as derived only from the mind-body discrepancy. The DSM-V (2013) states: “not all individuals will experience distress as a result of such incongruence, many are distressed if the desired physical interventions by means of hormones and/or surgery are not available” and later that experiences of dysphoria may “be mitigated by supportive environments and knowledge that biomedical treatments exist to reduce incongruence”. These qualifiers in the DSM-V, alongside the indications of alternative relations to gender dysphoria by trans theorists, demonstrate a degree of contingency or contextuality for the impacts on the experience of dysphoria; that gender dysphoria may be shaped by “supportive environments”, the availability of “desired physical interventions”, and interestingly here the “knowledge” that these technologies exist and may work to reduce the incongruence that people may feel.

And yet the central tenant of gender dysphoria, as a mis-alignment, gives support to gendered medical interventions, otherwise considered to disrupt a binary gender system. Harsin Drager (2019) notes an avoidance to query this model of gender dysphoria in trans studies, to admit that perhaps “we have this concept of dysphoria all wrong”, that maybe dysphoria “never goes away”. They attribute this lack of critical attention to dysphoria as a result of a belief that querying dysphoria and its repair through medical intervention “would be seen as undermining our gradual march toward ‘progress’” (Chu & Harsin Drager, 2019, p. 104). While this chapter does not attend to dysphoria that remains present despite medical intervention, it does query gender dysphoria as solely arising from the mis-alignment between the gendered mind and the sexed body. I aim to extend the indications of trans theorists, and the DSM-IV (2013), noted above, that suggest gender dysphoria is shaped by phenomena that exist beyond the gendered mind and the sexed body. This chapter looks to how dysphoria might emerge from encounters

89 with attention to the body, the body as a site of potential, and hope for an alternative future, all of which are shaped by encounters with time and with race.

Emergent phenomena All phenomena, including dysphoria, emerge from encounters between phenomena. The phenomenon of dysphoria can be considered analogous to thirst, as an experience often defined as inherent and bodily. In “‘Frequent sipping’: Bottled water, the will to health and the subject of hydration”, Kane Race (2012) draws out a sharp analysis of water rhetoric. Race’s (2012) work draws on the work of Latour (2004) in thinking the body as “affected”. Race (2012) elaborates how the apparatuses formed through biomedical discourse and market imperatives enact a body as sensitive to the risk of dehydration and extends Latour’s (2004) work by looking at precisely how these apparatuses or “artificially created set-ups” (Latour, 2004, p. 209) can be followed and traced.

In particular, Race (2012) elaborates how the “subject of hydration”, a self-caring frequent sipper of water, emerged through the meeting of biomedical techniques and research and the bottled water market. Sports research into the dehydration of athletes, the advertising that capitalised on this data and the formation of different markets for different kinds of bottles were some of the features that contributed to the emergence of the subject of hydration. What also emerged here was not only the subject of hydration, but also changes to thirst itself. He states: Drinking is reconfigured in the process. No longer a simple response to how the body feels, it now takes the shape of a practice or a skill: an activity that is undertaken “consciously, deliberately, and for the good of the body” (Fixx, 1977: 31). It can be learned and studied and optimized, moreover, to enhance the body’s efficiency and performance. Thirst is not what it used to be. (Race, 2012, p. 84-85). Thirst has become something to be attended to, emerging from encounters between biomedical techniques and discourse, the bottled water market, advertising and the body. It has become something to be acted upon differently, not always an indicator of dehydration, but something that we are always at risk of and should always be trying to ameliorate. Thirst, as a specific phenomenon, is being enacted through these encounters.

What Race’s (2012) work suggests is that thirst, and the shifts and changes “to” thirst, emerge through

90 the socio-material arrangements in which it is embedded. Be it feeling thirsty or feeling dysphoric, the situatedness of a phenomenon and its attachment to materials and semiotics co-form what it is and how it is felt within any one moment. While Race (2012) attends closely and with precision to the material as well as the discursive, this chapter focuses more closely on the discursive features of the emergence of dysphoria. While this is largely due to the materials available from participants’ discussion of their experiences of dysphoria, it is not to suggest that the emergence of dysphoria is purely a semiotic event. The ways that testosterone, digital trans publics or audio-visual technologies (such as cameras) have emerged as material actants in the emergence of dysphoria, will be noted throughout.

Dysphoria as emerging with attention to the body, body potential and hope for the future The following section elaborates dysphoria as an emergent phenomenon. I pay particular attention to participants’ encounters with new modes of attention to the body, how the body is understood as a site of potential, and the development of hopeful orientations to the future, in the emergence of dysphoria. Further, I also attend to how the potential of the body and hope play roles in the emergence of dynamic encounters with the gendered body and self, that can include a reduction in the experience of dysphoria or a difference in the feelings about one’s dysphoria. Time and race were also key elements that threaded throughout participants’ discussions of bodily attention, body potential and hope for a different future.

Before continuing, it is important to note that the small sample size of this project prevents any elaboration of clear and consistent trends regarding any specific experience of dysphoria or the gendered body or self. And that, while some participants attended extensively to dysphoria, other participants did not discuss dysphoria at all, or did not discuss changes in dysphoria. It is quite possible then, that some participants had very consistent experiences of dysphoria across their lifetimes, or that some experienced no dysphoria at all. However, it is evident that for some participants the role of attention to the body, the potential of the body and hope for the future played crucial roles in their encounters with dysphoria. And it is quite likely that these are not the only features that contribute to the emergence of dysphoria or experiences of the (trans) gendered body and self.

Attention to the body Participants in the interviews often discussed the ways they looked at and attended to their bodies. These modes of attention had one of the most consistent relations to the emergence of dysphoria, in their

91 accounts. Participants articulated how looking at their bodies in specific ways, held up against specific (gendered) ideals increased their experience of dysphoria. While I would argue that attention and dysphoria are co-constituted, I will only be attending to the emergence of dysphoria through specific modes of attention and how attention to the body participates in the formation of transition as a particular kind of socio-material phenomenon.

The modes of attention I am referring to emerged with the knowledge and practices associated with digital trans publics and the use of audio-visual technologies like cameras and apps. As will be discussed in Chapter Four, these audio-visual technologies participated in the emergence of transition and shaped the available scaffolds and techniques of how to attend to the body on testosterone. In a similar way, audio-visual technologies and digital trans publics are also relevant to the emergence of dysphoria prior to testosterone use. As the role of audio-visual technologies are discussed further in Chapter Four, I will only touch on this briefly below.

Grey, a contemplative non-binary Chinese Australian who uses “they” pronouns, indicates the role of these digital trans publics and their imbrication with specific modes of attention, when they say: I was looking through YouTube, they were talking about certain areas of their body, it made me think about those areas of [my] body… I wouldn’t think about it usually and then it would point [my] attention to [these parts of the body]. Later, they also talked to me about how they felt when they learnt about what testosterone could do to a female body. They said: It brought more attention to certain areas that I wanted to address… it kind of gave me more dysphoria, because people would talk about the effects [of testosterone] and how it would do this and that. And that would sort of bring attention to those parts of my body, which I had never really addressed it in the past. So, in a sense, it gave me more dysphoria. Grey elaborated how others’ expectations and encounters with testosterone’s effects on the body, discussed in online spaces, shaped how they attended to their body. The pulling of attention into specific parts of their body that they “had never really addressed in the past” and comparing these parts of the body to the shifts they saw in online spaces, resulted in an increase in dysphoria. For Grey, learning about testosterone in online spaces and how it might alter their body, and learning the ways and techniques of attending to their body, facilitated the emergence of a different kind of dysphoria, that Grey frames as an

92 increase in dysphoria.

Further elaborating on the emergence of specific styles of attention through knowledge of testosterone was Blake, a white queer trans man from Melbourne, who was twenty-five years old at the time of the interview. Blake was a delightful interviewee, his words flowed well, neither halting for prolonged pauses nor rushing out in a torrent. Our conversation went like this: [RB:] When you first found out what T84 could do to your body, or a body, did it make you think differently about the body that you had? [Blake:] Yeah a little bit, like it was kind of being like T is going to do this, and I never really looked at my body and assessed how I felt about it [or] spent time being like “I don’t like this thing about me, I don’t like this”, because I’ve lived in this body for so long like it had been that way for ten years. So, I was like this is what it is, this is just a level of acceptance that I’d gotten to. But when I kind of realised that T could change some of those things I was like … yeah it was weird how it did change the way that I thought about stuff, things that I hadn’t really thought about, hips and body hair and stuff and I was like “oh I think about that now”, I never used to. Blake spent a lot of his life with a “level of acceptance” of his body. And yet, once he found out what testosterone could do to his body, he began to pay attention to the parts and potentials of his body that he “never used” to consider: “hips and body hair”, which resulted in increases in dysphoria. Dysphoria can again be seen to emerge with shifted forms of attention brought to the body, informed by knowledge of testosterone’s potential effects. But further, these sites of attention focus on areas that are presumed to be affected by testosterone, shaping the locations and specifics of the dysphoria Blake felt. When dysphoria emerges then it also emerges at specific sites of attention, or as attached to specific elements of the body, informed by this knowledge of testosterone’s potential effects. It emerges both in increased intensity as well as a qualitatively as specific kind of phenomenon through and with attention.

Lucas, a “male” identified queer Chinese Australian who took long pauses to think through his responses, also pointed to this shifting of dysphoria through shifts in attention. He said: Um. Let me try to think back. It [finding out about testosterone] made me dysphoric… it was bringing it to the forefront of your mind, going this is the body I want, and thinking about that…

84 Many participants used the word-letter “T” to denote testosterone.

93 like bringing focus to my body and I’d never really paid any attention to that. I don’t remember really looking in the mirror before thinking about the trans stuff and thinking about what changes I wanted on T so it’s kind of like looking in the mirror for the first time and thinking ‘oh great, there are things here that I do not want on my body’ and um some things T may change and some things T can’t and so that wasn’t fun. Like Blake and Grey, Lucas too found out about testosterone and its capacity to alter his body which shifted the kinds of attention that he paid to his body. He began to pay “attention” and to “focus” on his body. This resulted in attending to the parts of his body that could be altered by testosterone and surgeries, and to find these areas as sources of discomfort or dislike. Lucas demonstrates a slightly different orientation to this process than Blake. While both pay attention to specific parts of the body, Lucas also forms a whole body with which he compares his body. He sees the body that he has as starkly different from “the body that I want”, particularly when he looks in the mirror, an experience that he said was like “looking in the mirror for the first time”. It is his holding of a testosterone altered body up against his own un-altered body that he experiences an increase in dysphoria and body dislike. Dysphoria emerges here with both attention to the specific, the locations of the body that may be altered by testosterone (or surgeries), as well as to the whole; a comparison between Luca’s non-testosterone altered body and an envisioned body he does not have.

The emergence of dysphoria with bodily attention is also likely shaped by race and the dominance of whiteness in digital trans publics. While no participant discussed specifically the ways that their attention to their body was shaped by race, many participants of colour did discuss how their expectations of transition were shaped by race, as I will discuss further in Chapter Four. As dysphoria evidently emerges with attention, and as attention is formed with digital trans publics which are shaped by whiteness, it is highly likely that dysphoria, as it encounters attention, also emerges with race. Grey and Lucas indicate this embedding.

When Grey, a Chinese Australian, was thinking about what testosterone could do to their body, they told me: Well because there’s a typical narrative for when you’re transitioning and the typical narrative ends up with… this sort of this certain type of [normative white masculine] physique so when I was looking into it [testosterone use] I guess I wanted that sort of type of physique… so it did inform

94 my sense of what being on testosterone would be like. For Grey, how they attended to their body was defined in many ways by the dominance of whiteness in online spaces. The normative body ideal, one that is white, masculine and able-bodied, shaped the emergence of particular kinds of attention, which is highly likely to have shaped the emergence of their dysphoria.

Lucas, as a Chinese Australian, was also impacted by the whiteness of digital trans publics and Australian culture. He said, “I remember desperately wanting a beard and like a lot of different changes that happen, but not so much if you’re of Chinese descent”. Here, Lucas’ desires for specific changes to the body reflect Grey’s desires for changes to the body. Both participants’ expectations are shaped by the effects of testosterone on white bodies, depictions that are dominant in online spaces. The expectations of the transitioning body effect the locations that some participants attended to prior to transition. This racialisation of transition, and attention, is likely to have shaped the emergence of dysphoria for some participants of colour.

For Blake, Lucas and Grey, dysphoria emerged through an attachment to attention. As attention emerged as a specific phenomenon, so too did dysphoria emerge as a specific phenomenon. For all three, this involved both an increase in the intensity of negative feelings about the body and of increases in dysphoria. It also included qualitative shifts to dysphoria, highlighting and problematising specific locations of the body and elaborating a comparison of the current body to an ideal body. Both the locations of the body and the comparative ideal body were formed through encounters with digital trans publics. These features, because of online trans spaces’ white dominance, were potentially more acute for participants of colour due to the under-representation of trans testosterone using people of colour in these spaces. This dysphoria, this negative relation with the body, emerges qualitatively from the interplay between the knowledge of testosterone, attention paid to the body, one’s (gendered) experiences of one’s body and self, as well as one’s racialisation.

The potential of the body A feature that permeates some of the above discussions of attention is that of body potential: the “inherent”, but unrealised, capacity of the body to change when exogenous testosterone is administered. The changes that are understood to take place with testosterone are intimately reliant on the discourse

95 present in digital trans publics, discourses that are informed by contemporary and historical endocrinological research, as well as social understandings of masculinity and gender (see Chapter One). What the body apparently has the potential to become is shaped by testosterone’s capacities and associations, the modes of attention held to the body, and the expectations of what the body could be. Here, we look at participants Cinna and Frankie to understand dysphoria as emerging through its encounters with body potential. Further, in Tom’s discussion of his reduced experiences of dysphoria, we can also see how the potential of the body participates in the emergence of (dysphoria related) experiences of the body and the self. And finally, Lucas indicates the role of race in the emergence of dysphoria as it encounters the potential of the body.

Cinna, is a white non-binary trans man who was twenty-eight years old at the time of the interview. While casually lounging in his chair, a gentle attentive air about him, he said: I think knowing that my body housed in it that potential [to be affected by testosterone] probably made me a lot more dysphoric, because it could do this and it could do this and yet… because of that potential I knew that it could be a thing and because I wasn’t taking testosterone, or doing other body altery [altering] stuff, it made it [dysphoria] worse, because it [the body] is still here, even though it couldn’t be. Cinna suggests that the potential “housed” in the body, its ability for the body to be affected by testosterone and the inability to enact that potential resulted in Cinna feeling “a lot more dysphoric”. For Cinna, dysphoria emerges with the knowledge of the potential of the body and the body’s capacity to change when affected by testosterone; it is tied to a sense of internal possibility, but one that is unrealised.

Frankie is an extremely self-reflexive white bisexual, who was twenty-six years old at the time of the interview, and identified as “non-binary (trans masculine femme)”. Their experiences with the potential of the body echo those of Cinna. In discussing finding out about testosterone, Frankie noted an increase intensity of dysphoria at particular sites of the body, which they linked to the potential of the body. They said: “If you never think of things as able to be changed, or if I don’t think of things as able to be changed then I don’t consider the possibility of it being different…”. Frankie suggests that the expectation of the body as limited, produces (for some people) a sense of acceptance of the status quo. But when one establishes the potential for the body to be other than, the experience of the body can shift. For Frankie, dysphoria emerged with the belief and knowledge of the potential of the body to be affected by

96 testosterone.

For Tom, the potential of the body encountered (dysphoria related) experiences of the body and the self. Tom is a white queer “trans man (non-binary)” with an interest in hats and abstract thinking. He told me about his experience of finding out about what testosterone could do to the body, and how that made him feel about his own body. He said: Even though [changes caused by testosterone are] things that haven’t happened yet, they are potentialities that make me feel more secure in the moment because I’m like “you won’t feel this thing forever… remember that you won’t feel crippling dysphoria forever” [and] often it lessens that feeling [of dysphoria] in the moment because it’s like at some point these things [the body] will be at least a little bit different and you’ll feel a bit better and you’ll be ok. So no, definitely, it is a future thing that also has positive repercussions now. While the deep relevance of temporality will be discussed later, what is important to note here is that for Tom, the potential understood to reside in the body reduced the acuity of dysphoria and made it not quite as “crippling”.

Tom’s experiences with dysphoria were consistently quite different to the rest of the participants. While Cinna’s dysphoria increased as a result of understanding the potential of the body, Tom’s dysphoria decreased. This difference is potentially to do with Tom’s experiences of being a trans man who had not begun testosterone, and who was not going to begin using testosterone in the immediate future, but who had total confidence in his using testosterone at some point in the future. This difference can serve its own analytic purpose however, as it emphasises variation amongst trans testosterone users and the different manifestation of attachments between body potential and experiences of the gendered body and self. While Cinna evidences dysphoria as emerging with body potential, Tom evidences a reduction in the experience of dysphoria when encountering body potential.

Tom’s experience of a reduction in dysphoria through an encounter with body potential also gives greater nuance to the relation between dysphoria and the wrong body narrative. Dysphoria is largely situated as emerging from the discrepancy between the gendered mind and the sexed body. Interventions into the body are positioned as the way to alleviate dysphoria by shifting the body from “wrong to right, dysphoria to alignment” (Chu, 2017, p. 143). But Tom here evidences how a reduction in dysphoria not only occurs

97 with the manifesting of body potential but also a knowledge and orientation to the potential of the body. This resonates with the suggestion of the DSM-V (2013) that people may experience reduced dysphoria or “distress” by the availability of bodily interventions to reduce “incongruence”, such as testosterone. Although, as Tom evidences, this knowledge also adheres to the very potential of the body itself, as well as knowledge of bodily interventions.

While neither Cinna nor Tom were people of colour, the impacts of body potential, formed through online digital publics, and dysphoria can be extrapolated from elements that other participants of colour have elaborated. For instance, returning to Lucas’ comment about his initial desires for testosterone use, he said that he could “remember desperately wanting a beard and like a lot of different changes that happen, but not so much if you’re of Chinese descent”. This desire for a beard aligns with a host of expectations that Lucas had had prior to using testosterone. These expectations, these potentials of the body, arose for these participants almost entirely through digital trans publics and the discourse, images and practices elaborated online. When dysphoria emerges with the (presumed) potential of the body, and when trans people of colour and their specific body potentials are not represented online sufficiently, then there are numerous additional layers to unpick, from trying to establish what their bodies might do on testosterone, to how to orient themselves to their own bodily potential.

An orientation to hope For a few participants, hope, and the promise of a different future, was a central phenomenon in the emergence of dysphoria. One participant Danny, a non-binary person of colour who was fifty-nine years old at the time of the interview and tended to talk rather quietly, typified this experience. When asked about how they felt about their body, when they first found out what testosterone could do to their body, they relayed feelings about watching a YouTube video of a testosterone user. They said: [Danny:] I felt excitement and a bit of disbelief; cause I’d never known it was possible. I grew up in the western suburbs of Sydney where it took two hours to get anywhere by train, it was incredibly homophobic and racist, I knew nothing about it out there. [RB:] Did it make you feel differently about the body that you had at the time? [Danny:] Yeah yeah I guess I started feeling more dysphoric again. [RB:] Had you started feeling dysphoric in the lead up to [watching] the video [of a testosterone user]? [Danny:] No, it was that moment I think.

98 Danny felt excited and disbelief about finding out about testosterone, they had no idea that altering the body with testosterone was possible. The excitement and disbelief that Danny experiences at first appears somewhat benign, the affective experiences of possibility, the hope of being other than one is now. But in “that moment” Danny also “started feeling more dysphoric again”. For Danny, a hopefulness for the future, the excitement of the possibility of being different through using testosterone, also resulted in them feeling more dysphoric and less comfortable in the body that they had. Danny’s experiences with hope demonstrates how dysphoria emerges with hope, and in this instance how dysphoria emerges more intensely with a hopefulness for a different future, body or life. Tom’s quote, discussed earlier, indicates the ways that possible futures, different from the present, can reduce feelings of dysphoria in the moment. How a different relation to the gendered body and self can emerge with hope. Tom discussed how his future body on testosterone “will be at least a little bit different” from his body now, resulting in him “feel[ing] more secure in the moment”. This future body “lessens that feeling [of dysphoria] in the moment”. Tom’s assertions can easily be attached to the standard rhetoric of “solving” the wrong body and eradicating dysphoria through gendered interventions. And yet it is not the act of intervening in the body, but the conviction that the intervention will happen, and the hope embedded in a different future, that makes him feel less intense dysphoria. Tom’s hope for a different future and a reduction in his experience of dysphoria, evidence how a relation to the body and self can emerge in an encounter with hope.85

Alexander’s encounters with hope were slightly different to those articulated by Tom and Danny. For Alexander their feelings about dysphoria, rather than dysphoria itself, emerged through a relation to hope. Alexander experienced a reduction in the impact of dysphoria, rather than a total reduction of dysphoria itself. Alexander was a few months on testosterone at the time of the interview, they identify as “living/experiencing life as a non-white person”, uses both “he” and “they” pronouns and was a very excited interviewee. Alexander spoke about finding out about and starting to use testosterone. They told me: Finding out what testosterone can do, and then starting it myself, I was really excited to just see where that would go…just excited for something to change…because prior to finally deciding to

85 Tom’s encounter with hope here also speaks to the previous discussion of the DSM-V (2013) and Gender Dysphoria. While the DSM-V (2013) notes the potential reduction in the experience of gendered “distress” through the knowledge of possible gendered interventions, here it is not just knowledge but also hope for a different future and body altered by testosterone.

99 “yes I’m going to do this”, it was the struggle of you know of “just deal with this, this is you, deal with it”, and then trying to accept that and then one day I was like “you know what fuck this”. I guess I felt better about it [their body], even the things I didn’t necessarily like, because you know there’s a process starting, somethings going to happen. I guess what it was, was like I’m looking in the mirror and I know I’m looking at myself but I don’t feel like I’m seeing myself, and um I guess I was kind of looking forward to kind of seeing an image or reflection of myself and being like “yes that’s you”. Alexander indicates a hopeful relation to using testosterone and the changes for the future. He says that he was “really excited to just like see where that [testosterone use] would go” and that he was “just excited for something to change”. But Alexander does not talk about the alleviation of dysphoria through feeling hopeful for a future body altered by testosterone. Upon finding out about testosterone and deciding to start using it, Alexander, despite being hopeful for change, also continued to feel dysphoric about his appearance and body. They say that their mirror reflection is not one that resonates with their idea of themselves and how they should look, and they also talk about still feeling negatively about the things that they “didn’t necessarily like”. But Alexander also talks about how he “felt better about it [his body]” and that even though he continued to see his reflection in the mirror in ways that did not resonate, he was also “looking forward to kind of seeing an image or reflection of myself and being like ‘yes that’s you’”. While not directly changing their experience of their body, the hopefulness they hold for their body to be different in the future, seemed to allow Alexander to experience their dysphoria differently. While not reducing its presence, a hopeful orientation to the future mitigated its capacity to impact his psychological and/or emotional wellbeing. Their dysphoria was not reduced by hope, as Tom found, but its capacity to impact their life was contained by a hopeful orientation to a future body altered by testosterone.

As with body potential, we might extrapolate some sense of how trans people of colour, who may desire the use of testosterone, may also encounter hope. When depictions of the happy post-transition trans person, a teleological approach to testosterone use, is one consistently attached to depictions of white people, largely in U.S. and U.K. spaces, the site of hope and hopefulness for a future is potentially harder to reach for trans people of colour. Alongside the lack of modes of attention that include trans people of colour, and a lack of depictions of trans people of colour’s body potentials, trans people of colour’s access to a hope-based dysphoria alleviating structure may also be diminished.

100 Temporality Time and temporality threaded through participants’ experience with dysphoria as it emerged with bodily attention, body potential and hope.86 Temporality has been extensively theorised in trans studies87 and in queer theory88. While an elaborate engagement with the various literatures and theories of trans and queer temporalities are beyond the scope of this chapter some of this work does give texture to the trends present in participants’ experience with dysphoria.89 In the following section I will focus on the experiences of Jake, Cinna, Tom and Danny with dysphoria that illuminate two central temporality themes: that of presentness and of the future in the present. I will also briefly point towards the racial implications of time and the emergence of dysphoria.

Being present Jake is a “transmasculine” Filipino Australian who was twenty years old at the time of the interview, and whose calm and gentle manner permeated the conversation. Jake’s comment describes a relation between shifted attention to the body, dysphoria and a kind of grounding in time; a deep presence in the body of the moment. Jake said: Once I started realising that testosterone could change my body in a way that was good for me, I kind of thought about my pre-T body as something that wasn’t okay. [Finding out that taking testosterone] was an option, I want[ed] to go for it, I can’t be where I am. In discussing his need to shift his body Jake says that he “can’t be where I am”. Jake is not speaking of the literal place in which he was existing in that moment. Rather, Jake is speaking of the location, context and time in which he was residing.

Fraser and valentine (2008) in “The chronotope of the queue” bring together the work of Bakhtin (1981)

86 As Barad (2001) discusses time (and space) are not pre-existing containers for reality. Rather, “intra-actions are the dynamics through which temporality and spatiality are produced and reconfigured in the (re)making of material- discursive boundaries and their constitutive exclusions” (Barad, 2001, p. 90). 87 While many trans studies scholars write of the complex temporality of trans lives, there is a tendency for trans temporality theory to focus on the past in the present (see Andrucki & Kaplan, 2018; Koch-Rein, 2018; Prosser, 1998; Simpkins, 2017). This may occur as a result of attending to trans lives after transitioning, rather than before or during. One notable exception to this is Hayward (2010) in Spider City Sex who writes during transitioning about the “spatial-sensual-temporal” flows of “trans-sex transitions” (Hayward, 2010, p. 237). Kadji Amin (2014) gives an excellent introduction to temporality as it concerns both trans studies and queer theory. 88 Notable queer theorists include Jack Halberstam (2005), Lee Edelman (2004), Tom Boellstorff (2007), José Esteban Muñoz (2009) and Elizabeth Freeman (2010). 89 The temporality of transition is canvassed in Chapter Four.

101 on the chronotope and Barad (2001) on the space-time manifold in an exploration of the methadone management treatment queue. Specifically, they elaborate how the dosing location of methadone, the mechanisms of administration, and the queue, co-constitute one another and how the “methadone subject” with its associated “anti-social” qualities emerge as a specific phenomenon within this nexus of material, spatial, temporal and semiotic arrangements. Crucial to their work is how space and time are co- constituted, how space-time emerges through an arrangement, and how it participates in the emergence of phenomena, such as the “methadone subject”.90

In Jake’s encounters with dysphoria, he uses location and space as an anchor point for the time in which he is occurring; a kind of melding of his “where” with his “when” in a way that relies on the imbrication and in-extractability of time and space. For Jake, his increase in dysphoria emerges with his “where” and his “when”, embedded with his body in space-time. Jake does not talk, as trans testosterone users sometimes do, about shifting into the future space-time.91 Rather, he talks about needing to not be in his present. Jake feels himself to be deeply present in his “where”, his “when”, and a strong desire to be away from that space-time. His presentness emerges through and with his knowledge of testosterone, and an increase in dysphoria emerges through and with his presentness.

Cinna also discusses a presentness of being when he notes his increase in dysphoria as a result of finding out that his body had the potential to be different through the use of testosterone. He told me that “I think knowing that my body housed in it that potential [to be effected by testosterone] probably made me a lot more dysphoric”. Cinna also states that the body is “still here, even though it couldn’t be”. The use of the present location, the “here”, speaks to the moment of the now, and the presence of the current body in its potential. It is not the altered future body that shapes Cinna’s dysphoria, it is the body of the moment that exists now ¾ in potential, but unrealised. It is a body that is here, in this moment, but it holds the potential to be something else in this moment also, and it is this unrealised potential that exacerbates Cinna’s

90 Fraser and valentine (2008, p. 100) assert that space and time must be considered together, that they are in fact indivisible from one another and “that quarantining the two from each other would likely provide cover for other questionable divisions”. The role of space is always relevant when considering dysphoria as emergent, it cannot emerge detached from, at the very least, a human body, a body that exists in space. And yet, participants in this project did not attend extensively to the locational/spatial elements of dysphoria, even as it is highly likely that the spatio-temporal approach to dysphoria would yield a greater and more comprehensive analysis. See also Farrugia (2015, p. 246) 91 See Israeli-Nevo (2017, p. 37)

102 bodily pain.

The deep presentness of dysphoria, as it emerges with attention and body potential, resonates with the work of Israeli-Nevo (2017). Israeli-Nevo (2017) speaks back against the linear and teleological approach to trans time, its “chrononormativity” (Freeman, 2010), through analysing and reflecting on her own process of “taking time” in transition, as well as through an analysis of the novel Nevada (2013), and films Murder in Passing (2013), Jupiter Ascending (2015) and Tangerine (2015). She asserts that as trans people in this transphobic world, we are encouraged and forced into a position of not being present. We are dissociated from our bodies, our loved ones, and our general environment. This dissociation throws us into a far future in which we are safe after we have passed and found a bodily and social home. (Israeli-Nevo, 2017, p. 38). Israeli-Nevo (2017) illuminates a lack of presentness of trans temporalities, as always dominated by future orientations or always caught in a need to speak back against one’s past. She indicates the political implications of resisting chrononormativity; the ways that “taking time” can allow for an ability to “pause and linger on the subversive politics of trans subjectivity, and the fluidity of gender itself” (Israeli-Nevo, 2017, p. 41). This is a notable political imperative, one that elaborates the variability in temporality for trans people. But while recognising these significant moments, it is also deeply relevant that these experiences of presentness and pause for participants were characterised by high levels of anguish and distress.92 In demonstrating the deep presentness of dysphoria, and how being dysphorically present can emerge through encounters with attention and body potential, participants also evidence the substantial toll that a non-chrononormative temporality can take on their lives.

A future in the present Tom demonstrates the encounters between the potential of the body, hope, dysphoria and temporality. Tom found out about testosterone and how it could affect his body in the future, he said that these testosterone “potentialities… make me feel more secure in the moment” because he will not “feel

92 The political implications of being stranded in presentness have been discussed by Rosenberg (2017) with regards to trans women in the prison industrial complex, and by Pyne (2017) regarding children and trans people with disabilities who may or may not be able to access to puberty blockers or who might be forced to use puberty blockers. Both articles complicate an anti-chrononormative approach and the always fraught ways of negotiating political and ethical imperatives.

103 crippling dysphoria forever”. He also notes that “it is a future thing that also has positive repercussions now”. Tom feels less dysphoric in the moment because of the potential residing in the body, a potential that he feels will come to fruition in the future. He projects the current potentials of his body into the future in a way that comes back to positively affect his experience of his body in the present. Tom also has a hopeful orientation to this future. He suggests that hope for a future, with an altered and more comfortable body, affects the current experience of his body and his dysphoria. It is not only that one’s future looks hopeful, but also that the present experience of one’s gendered body and self emerges with an orientation to hope.

But looking to the future in the present is not always a positive occurrence. Danny’s experience of living in Western Sydney, finding out about what testosterone can do to their body and feeling more dysphoric, is an instance of looking to the future, and feeling worse in the present. For Danny, when a future becomes visible, when one allows oneself to hope for a different future, where that future becomes attainable, it also exists closer and more present in time. This can result in positive effects, as it did with Tom, where the lessening of the gap between the future and current body result in the lessening of dysphoria. But it can also produce a context where the future becomes closer and more possible and the difference between the present body and the future body can become more acute, more stark and more painful, resulting in an increase in dysphoria.

Sundén (2015), Eckstein (2018) and Rosenberg (2017) all look to the possibilities of the future in elaborating trans temporalities. And all three argue that the potential of the future can be a deeply significant survival mechanism, and in some instances, a thriving orientation for trans people. Sundén (2015) discusses the different temporalities existing in online discussions between transgender woman Bunny and fans of the band Steam Powered Giraffe, that surrounded Bunny’s character Rabbit’s gender transition. Sundén (2015, p. 204) notes that “the future is where there is hope, it is the promise of transition, of a life yet to come (albeit being well underway)”. Eckstein (2018) elaborates the complex temporalities present in trans men’s YouTube depictions. He points to the significance of the connection between the present and the future in being able to “see and feel beyond the constraints of [one’s] embodiment” (Eckstein, 2018, p. 41). Rosenberg (2017, p. 91) explicates the different temporalities for trans women and trans feminine people in the U.S. prison industrial complex (PIC), asserting that the bonding of “presents and futures together” can become a “powerful force of resistance and survival” for

104 trans women in the PIC.

All three draw on José Esteban Muñoz’s (2009) Cruising Utopia, which also deeply resonates with Tom’s experience of hope for a different, less dysphoric future. Muñoz (2009) critiques the reification of anti- futurity in some queer theorising, especially the work of Lee Edelman (2004), while also highlighting the failure to account for the implications for black and racially marginalised subjects. He argues that “the future is queerness’s domain. Queerness is a structuring and educated mode of desiring that allows us to see and feel beyond the quagmire of the present” (Muñoz, 2009, p. 1). And that “to call for this notion of the future in the present is to summon a refunctioned notion of utopia in the service of subaltern politics” (Muñoz, 2009, p. 49).

On the arguments of this literature, the importance of the future to envision alternatives to the present are vital for trans lives. While Tom demonstrates this he also demonstrates how the calling of the future into the present has literal impacts beyond an orientation to that future; the future, and a different future, participate in a reduction of dysphoria in the present. Unfortunately, Danny’s experiences do not reflect this positive hopefulness of the future. For Danny, the calling of the future into the present made the present less bearable, more painful and more dysphoric. It situated the difference between the future and the present as too close and too different, bringing the negative presentness into greater relief.

While Israeli-Nevo (2017) points to the importance of attending to presentness to oppose the chrononormative imperatives of transphobia (also attached to trans medicine), and Muñoz (2009) emphasises the significance for marginalised populations in being able to envision queer utopias, participants’ experiences of dysphoria demonstrate no clear trend. Their encounters with temporality, and the emergence of dysphoria and the gendered body and self as they encounter bodily attention, body potential and hope, was a complex interplay between orientations and phenomena. For Jake and Cinna, dysphoria increased in intensity in the encountering of presentness with bodily attention and body potential. For Tom, dysphoria decreased in intensity when it emerged with body potential, hope, and a future in the present. While for Danny, dysphoria increased in intensity when it emerged with hope and a future in the present. All four participants’ shifting relations to the gendered body and self, demonstrate the complex interplay between dysphoric intensities, bodily attention, body potential, hope and time.

105 Race and time The intersections of race and temporality add additional complexity to the consideration of dysphoria as emergent. Muñoz’s (2009) work evidences how discussions of hopeful orientations to the future should include a consideration of race; when he notes how anti-futurity arguments rely on a disparity between white queers who can expect (relatively) safe futures, while forgetting that queers of colour are not guaranteed such a future. Alexander’s experiences evidence one way in which a hopeful orientation to the future may benefit trans people of colour in their encounters with dysphoria. Alexander stated that “I was really excited to just see where that would go” and while this excitement did not alleviate their dysphoria, it did allow them to deal with it better. However, Danny’s experience of an increased intensity of dysphoria suggests that a hopeful relation to the future may not always be a pleasant experience and may intensify dysphoria. The experience of dysphoria as it encounters hopeful orientations to the future are likely to be different for those experiencing intersectional oppression and racial marginalisation, but the specific way that these differences may manifest is currently unclear.

Conclusion This chapter has elaborated an alternative way to think about dysphoria as an assemblage of phenomena that exist beyond the disjuncture between an individual’s gendered mind and their sexed body. It has explicated some of the ways that dysphoria can emerge, qualitatively and in intensity, with the negotiations and co-production of attention to the body, body potential and hope. Where each phenomenon is formed through its own specific entanglements with testosterone, digital trans publics and medical and endocrinological histories (to name just a few). It has also demonstrated how the gendered body and self can emerge through and with attention to the body, body potential and hope, where dysphoria can be reduced, or where the feelings about dysphoria can shift. Temporality and race also play roles in the emergence of dysphoria and the gendered body and self, adding layers of complexity to how participants encounter dysphoria and their bodies. What I will conclude with now is a return to the political implications for understanding gender dysphoria as emergent.

One of the central issues with gender dysphoria, especially as it is enmeshed within trans medicine, is the potential for trans people to become embedded in a politics of ressentiment. Elaborated at the beginning of this chapter, and discussed by Heyes and Latham (2018), ressentiment for trans people can

106 occur through encounters with trans medicine that require trans people to speak and understand their experiences through an attachment to gender dysphoria. This attachment is also facilitated by social and intra-trans discourse that tends to uphold trans definition and validation for gendered intervention through a rhetoric of gender dysphoria. These structures of understanding define the self and one’s gendered experience through gender dysphoria and trans illness, while also reinforcing potentials for trans subordination to the discursive and material constraints of (some) trans medicine.

However, to reject gender dysphoria in its totality fails to account for its usefulness in describing some trans people’s experiences of their bodies, genders, lives and worlds. To hold the usefulness of gender dysphoria for (some) trans people, while also rejecting possibilities of trans ressentiment, requires a different orientation to gender dysphoria, without giving it up entirely. In situating gender dysphoria as emergent, we can dislodge dysphoria as arising singularly from the disjuncture between the gendered mind and the sexed body. And, it can become a variable and fluid experience, arising from encounters between a whole assortment of intra-actions between phenomena. In situating gender dysphoria as emergent, the “dysphoric” self and dysphoria itself cannot be fully and completely defined. And so, in its variability, dysphoria can be an experience of a trans self but it cannot define a trans self. This undercuts the potential for trans ressentiment, of trans experience defined by illness, while also allowing trans people to speak about their bodily realities, to have them remain valid, and able to be alleviated in ways that avoid trans experience being overly defined by trans medicine.

Further, dysphoria as emergent can extend how we understand body comfort beyond the wrong body narrative and dysphoria as a mind-body discrepancy. Situating dysphoria as emergent can produce dysphoria as a bodily experience that does not necessarily need to cohere specifically or only to the gendered parts of the body, so often centralised in discussions of trans experience. It could adhere (at least) to attention to the body, the potential of the body, and hope for a different future. One could feel dysphoric about how one attends to the body, how one encounters the potential of the body, or how one envisions one’s future, in ways that do not require articulations of the wrong body narrative. Dysphoria could also adhere to parts of the body that are gendered, but for reasons that may not be tied to gender; dysphoria attached to the face that has the potential to produce more hair, while not (necessarily) being a desire for a man’s face. Dysphoria could be used to validate a transition that must occur because of undesirable modes of attention to the body, or to manifest unseen bodily potentials, or to create alternative

107 futures than one has previously envisioned. But, in ways that do not presume the outcome is one of shifting from the wrong body into the right body. It could be held within a relation to temporality and a need to shift a specific relation to the body in time. In shifting gender dysphoria away from this static relation of the gendered self to the sexed body and in increasing the variety of impetus for undertaking transition processes, the parameters on who can undertake those processes can also change. Non-binary people, who do not align with manhood or womanhood, as one group of people who fall outside the traditional binary gendered wrong body narratives, may have greater access to explore the potential for hormonal or surgical interventions into the body without recourse to assertions of “rectifying” the mind- body disjuncture (even if that disjuncture is a “non-binary” one). Dysphoria as an emergent phenomenon allows for a way to speak with, as well as against, medicine and clinicians who so often dictate the terms of trans diagnosis and treatment and, perhaps more importantly, to increase the possibilities for trans and non-binary people to encounter, understand and speak of their realities in ever more complex ways.

108 Vignettes

Formalising medicine

Day Fifty-Two

I decide to get a script from my endocrinologist for testosterone gel. I’m liking how it’s going and I need more than my friend’s leftovers. We talk about possibly using Reandron, a three-monthly injection.

“I don’t want to use Reandron.93 It didn't feel right” “You mean it wasn't strong enough?” “It didn't feel right” “It wasn't a high enough dose?” “Err yeah I guess” “Because…It's all the same chemical”

I can’t explain the differences I feel between Reandron and Primoteston, the two-weekly injection. “It’s all the same chemical” apparently, the only relevance is dose rate. It feels like an insufficient explanation, but who am I to know. I get a script for Primoteston and testosterone gel.

93 A year later I’m forced to begin Reandron because the company that makes Primoteston has significantly reduced its availability.

109 Chapter 4 Transitioning with more than testosterone: The role of audio-visual technologies in the emergence of transition’s effects

Trans testosterone transitions94 are now indivisible from their spectacular visual and aural representation in online trans spaces and in popular culture. The representations that take centre stage in most discussions of trans experience are typically structured in one of two ways. The first contains two images side by side. The image on the left is “obviously” a woman, perhaps with long hair, makeup, smiling with friends. The image on the right is “obviously” a man, perhaps with short hair, a beard, in a t-shirt and pants. The excitement and intrigue in viewing these images comes from the knowledge that the woman and the man are the same person, where the sharp differences between the two scream out and the echoes of the same face flicker beneath the surface. The second way that trans testosterone transitions are displayed is through a series of images, lined up chronologically, from pre-testosterone use to post- testosterone use. The best of these take place in a single location, perhaps a bathroom, or at a computer in a bedroom. It shows the smooth slow slide from one gender to another, the shape of the face and hair line shifts ever so subtly, facial hair sprouts from the chin, creeping up to cover the lower half of the face. There are occasional cracks where haircuts have happened or where a hat has been worn. The compelling draw of these videos is the visible shift from one gender into another, the mellifluous flow of a shifting face and body, the solution to having been born in the wrong body.95

Both representations typify how we understand trans testosterone transitions96; as a purely bio-chemical process effected by exogenous testosterone that shifts the body from one sex-gender into another.

94 I use the term “transition” cautiously here because of how it has been formed within biomedical systems that have histories of real and symbolic violence against trans people (see Carter, 2014). Transition can still be deployed in ways that do harm through its associations with trans and non-binary legitimacy, imperatives to undergo a “full” transition, and a negation of the always complex experiences of trans bodily and gendered practices. However, like many words there is use in this term. Primarily this is the term I use because it is less of a mouthful than “gendered bodily interventions”, which I also use on occasion, and because it was a term that most of my participants used, however reluctantly, to describe their experience of testosterone use and surgical interventions. 95 These two dominant temporal models of trans narratives and trans transitions, the jump as well as the flow from one gender to another, have become, at least according to Israeli-Nevo (2017, p. 36) “almost hegemonic within past and contemporary trans politics”. 96 There are of course exceptions to these two approaches. “Spiderwoman” (Hayward, 2017) offers a unique description of Haraway’s “sensuous transition” which blurs the lines between body, animal and cityscape.

110 Testosterone situated as the determining factor in trans masculine transitions is not surprising. The effects of pharmacological substances, be they illicit drugs like crystal meth (Fraser & Moore, 2011) or MDMA (Farrugia, 2015), or medical products like exogenous testosterone, are positioned as pre-determined in Western medical and social discourse. The “remarkable” power97 of testosterone (and sometimes surgeries98) to “masculinise” the body, reinforces testosterone as the singular determinant of transition99, albeit tacitly accepted as effected by one’s biology and genetics. As was discussed in Chapter One and as will be discussed more so in Chapter Five, exogenous testosterone as a trans treatment protocol is deeply imbricated with (some) trans medicine’s attachment to a binary gender system. And, as was discussed in Chapter Two and Three, trans people have a complex and oftentimes fraught relationship with trans medicine. The way that Western cultures situate medicine and pharmacological substances, as well as the power of medicine to shape trans lives, is echoed in the framing of transition as a pre-determined outcome of the administration of testosterone.100 Because transition is typically understood as a biological process that occurs when testosterone meets the body’s biology or genetics, the trans person is occluded from participating in the emergence of transition’s effects. While trans people are considered agents in the process of deciding if, when and how to use testosterone (where permitted by medical systems) they are paradoxically considered, by themselves and others, as passive recipients of the changes taking place with the body during transition.

However, that the two representations of trans transitioning, the side-to-side images and the flow of bodily changes, are so central to contemporary trans discourse is notable. If we take seriously this centrality and the practices of representation, we begin to consider trans testosterone transitioning differently. In attending to the encounters between the recording of one’s body with audio-visual

97 This power is of course attached to masculinity (see Keane, 2005). 98 For trans masculine people, testosterone, especially when compared to genital surgeries, is often the defining and organising principle of transitions. Testosterone for instance has been, until only very recently and only in specific circumstance, the first requirement for bodily intervention before surgery is even considered (see Latham, 2017b, p. 190). I strongly suspect that this is because “testosterone actively makes the man” while surgeries only “take away the offending female parts” (Rubin, 2003, p. 152) and trans masculine people must evidence the truth of their genders with the use of masculine hormones. However, there are still occasions where phalloplasties, despite their cost and degree of difficulty, are seen as the final culmination of a transition process. 99 Trans feminine transitions and transitions with estrogen and progesterone may have different rhetoric around what is most central in transitions (see Bremer, 2013). 100 Carter (2014) notes how “transition” initially denoted a “standardized trajectory of ‘sex reassignment’ in which people were shuttled from the psychiatrist, through the endocrinologist, to the surgeon, to the judge”. While perhaps not as strict a trajectory in contemporary Western medicine, “transition” still largely applies to medicalised gendered body interventions.

111 technologies and testosterone’s effects on the body, transition becomes both emergent and contingent, deeply particular and never fully determined. These technologies do not merely record transition; they are a crucial means to enact transition. In considering the technologised audio-visual practices of transition we can begin to fully embrace the always already mediated nature of trans narratives and trans transitions, and the possibilities that might arise from these creative and experimental encounters with the body in connection with specific technologies of gender.

There are effects in accounting for the place and role of audio-visual technologies as actants101 in the emergence of transition’s effects. Transition is no longer a singular pre-determined effect of testosterone as it meets biology, it is variable and unpredictable, tied to the affordances of audio-visual technologies and its co-constitution with other phenomena involved in transition. Transitioning with audio-visual technologies also becomes a phenomenon that enacts certain capacities of attention to the body, particular temporalities and the curation of “good” attachments between the trans person and their transitioning body. These are in turn shaped by the racialisation of representations present throughout digital trans publics. These capacities and effects are co-constituted with transition and made available only through specific encounters with audio-visual technologies. A non-deterministic understanding of transition also affects conceptions of agency and causality. It extends the nexus of actants in the emergence of transition’s effects to include the trans person beyond being merely a biological substrate upon which testosterone acts. The trans person plays a participatory role in the very formation of the effects of testosterone.

These shifts in turn affect how trans medicine, medical practitioners and medical technologies are situated. While remaining substantial and significant players in transition, they are also shifted, becoming more participatory and less determining. This is a notable shift as the process of transition is generally largely confined to the domain of bio-medical systems and discourses, a process that is situated as the way to fix the dysphoria resulting from the misalignment between the body and the mind. Situating transition as a means to fix a wrong body fails to account for the myriad other reasons for trans people to undertake a transition process. Attending to the place of audio-visual technologies in the emergence of transition we can see other possible imperatives for altering the sex-gendered body. When what transition

101 “Actant” here is synonymous with a phenomenon embedded in a network. Using “actant” rather than “actor” “avoid[s] the zero-sum game implied in causal explanations” (Gomart & Hennion, 1999, p. 245, ft 7). It also avoids human- centred agency (Latour, 2017).

112 is shifts, so too does why it might occur. Perhaps transition occurs as a means to shift the way one attends to the body, perhaps it is undertaken to alter specific temporal relations with the body, or perhaps one wants to change the way one is attached to the body. These reasons are deeply material and bodily, but crucially, they are not purely confined to a desire to fix the wrong body.

The pre-determined trans testosterone transition Physically transitioning with testosterone is situated as the sole effect of how the pharmacology of testosterone comes to meet the genetics and biology of the user. This deterministic approach to transition echoes Western medicine’s and Western societies’ approach to drugs and pharmacological substances. In the “Introduction” to The Drug Effect, Fraser and Moore (2011, p. 5) discuss how a deterministic approach to drug use upholds an ontology where “a pre-formed object (with inherent attributes) enters into subsequent relations with other pre-formed objects, [and] together they produce predictable, stable effects and meanings”. While Fraser and Moore (2011) query this determinism through attending to the effects of illicit drugs, we can also see this approach clearly with exogenous testosterone use.

Testosterone, with its deep associations with masculinity and manhood, is situated as the catalyst for inducing masculinising effects on and in the body: to produce a bodily transition through the growth of hair and muscles, the deepening of the voice and the morphing of the face.102 Participant’s relation to the role of testosterone was situated within a somewhat humanist rhetoric around control, specifically a sense of not feeling in control of the changes taking place during transition.103 For example, Charlie, a mixed race Indigenous, Indian, Chinese and Caucasian queer person said “I feel in control of the process of getting the testosterone, but not in control of what it has done”. Jake, a Filipino and Australian bisexual said regarding his feelings of control over transitioning: “not really, well some control because I was on testosterone and the [levels of] testosterone was controlled [by medical professionals]…you can’t really pick and choose the changes you want”. James, a white queer twenty-seven year old said he wanted to

102 Transitioning with testosterone is understood to be so predictable that the vast majority of participants articulated the expected changes to occur in certain weeks or months after starting testosterone. Even people who had not experienced those specific timelines articulated these temporal changes. 103 Many participants sought out ways to establish control and agency over other elements of transitioning with testosterone. Either through accessing different kinds of testosterone or different methods of administration. The most substantial differences in this process were between rural and regional compared to urban trans testosterone users. This was often due to limited access to medical professionals.

113 self-inject because “you know, you can’t control… what’s gonna happen with this [testosterone]… so its [self-injecting] like one small thing”. And when asked if they felt in control of the changes taking place on testosterone, Mix, a mixed-race Middle-Eastern and Anglo-Australian non-binary person said: “Oh, no. Who is?”.

While participants felt no control over the effects of testosterone, almost all of the participants were undertaking detailed and extensive practices with audio-visual technologies to “track” their transition process. Almost all participants, especially those having transitioned since the 2000s, had been thoroughly immersed in online trans groups and forums, often for years, prior to transitioning. Trans online spaces function as spaces to access information about hormones and surgeries (Miller, 2017), as places for the exploration and formation of trans or non-cis gender identities (see Austin, 2016; Raun, 2012) and communities (Horak, 2014; Raun, 2010). These spaces also allow trans people to critically approach their gender and gender expressions in ways that scrutinise and counter discourses of normative masculinity and manhood (Farber, 2017), produce intimate ties that validate non-cis genders (Gauthier & Chaudoir, 2004) and re-appropriate medicalised discourse such as the wrong body narrative (Psihopaidas, 2017). They have also been theorised as spaces for trans political mobilisation (Erlick, 2018; Shapiro, 2004), resistance to cis-centrism (Fink & Miller, 2014), or to binary centric trans spaces (Darwin, 2017). Online spaces have also been linked to accessing financial support and redistribution, usually around surgical interventions (Farnel, 2015; Fritz, 2018; Raun, 2018). The potential of these spaces is intimately linked to the affordances of the platforms be it the potential for anonymity, reduced limits of physical distance or other platform specific affordances (Dame, 2016a, 2016b; Horak, 2014; Oakley, 2016; Raun, 2015b). These spaces, and the affordances of the technologies embedded within these spaces, provide significant (in some cases lifesaving) support for trans and non-binary people, especially those whose offline lives are pervaded by fears and risks of violence or discrimination (Marciano, 2014; Raun, 2015a, p. 704).

The discussion and depiction of transitioning in these online spaces frequently detailed a variety of audio- visual technologies used to “observe” the transitioning body that were ripe for emulation. Participants tended to focus on the capacities of smartphones, and occasionally computers with video capabilities, to take multiple photographs and videos of their changing bodies and voices, especially in the first six to

114 twelve months of testosterone use. A few participants used apps, such as pitch tracking apps,104 to follow the changes in their voices. The use of these technologies by participants during transition was often directly tied to the desire to emulate the practices and discussions they had seen in online spaces. Josh, for instance, a twenty-five year old queer trans man, told me that he was “gonna make [transition] videos, I was so enamoured with YouTube sensations”. Ethan, a non-binary trans masculine pansexual, said that he “started trying to do that whole [photo taking] thing, just because I saw everyone else doing it”. Alec, a white non-binary person said: “I remember I was, as I think a lot of people start trying to do, taking selfies every day”. And Exi, a twenty-four year old non-binary person said that they took videos of their changing voice and face and that a “few times I did ‘this is my name and I am x days on testosterone’”.105

These digital publics offer significant collaborative pedagogical sites to explore and experiment with the possibilities of trans bodies. And yet, the biological and pharmacological determinism that permeates transition discourse (an echo of medicine’s control over trans bodies) upholds a conventional and deterministic approach to testosterone use. This places testosterone, and to an extent one’s biology and genetics, in the active and visible role, while all other phenomena become passive, invisible and/or irrelevant to transition. In turn, participants’ sense of their agency was seen to stop at the point at which testosterone entered the body, it concluded with the wiping on of gel or the withdrawal of the empty syringe. Within this paradigm, participants’ extensive use of audio-visual technologies used to envision the changes taking place on testosterone can be situated as a means for participants to exert some sense of control over their changing bodies. To be able to track what is taking place even as they believe they cannot dictate those changes is a strategic reconfiguring of control away from the substance of testosterone via their practices with technologies. While one way to explain these negotiations, this approach does not fully grapple with the underlying determinism of discourses of testosterone administration, and relies on a cleaved relation between the practices of “seeing” testosterone’s effects and the act of bringing those effects into being. Envisioning the changes taking place with testosterone is not just a means of “seeing” those changes, but is a crucial way to enact transition as a particular emergent

104 The app Voice Pitch Analyzer seems to market itself in some way to trans users: it uses a purple icon remarkably similar to the trans sign, but without the mixed top left symbol (see Purr Programming, 2017). 105 Exi’s reference to “my name” and “x days on testosterone” is an extremely common way to introduce oneself in online videos, providing both an introduction to the viewer, a point of reference for the vlogger’s transition, as well as a short and consistent audio-visual section that can be compared across months and years through the production of timeline videos.

115 phenomenon co-constituted by these audio-visual prostheses.

Transition as emergent The work of Tobias Raun (Raun, 2012, 2015a, 2015b) attentively considers the role of audio-visual technologies, especially YouTube and vlogging, in contemporary Western testosterone transitioning. In “Video blogging as a vehicle for transformation” (2015b) and “Archiving the wonders of testosterone via YouTube” Raun (2015a) explores the practices of YouTube vlogging by trans women and trans men. In “Video blogging” Raun (2015b) elaborates how the visibility of the self to oneself, as well as to others, produced in the process of vlogging, enacts a process of “becoming” as a particular gendered subject. The vlog acts as a transformative medium through its ability to function as a mirror, a digital diary, an autobiography and an artistic endeavor. In “Archiving the wonders”, Raun (2015a, p. 701) attends to “trans male video blogs” arguing that they are “living archives” that communicate “embodied trans knowledges” in new ways through the specificity of the audio-visuality of the medium, which also functions to both document and instantiate the effects of testosterone on the body.

Both pieces, and especially “Archiving the wonders” offer a tantalising exploration of the technological production of transitioning with testosterone that resonates with the work of this chapter. Raun (2015a, 2015b) draws on the work of Judith Butler (1990) on gender and Derrida (1995) on archives to explicate the performativity of transitioning with vlogs. As Butler (1991, p. 24) seminally asserted: “gender is not a performance that a prior subject elects to do, but gender is performative in the sense that it constitutes as an effect the very subject it appears to express”.106 While Derrida (1995, p. 17), in a similar vein, states that the process of “archivization produces as much as it records the event”. Raun (2015a, 2015b) draws on the performativity of gender elaborated by Butler (1990) and the process of archivisation discussed by Derrida (1995) and applies it to vlogging practices of trans testosterone users. He argues that the vlog not only documents transition but performatively produces its effects.

Discussing the relation between the drug as biochemical agent and its effects on the body, made evident through YouTube videos, Raun (2015b, p. 370) says:

106 Latham (2017b, p178) uses the work of Butler (1991, 1993, 2004) and Mol (2002) to analyse the “mundane acts” (Mol, 2002, p. 39) that are undertaken in clinical contexts to attempt to form and constrain the multiplicity of sex-gender.

116 The trans men use the camera to construct what the drug does (internally and externally), thus vlogging becomes a way to make the self and the viewer see the biochemical effect…The drug itself becomes masculinity through the ways in which biochemistry (the amount of time and doses) is directly connected to visible signs of muscles and hair growth…The vlog allows the vlogger and the viewer to witness the process (documenting effects) while also being a site for staging what and how to witness (performative effects).107 In “Archiving the wonders” Raun (2015a, p. 105) argues similarly; “the drug [testosterone] and the camera are mutually constitutive, instantiating and confirming maleness, thereby allowing the vlogger and the viewer to witness the process (documenting effects) while also being a site for staging what and how to witness (performative effects)”. While we can query the centrality of masculinity and maleness tied to testosterone in these assertions, Raun’s (2015a) work clearly points to the role of audio-visual technologies in the very production of transition and its effects.

While Raun (2015a, 2015b) draws on the work of Butler (1990) and Derrida (1995) to situate the instantiation of transition through its documentation in YouTube videos, his arguments deeply resonate with the work of STS scholars Annemarie Mol (1999, 2002) and Karen Barad (2003, 2007). Mol (1999) attends to medical diagnostic techniques, ostensibly used to ascertain the “truth” of a disease. She argues that in actuality the “seeing” of the disease is really the enacting of the disease, in a process that sometimes forms contradictory disease realities. Action and practice are vital to this process, where Mol (1999, p. 77) argues that realities are cultivated and shaped through their “encounters with other phenomena”; that realities are “done and enacted rather than observed”. Similarly, Barad’s (2003, p. 815) discussion of the wave-particle duality paradox illuminates how apparatus used to observe the properties of light actually enact its different properties as wave-like or particle-like. Barad (2003, 2007), much like Raun’s (2015a, p. 105) “mutually constitutive” testosterone and camera, also evidences how all phenomena are co- constituted in their encounters with one another.

Testosterone’s effects on the trans body, or “transitioning”, comes to be a specific phenomenon through not only the administration of testosterone to a body, and that body’s specific biology, but also through

107 While Raun’s (2015a, 2015b) work is very useful the apparent distinction between documenting and performing can be queried. As per Latour (2004) or Mol (2002) documenting is performing/enacting. It is important to attend to how different forms of mediation or performing are enacted differently via attachments to different (for instance) audio-visual technologies.

117 encounters with audio-visual technologies. Raun’s (2015a, 2015b) work explicates the performative function of these technologies and the constitution of the transitioning body. Rather than merely “seeing” or “observing” transition and the transitioning body, these audio-visual technologies are producing transition and the transitioning body. Raun’s (2015a, 2015b) work can be extended with STS through a closer inspection of trans practices with audio- visual technologies, through embracing the materiality of the socio-technical arrangement of transition and through situating matter as agential in the formation of realities of transition. In attending more precisely to what transition becomes through these encounters, as an experimental intervention into attention, into time and into alternative relations with the body, transition can be shifted beyond the wrong body narrative, beyond medicine, to encompass a multiplicity of alternative ways to think about what transition does, how it is done and why people might desire it.

Gifts of the dispositif How testosterone, the trans person and audio-visual technologies exist together within the nexus of transition shape the available actions and experiences of actants in transition. There are an infinite number of effects available to discuss, but this chapter attends to those most evident in the interviews: the formation of specific modes of attention, specific experiences of time and specific (and “good”) attachments to the body. The emergence of capacities is theorised by Latour (2004) in “How to talk about the body?” through particular attention to the perfume industry. Latour (2004) argues that for people to become attuned to different scents, to become a “nose”, they must become a particular kind of body through a process of “articulation”. They must develop a sensitivity to smell through the use of specific techniques or devices or learned forms of competence, through, for instance, the use of an odour kit. Odour kits, along with lessons from teachers, are designed to allow amateurs to become progressively more sensitised to the complexity and subtlety of different scents isolated and situated as significant by the perfume industry. A “dumb”, that is non-sensitive, nosed person may become a “nose”; someone who has learnt to be affected by the specific and curated differences in the world of smells.

The odour kit and the lessons are one apparatus for forming and constraining a specific form of odiferous reality for the pupil but for other parties there are other processes. The teacher of the pupil for instance, may become attached to a scent-apparatus in the form of the ongoing exposure to numerous pupils, the creation of lessons or their encounters with other discursive and material features of the perfume industry.

118 While for the chemists “smell” emerges from industry apparatuses used to “render themselves sensitive to differences of one single displaced atom” (Latour, 2004, p. 209). Latour’s (2004, p.209) point is that whether be it the amateur learning with an odour kit, the teacher teaching scent differences, or the chemist or engineer composing the odour kit, “each of these different actors can be defined as bodies learning to be affected by hitherto unregistrable differences through the mediation of an artificially created set-up”. The human body is one participant in this process and, alongside a host of other participants that encounter one another, a dynamic potential for being sensitised to smell (in this instance) is enabled.

As Latour (2004) elaborates specific apparatus as producing certain capacities, Gomart and Hennion (1999), drawing on the work of Foucault (1975) and the role of discipline as both constraining and productive, state that the subject emerges “never alone, never a pristine individual, but rather always entangled with and generously gifted by a collective, by objects, techniques, constraints” (Gomart & Hennion, 1999, p. 220). That is, all “action is an unanticipated gift from the ‘dispositif’” (Gomart & Hennion, 1999, p. 222). For Latour’s (2004) perfume industry example these odiferous set-ups, or encounters between phenomena, shape and articulate the body and the body’s capacities in specific ways, both in productive as well as constraining ways. For trans testosterone users, the encounters with audio- visual technologies, testosterone and the trans body make available certain possibilities for altered attention, temporalities and attachments, which in turn enact the specificity of certain kinds of transitions. Importantly, while these capacities differ from person to person there are some overarching differences experienced by some participants of colour due to a lack of racial and cultural representation in online trans spaces. This will be discussed throughout.

Attention Attention to the body emerges as a result of the encounters between online trans publics, testosterone and audio-visual technologies. Some of these shifts in participants’ modes of attention were discussed in Chapter Three, where it was evident that online discourse around trans body potential shaped participants’ attention to the body and their feelings of “dysphoria”. Digital trans publics are also central to the formation of the semantic-material arrangement of transition. This arrangement enacts transition as a specific kind of phenomenon. The shape of this arrangement in turn forms the capacities for certain modes of attention: the sites of attention, the techniques of attending as well as limitations to attention.

119 The emergence of specific styles of attention to the body108 arise from the encounters between trans digital publics, informed by medical knowledges, testosterone, audio-visual technologies and their affordances. They shape the specific locations of the body that trans people attend too. As Grey, a thoughtful fast talking non-binary Chinese Australian, told me: I was looking through YouTube, they were talking about certain areas of their body, it made me think about those areas of [my] body… I wouldn’t think about it usually and then it would point [my] attention to [these parts of the body]. YouTube videos demonstrated to Grey a mode of critical attention to “certain areas” of the body. These audio-visual demonstrations highlight and (usually) problematise particular parts of the body understood as gendered and, usually, understood as alterable by testosterone and/or surgeries. In encountering these practices, images and discourses Grey’s attention shifted to specific parts of their body. This is not to say that Grey merely “adopted” the bodily scrutiny and dissatisfaction communicated throughout these digital publics. Rather, it is that these trans digital cultures of attention make specific conceptual and attention capacities available to understand and apply to the body in particular ways.

Vital to these processes of cultivating certain modes of attention, and specific ways of attending to the body, are the audio-visual technologies themselves. The ways that the ubiquitous audio-visual technologies of transition, such as YouTube videos, appear to those viewing them are a product of the norms and conventions of the genre (Horak, 2014). These norms shape the content in these videos, for instance, the ways that bodies are visualised or their temporal flows.109 These norms are also shaped by the affordances of the audio-visual technologies used. For instance, Grey was likely exposed to some combination of hand-held cameras or mobile phones, inbuilt computer cameras or semi-mobile webcams. These technologies tend to elicit a kind of “selfie” mode, with limited imagery at a distance, reinforcing a norm of centralising the upper body as well as the face (see also Raun, 2015a, 706). This, in combination with the material effects of testosterone110, render the transitioning body visual in

108 The cultivation of certain modes of attention is not limited to trans transitioning. In an interestingly resonant experience of emerging attention capacities was the experience of trans vlogger Mason who became an audio- visual artist, discussed by Raun (2015b). Raun (2015b, p. 373) notes that Mason “has developed a ‘different kind of sensibility and eye’ because of the constant documentation, which makes him look at things ‘the way I would look at them through the camera lens’”. 109 This was evident in many participants, and my own video practices, that often began with “I am x days on testosterone”. 110 Raun (2015a, p. 704) notes that testosterone renders changes more visible more easily than oestrogen. But within this framework it is the crucial meeting of testosterone with gendered norms and technologies of attention that also work

120 particular ways, shifting norms of attention to specific locations of the body, and shaping specific methods for looking at the body.

Noah, a burly but quiet-talking white “transqueer” forty-year old, also discussed the use of audio-visual technologies and the shifting of his attention. Noah actively sought out boundaries to be placed on his attention by asking people in his Facebook network which three or four things were going to change on testosterone. He wanted to limit these sites, in order to give myself milestones about whether or not I’m changing because I know that it starts out really slow, and if I just look in the mirror everyday I’m never going to see it. I want to know what sorts of things to look out for… After Noah’s changes occurred and he began to pass in public he “stopped looking for changes after that… it’s [transition] happened. That’s all I need to know”. Noah defined the boundaries of his attention to his body which he could then monitor with technological apparatus. This, according to Noah, was a means to offset the unobservable small incremental changes that might occur in his use of testosterone.

While returning to the temporal elements of transition shortly, Noah demonstrates an attention-based affordance of audio-visual technologies: the capacity to segment the visual body. Audio-visual segmentation demonstrates how technologies can yield productive limits to attention. A photograph, or a mirror or an app, produce certain kinds of visual realities. A photograph has edges, and a static inclusion and exclusion of certain parts of the visible space within the image. A pitch tracking app, like the one used by Frankie, varied human voice pitch into “female range”, “androgynous range” or “male range”. Each audio-visual technology delimit attention to the body to certain locations, features, ranges or numbers, in turn limiting and producing specific modes of attention to the body. For Noah, his style of attention is a process afforded through the use of audio-visual technologies that produce a discreetly attended-to transition, a way of limiting the potentially overwhelming experience of extensive body changes. In attending to these specifically selected locations, alongside his passing in public, Noah could stop looking for changes, because transition had “happened”.

Both Grey and Noah’s attention capacities emerged through a dynamic interplay between testosterone,

to render testosterone more visible than oestrogen. If any of these elements shifted then so too would the apparent differences between the visibility of testosterone compared to oestrogen.

121 the affordances of audio-visual technologies and digital trans publics. While Grey accessed YouTube videos and discussions, Noah used Facebook for information about the apparent effects of testosterone. These online spaces, along with audio-visual technologies and testosterone, produced areas of the body as both significant sites of potential change and locations for mediated attention. This socialised and technically mediated process of cultivating attention echoes Warner’s (2002) work on publics and counterpublics. He argues that queer and feminist publics “can work to elaborate new worlds of culture and social relations in which gender and sexuality can be lived, including forms of intimate association, vocabularies of affect, styles of embodiment, erotic practices, and relations of care and pedagogy” (Warner, 2002, p. 57). Noah and Grey reflexively participated in, as Warner (2002, p. 57) states, “new worlds of culture and social relations”, made available within these digital trans publics. The audio-visual practices, norms and knowledges within these online publics, alongside testosterone, “gifted” Noah and Grey with specific, non-determined, capacities of attention and in turn shaped the emergence of a specific kind of transition and a specific kind of transitioning body.

Attention and Race While digital trans publics shape the conditions of emergence for attention, they also shape the conditions of emergence differently for different racialised trans people. Online trans spaces are not a cornucopia of equality and access: they are dominated by white (U.S. and U.K.) testosterone users’ transition experiences (Eckstein, 2018, pp. 27-28; Horak, 2014). All participants of colour but one commented on a lack of trans people of colour’s representation in online spaces111 and many white participants also noted a scarcity of racial and cultural diversity in online spaces. This can be attributed to, as Grey stated, “racist discourse within Australia and most Western countries and YouTube especially”112 that affects both the numerical uploads of trans people of colour’s transitioning practices, as well as the search algorithms that reinforce the centrality of white trans experiences over trans people of colour’s experiences (S. U. Noble, 2018).

111 This is particularly relevant when few participants had any contact with offline trans people prior to transitioning, and none of the participants of colour had contact with other trans people of colour offline prior to transitioning or coming out as trans. 112 This tends to result in a monolith of, as Ethan noted, a “white, sort of thin, sort of cis passing, sort of stereotypical like trans dude, always masculine” representation in online spaces. The same norms can be seen with class and ability.

122 The limited representation of trans people of colour’s transitions becomes more pertinent when thinking about the ways that attention is qualitatively shaped by online depictions of practices with audio-visual technologies. As Raun (2015a, p. 707) notes, the kinds of depictions in online trans spaces create norms of how “trans male vlogs manifest potentials — and possible futures”. The kinds of depictions available and the audio-visual technologies used in these spaces shape the emergence of transition as a specific arrangement, which manifests the possibilities and constraints made available within the dispositif. For trans people of colour, many of these constraints were derived from the centrality of whiteness that permeated online spaces and the specific affordances of audio-visual technologies available. While for some participants this lack of representation resulted in an ambiguity around what would take place on testosterone, for other trans participants of colour the dominance of white representations created certain expectations of what their bodies would do on testosterone. These expectations were of bodily changes attached to white masculine ideals.

Grey and Lucas’s experiences spoke most clearly to the effect of the dominance of whiteness in trans online spaces. During their interview, Grey paid particular attention to how their body would change on testosterone and how it was informed by the whiteness of trans masculine representation. They said: Well because there’s a typical narrative for when you’re transitioning and the typical narrative ends up with… this sort of this certain type of [normative white masculine] physique so when I was looking into it I guess I wanted that sort of type of physique… so it did inform my sense of what being on testosterone would be like. When Grey was “looking into” testosterone use, the expected outcome of the transitioning “narrative” was to produce a body that was normatively white and masculine. Grey, having been exposed to the abundance of white testosterone altered bodies made available by audio-visual technologies in online spaces, experienced their own bodily possibilities and their expectations of testosterone’s effects through the lens of white trans masculinity. They then attended to their own body shaped by the possibilities made available through audio-visual technologies that largely depicted white testosterone transitions.

The effects of white norms and expectations of bodies on testosterone, produced in part with audio-visual technologies, were also a central part of Lucas’ drawing of their relationship to testosterone. While drawing his relationship to testosterone Lucas, a twenty-one year old Chinese Australian, said “I remember desperately wanting a beard and like a lot of different changes that happen, but not so much if

123 you’re of Chinese descent”. In a similar way to Grey, Lucas’ desire for the effects of testosterone were informed by the dominant representation of white trans masculinity. Reflecting on his race he goes on to assert that these desires are unlikely to be realised. It is notable that hair and facial hair, as markers of masculinity113 and a guarantee for male passing, were present in nine of the thirty drawings people did of their relationship to testosterone, seven of those were facial hair, and the other two were butt cheek hair and scrotum hair. In this context then it is unsurprising that Lucas centralised a beard in his drawing (see Figure 1) when he elaborated his experiences with normative forms of white masculinity.

Figure 1- Lucas’ drawing114

After Lucas completed his drawing I asked Lucas to explain what he had drawn. He said: I suppose [the image on the left under “expectations”] it is what masculinity is in our [Australian] culture. And what other [trans] people have been able to choose, not the right word. What testosterone does to other people who use it. Generally, if you’re taller than me…I’m definitely tall compared to a lot of other well Chinese women, but you know walking down the street in Australia I feel really short. And yeah the ability to grow facial hair, body hair, and a lot of the trappings of what society perceives as masculine I suppose. For a long time I was really unsure about testosterone because I couldn’t see it…I couldn’t see what it would do to me, what was the experience of going on testosterone [going to] look like for someone of Asian descent, because race makes such a huge

113 Hair, and especially body hair, is intensely racialised, especially for women. See Carlin and Kramer (2019) for elaborations of hair, race and science in the diagnosis of polycystic ovarian syndrome. 114 See Appendix 3 for a larger sized image of Lucas’ drawing

124 difference.

Lucas’ drawing and his reflections on his drawing demonstrates his experience of testosterone and its effects as deeply entwined with whiteness. The idealised body of the man that framed his “expectations” was white, this man is tall, has body and facial hair and that facial hair, the only colour Lucas used other than black, is blond. Lucas reflects on this image as “what masculinity is in our [Australian] culture”. Comparatively Lucas draws himself as notably, and disproportionality, shorter115 than this man, with no evident body hair, with black head hair, rather than blond hair, and with smaller muscles. While it is evident that Lucas is drawing himself as a man, and as masculine, seen within the “V” shaped body, he draws himself in “reality” as not remotely close to this expected archetype of white masculinity.

Lucas’ reflections on his drawing also indicates his sense that other people have access to this form of masculine embodiment in ways that he does not. Lucas says that other people experience the effects of testosterone in a way similar to this image, and while Lucas is unlikely to assert that all trans masculine people who are white become this archetype of manhood, it is evident that he feels that other people who are white have greater access to this body type than he does. This makes sense when he has little other reference points for testosterone use other than white transition narratives. Further, as a person living in a country where whiteness is dominant the forms of masculinity that are highly valued are those that are white, and so the kinds of desirable bodies ascribed value during transitioning are those that occupy positions close to white normative (middle class, able bodied) forms of masculinity.

While likely a genuine mistake, Lucas’ mistaken use of the word “choose” seems too evident not to acknowledge. I would suggest that Lucas’ verbal misstep may indicate his belief in the ease with which white trans masculine people may access certain normative and desirable forms of masculinity, an access

115 I cannot help but draw parallels to Ghassan Hage’s (2000, p. 43) discussion of “imaginary spatiality” in White nation: Fantasies of white supremacy in a multicultural society. Here Hage (2000) compares the different spatial, national and affective relations of a young Lebanese man talking about racism, with a white police officer being racist. While both use the same word “shit”, the young Lebanese man articulates a sense of being over-whelmed by shit and the police officer talks about a small and easily removed “piece of shit”. This comparison denotes the difference in power embedded in spatial relations: the sense of being overwhelmed by the “shit” of the racist Australian nation, and the mere inconvenience of a “piece of shit” that are the racially “unacceptable” individuals within Australia. For Lucas to feel small, and to feel small in public spaces, suggests not only a reflection of his self-perceived height (which was barely below average for a male person) but also of a relation of his racialised existence to the racism and power of the Australian nation.

125 that he himself did not seem to feel. Further, what it may also indicate is the additional burdens and limitations that Lucas feels in desiring testosterone without being able to easily understand the effects on his body because he is Chinese Australian; he said he “couldn’t see… what it would do to me, what was the experience of going on testosterone [going to] look like for someone of Asian descent”. Because digital trans publics are deeply white spaces, and often the only places where people access information about transitioning and testosterone use, it is possible that Lucas felt a more enhanced sense that the effects of transitioning with testosterone were less available, or that there was a substantial disjuncture between what his body “should” do, what other white bodies have done and what his body “can” do on testosterone.

While Lucas and Grey both discussed the dominance of whiteness in online trans spaces, including representations produced through audio-visual technologies, what they do not talk about is the specificity of the technology itself. As Roth (2009), S.U. Noble (2018) and Hobson (2008) have discussed, technology is not absent of race, and audio-visual technologies in particular have been designed in particular ways for particular bodies. Photography and television for instance have a history embedded in the normalising of whiteness. The apparatus and technical practices of photography and filming were developed with white skin as the norm (Dyer, 2017). For example, white women's skin in the form of "Shirley cards" were used to calibrate skin colour on film and photographs (Roth, 2009). This posed a variety of technical issues for capturing non-white people on camera also reinforced white skin as the standard (and desirable) skin colour norm (Dyer, 2017). The racism present within the materiality of the film and photography apparatus inhibited the image capturing of non-white skin colours and required the development of "compensatory practices and technological improvements" in order to do so (Roth, 2009, p. 111). While digital photography has diminished the difficulties of capturing non-white skin technology is not racism or white-centrism free. Racism remains embedded in all manner of recently developed (visual) technologies, including Google image searches (Hern, 2018), automatic soap dispensers (Fussell, 2017) and driverless cars (Hern, 2019). At the beginning of my own testosterone use I was canvassing depictions of trans testosterone users on YouTube and I came across a U.S. based early transitioning young black man. He was attempting to demonstrate his facial hair growth and was discussing how he was unable to show these changes, unable to make them evident to the viewer with his camera because his skin colour was close to his facial hair colour. Eventually he discovered a fisheye lens that allowed the hairs on his face to become visible to the viewer of his videos. This strategic use of a camera lens demonstrates how the racialised body and their depictions in online spaces are limited or made possible

126 by the affordances of audio-visual technologies. This also emphasises how even when people of colour are depicted online the visual technology used to articulate those bodies may facilitate the visibility of some bodies and some changes more easily than others.

Time Online representations of transitioning with testosterone are tightly woven with time. Even looking at the generic conventions of YouTube videos one can see how intensely time and testosterone are linked. As Raun (2015a, p. 704) notes testosterone “becomes the structuring principle, defining when it is time to make a new vlog (monthly or annual updates, for example, two months on T, one year on T, and so on)”. The importance of temporality to audio-visual transition practices – in particular chronological temporality – and the way it is understood to make evident bodily changes, was also articulated by participants. Sam, a mostly straight Sri Lankan Australian, was rather explicit about this use. He told me that he takes “photos from time to time just to see, just so I could see [slight pause] how things were changing”. Mix, a queer non-binary participant, used photographs as well as voice recordings and videos to see their body effected by testosterone over time. Mix had used testosterone over two separate periods. During their second period of testosterone use they also began to use audio-visual technologies to prevent themselves from “second guess[ing] myself”, to be able to “notice things as they happen, not when I decide they’re happening”. Sam and Mix used audio-visual technologies to allow them to “see” the changes taking place in the body over time in ways understood as more reliable that with just their eyes and their memory.

And yet, as Barad (2003, 2007) and Mol (1999, 2002) have noted, one does not merely see reality as it is, reality, including temporality, is formed by its very “observation”.116 What Sam and Mix’s practices indicate then is the way that the temporal shifts attached to the changes in the body emerge through the audio-visual technologies they used to “see” and to see “accurately”. The specificity of the audio- visual technologies used, shape the temporal flows of transition according to chronological or calendar notions of time such as “month to month”. In photographs held side- by-side, the body jumps from one moment to the next. In a timeline video, where many images of the body are lined up chronologically, the body changes in a fast and forward motion. The temporalities of transition emerge from the practices of trans participants and through the deployment of audio-visual technologies to enact chronological,

116 Time, as well as space, emerge with the dispositif. See Fraser and valentine (2008) and Farrugia (2015).

127 linear, “progressive” time as the temporality of transition.

The ability to “see” changes occurring in transition, as Horak (2014), Eckstein (2018) and Raun (2015a, 2015b) have all argued, is especially evident when images or voice recordings are presented in chronological order from pre-testosterone use to months and years on testosterone. Timeline videos exemplify the dominant linear and teleological temporality of transitioning with audio-visual technologies. Horak (2014) attends in detail to timeline videos and their formulaic generic conventions on YouTube. Horak (2014) coins the term “hormone time” to define the temporalities of hormone use articulated in YouTube transition videos. She argues that it is a temporality that is “linear and teleological, directed toward the end of living full time in the desired gender” and that “it also points toward a utopian future, in which the subject experiences harmony between the felt and perceived body” (Horak, 2014, p. 580). However, she argues that the normative articulations of time in these videos allows trans people the crucial ability to participate in, and contribute to, trans digital publics in ways that validate their genders and bodies; these practices “save trans lives” (Horak, 2014, p. 581).

Horak (2014) positions this life saving temporality in opposition to the focus on the radical nature of postmodern theories of time like Jack Halberstam’s (2005) queer temporalities and Elizabeth Freeman’s (2010) chrononormativity. Freeman (2010, p. 3) uses “chrononormativity” to describe the “use of time to organize individual human bodies toward maximum productivity”. For trans people chrononormativity becomes an acute structuring device especially in trans narratives and trans autobiographies, which, while not inherently bad, may produce and enforce a substantial disjuncture between the “experience of healing and empowerment for certain trans subjectivities and one of fragmentation and invalidation for others” (Amin, 2014, p. 220).

There is extensive theorising of the non-linear temporality of trans lives, transitions and online practices.117 I use “non-linear” here as an umbrella term for temporalities that are not linear. As

117 See Halberstam’s (2005) In a queer time and place for an elaboration of queer temporality as it emerges with trans masculinity (as in the case of Brandon Teena) and queer sexuality-gender subcultures such as drag kinging. See also Carter (2013) “Embracing transition, or dancing in the folds of time” for a discussion of Sean Dorsey’s dance piece about transsexual man and activist Lou Sullivan, titled Lou (2009). Carter (2013) reframes being trapped in the wrong body as an embracing, and transition as an embedded spatial and temporal linkage, to elaborate transition not as linear but as a moment where movements backwards, forwards, sideways and diverging can be simultaneously possible.

128 discussed in Chapter Three there are a host of elaborations of trans temporalities many of which grapple with the tension between linear (and chrononormative) temporalities and non-linear temporalities, especially when it comes to transitioning. Some trans theorists emphasise the importance of chrononormativity for trans subjects (see Horak, 2014) while others emphasise the ways that trans lives and practices are threaded through with non-linear temporalities (see Raun, 2012; 2015a; 2015b). What I group under non-linear trans temporalities are discussed in a variety of ways. Sundén (2015, p. 199) in Temporalities of transition, for example, emphasises transition as a non-linear process, arguing that “transition [is] a continuous process, a movement that does not straightforwardly mark a change from a ‘before’ to an ‘after,’ gender is primarily understood as a temporal form which cuts or vibrates through the body in highly material, embodied ways”. Eckstein (2018, p. 25) in Out of sync defines one non-linear temporality as “temporal entanglements” which “emphasiz[es] the collapse and integration of past, present, and future”. And Rosenberg (2017) in When temporal orbits collide discusses the experience of trans women in the Prison Industrial Complex (PIC) and how the PIC asserts power and control, in part, through heteronormative and disciplinary time. Rosenberg (2017, p. 74) emphasises how transitioning, or not, in the PIC “invites several gendered pasts into a body’s present and places these temporalities in conversation with varying futures as the body’s potential” and that this “can be both harmful to, and necessary for, the assertion and survival of trans feminine identities in the PIC”.

However, the following two participants illuminate their temporal encounters with audio-visual technologies in a way that embraced the linearity and chrononormativity of temporality, as it emerged from encounters with audio-visual technologies.118 What is interesting here then is not how temporality emerges as non-linear, but rather how linear and normative temporal flows create opportunities for (some) trans people to encounter transitioning in positive and productive ways. This extends Horak’s

118 Not all audio-visual transition encounters enact or rely upon a chrononormative temporality. Eckstein’s (2018) work “Out of sync: Complex temporality in transgender men’s YouTube transition channels” elaborates how trans temporalities in online representations can be linear and asynchronous and can also work to collapse and integrate the past, present and future. The asynchrony of temporality, discussed briefly in Chapter Three, is a linear temporal progression marked by varied speeds and slowness, and a being outside of normative temporal expectations (e.g. “second puberty” in one’s twenties). Eckstein’s (2018) elaboration of temporal enmeshing through and with audio-visual technologies is also pertinent to mention here. Eckstein (2018, p. 37) uses Deleuze’s (1988) work Bergsonism to elaborate how “past and present are…not in a passive sequence, but an active entanglement”. These entanglements emerge from the affordances of YouTube both in terms of the bringing of the past self into the present through reflections, thoughts and feelings of a prior embodiment and existence, as well as the very ability to revisit past videos and interweave them into present videos (Eckstein, 2018, p. 38). This past, present and future entanglement in trans existence is also discussed by Andrucki and Kaplan (2018) regarding trans home spaces.

129 (2014) focus on the formation of trans publics, and gender and bodily validation, to consider how transition becomes an enticing or achievable practice for spectators of online audio-visual practices. These capacities crucially emerge through a linear temporality, itself emerging with the encounters between audio-visual technologies, testosterone use and trans people and publics.

Owen, a sweet and creative thirty-five year old “male/man” spoke of some of his very early experiences with audio-visual technologies. He told me that: I guess when I first found out [about testosterone] it was seeing those pictures online… just that series of photo faces… where people took one a week… where you could look at the same face and you could see it morphing from something I perceived as female to something I perceived as male… when I saw that I guess part of me wanted it straight away but I didn’t want to admit that to myself because it’s kind of scary. For Owen, desiring testosterone for himself is deeply linked to the temporal compression emerging from the encounter between testosterone and audio-visual technologies. He views these gender “morphing” faces, faces that went from “female” to “male”, and he finds himself pulled towards these changes. This linear move from one gender to another, from one body to another, sparks in Owen the desire for his own face and body to change, for his own transition. He wanted these effects “straight away”, even if he was scared by this desire. His resonance with testosterone’s effects do not purely arise from what testosterone does to the body, but from what a linear temporality does to the body as it emerges with audio-visual technologies and testosterone. The transitioning body, emerging from its encounter with audio-visual technologies and a linear temporality, is made desirable in a way that allows Owen to consider this “morphing” practice for himself.

Along with a desire for testosterone use the achievability of transitioning is also made available when linear temporality emerges through audio-visual technologies’ encounters with testosterone. Elin, is a white “nonbinary” person who punctuated their easily flowing words with lots of bodily movements and hand gestures. They were twenty-three year old at the time of the interview and they discussed their experience of viewing their friend Jay’s Facebook photo history. This photo collection, in a similar way to YouTube, depicted a shift over time in Jay’s face and body as it was affected by testosterone. My interview with Elin went like this: [Elin:] I guess it’s easy to look at people who have been on T for ages and it was hard for me to

130 actually identify with that, and that it’s a process, [that] I could go through those changes. It was going all the way from [Jay] on estrogen to [Jay] now, and I could be like yeah I could definitely want to be like [Jay] is now but actually looking at the whole thing made me realise that is something that I could do, “oh I could just do that”… it just made it very real, that it was actually achievable.119 [RB:] How was that different or similar to coming across [Alan] and his transition? [Elin:] Yeah like I don’t think I’ve seen any photos of him from years ago. Yeah so that was the end product, maybe that’s something I want, but it was really hard to actually see myself there, like maybe that’s something I want but it’s so different from where I am, how could I ever know… Elin sees the “whole thing” “from [Jay] on estrogen to [Jay] now” through Facebook’s photo history. Elin is not seeing the truth of Jay’s transitioning body, they are seeing a cultivated and linear emerging of changes in Jay’s body manifested through audio-visual technologies’ linear time compression. It is crucially the linearity, the chrononormativity, of these compiled images that allow Elin to consider the step by step processes that might occur in similar ways with their own body. Transitioning becomes an achievable possibility for Elin, made “very real” by the nexus of audio-visual technologies, of a linear temporality and testosterone’s bodily effects. In encountering these images Elin feels that testosterone use is achievable, that they “could just do that”.

Transitioning and its temporality is not dictated by testosterone’s biochemical effects on the body, it emerges from the encounters between testosterone, the trans body, trans digital publics and audio-visual technologies. This is not inherently and necessarily a linear temporality.120 And yet some capacities that emerge from these networked encounters are fundamentally entwined with a linear and chrononormative temporality. This linearity is experienced by at least some trans subjects as crucial because it offers a future filled with potential. Through this potentiality and chrononormative flow, a progress spawned by practices with audio-visual technologies, transition can become enticing, it can become achievable, and it can become a viable possibility for shifting the body from the here-and-now into the future.

Temporality and race

119 As Michael (2014, p. 239) discusses, linear time itself is complex and we could consider Elin’s experiences here as being a moment where, rather than moving in clear temporal allotments towards the future, the “future’s motion toward us has accelerated”. 120 See Sundén (2015), Eckstein (2018) and Rosenberg (2017).

131 While Elin’s experiences with audio-visual technologies’ manifestation of a linear temporality allowed them to consider transition as a “very real” possibility, the potential to look towards the future and consider testosterone’s effects on the body is not available for all people equally. Muñoz (2007) in Cruising Utopia highlights the failure to account for the implications for black and racially marginalised subjects in an anti-futurity approach. The precariousness of black people’s ability to envision and actualise futures, as theorised by Muñoz (2006, 2009), is echoed in some trans participants of colour’s difficulty with envisioning their futures on testosterone. These limitations were, in large part, manifested through the lack of available representations of white trans people online, as compared to trans people of colour, a trend deeply effected by the ingraining of racism in, for instance, search algorithms (discussed by S. U. Noble, 2018).

Towards the end of his interview Lucas discussed some of his initial desires and feelings about his testosterone use. I asked him: [RB:] When you started thinking about going on T, was [growing facial hair] fairly important to you? [Lucas:] Um not at that point in time, um I would say [it was important] earlier on when I was coming to grips with wanting to go on T. I think it just dawned on me one day, my expectations of, or seeing myself in the future I see a guy, but that male was white! And that that was not going to happen on T [laughs] [RB:] Yeah right! And was that an image of someone who had a beard? [Lucas:] Yeah. Yeah it was a lot taller than I would ever be and a lot more hair, everywhere. Lucas’ image, this intimate projection of a future self that was using testosterone, was an image of a man who was white. His initial sense of his transition was one that shifted his body from being read as a Chinese woman into appearing as a white man. When confronted with this explicitly this is not to say that Lucas believed his body would become white through testosterone. Rather, Lucas’ experiences of online white dominated spaces, and likely the centrality of whiteness to Australian culture, resulted in specific beliefs about what all transitioning bodies looked like. Further the compressed linear temporalities enacted by audio-visual technologies situate testosterone as a specific kind of body-altering chemical, one where future body emerges as white. The discrepancy between a white future and a Chinese Australian present reduced the viability of the movement between the two, undercutting Lucas’ access to a present encounter with testosterone and transitioning.

132

Evidently Lucas, as a trans person of colour, who struggled to manifest a future image of himself on testosterone demonstrates some of the issues surrounding a diminished access to a linear and teleological temporality. However, the imperatives of chrononormative time should also be held as suspect for all trans people. Freeman (2007, p. 160) evidently points us towards some of the problems with chrononormative time when she says: Temporality is a mode of implantation through which institutional forces come to seem like somatic facts. Schedules, calendars, time zones, and even wristwatches are ways to inculcate what the sociologist Eviatar Zerubavel calls ‘hidden rhythms’, forms of temporal experience that seem natural to those whom they privilege. The implications for trans people and transitioning with audio-visual technologies is clear here. As chrononormative temporalities of transitions emerge with the audio-visual technologies, so too may the “institutional forces” (Freeman, 2007, p. 160), especially those of medicine, come to embed in the apparent desires and practices of trans people. This can validate particular trans experiences, people, actions and lives while casting out as either archaic or not “trans enough” those who cannot, do not or do not want to enact these modes of being.121

A “good” attachment One final “gift” from the dispositif elaborated here is what participants articulated as a greater sense of embodiment. This notion of embodiment suggests, as much trans discourse asserts, that an always already trans person will take testosterone, see the testosterone induced changes, and feel happier with an alignment between one’s internal gender and one’s external body. However, as we have seen the place that audio-visual technologies have in transition is not merely documentative but performative, it produces certain relations to the body, to testosterone and to transition that are not present or available without their affordances. These moments of “embodiment” evidence new opportunities for relations to the body and new formations of bodies that emerge, in part, through encounters with audio-visual technologies. The bodies made possible by audio-visual technologies will hopefully be characterised by positivity, comfort or pleasure.

121 The implications, and potential ways to usurp these imperatives, have been taken up by Amin (2014), Israeli- Nevo (2017), Rios (2017) and Halberstam (2005).

133

Sam and Ethan articulated some of the most explicit attachments to specific ways of articulating the body with audio-visual technologies. Sam told me that prior to beginning testosterone he hadn’t felt very “connected to how I looked in the mirror”. Once he began testosterone he started documenting his face and the changes that took place on testosterone through taking photographs. In explaining why he took photographs of his face he said “me taking a lot of photos is actually going: Who is this person?”. He also told me that taking testosterone and encountering his body in these ways made him feel “more in tune and more aligned…everything feels right”.

Ethan, a transmasculine Greek and Italian Australian, also told me that he used a variety of audio-visual technologies as he began testosterone. In a similar way to other participants, Ethan tended to focus on taking photographic recordings of his body and face. However, unlike other participants who were more temporally consistent in their audio-visual technology use, taking photographs every week or month for instance, Ethan told me that while he “definitely wanted to monitor it [his body on testosterone]” he also “wanted to do it on my own terms”. Rather than taking temporally consistent images of the body as it shifted over time, Ethan took photographs only at discreet moments in time during acute moments of dysphoria. He said that: When I feel dysphoric about aspects [of my body] I’ll take a photo and then something in my brain flips. If it’s a photo compared to like physically looking at my body, I can be kinder to myself if I look at it in a photo rather than if I look at the physicality. Ethan felt that when he took photographs he was able to “look at it [his image] like an outsider” and that as a result he could “focus more on what I like, or like what’s masculine”.

Raun’s (2015b) discussion of the use of YouTube resonates quite strongly with what Ethan articulates. Raun (2015b, p. 368) notes that “I understand the vlogs as attempts to connect with one’s visual self, and to self-reflect and to see oneself travelling through the gaze of the Other”. In Ethan’s experience the process of seeing oneself “travelling though the gaze of the Other”, as Raun (2015b) puts it, allows him to become more “generous” with his own image, to “focus” on what he likes more and to see “what’s masculine” about the image. But a reliance on this explanation makes invisible the work and the fundamentally central place of audio-visual technologies in the production of bodies and relations to bodies. Sam and Ethan’s experiences are fundamentally contingent on the affordances of the audio-visual

134 technologies they use to “see” their bodies. Sam relies on audio-visual technologies to “re-learn” his face and self through comparing photographs taken over time, an experience emerging from “time-jumping” affordances of photographs. While Ethan’s ability to focus on what is more masculine, more desirable in his experience of his body, is only manifested through the “distancing” affordances of the camera. Sam and Ethan enact their relations in somewhat opposed ways, Sam brings his body “closer” and Ethan pulls away from his, but both demonstrate the emerging of new relations to the body and the formation of new bodies through encounters with audio-visual technologies. Sam and Ethan’s practices demonstrate how audio-visual technologies make possible different modes of sensitisation to the specific arrangements of the testosterone altering body, arrangements that produce a different and more pleasurable attachment to this way of articulating the body.

Attachments and race The whiteness of online trans spaces, of the audio-visual depictions in those spaces and of Australian culture more generally, negatively affected many trans participants of colour. For some trans participants of colour this lack of information shaped their awareness of how to navigate their families’ specific cultural beliefs and practices, something that is discussed in such abundance for white families as to have become the invisible norm. For other trans participants of colour the whiteness of online spaces resulted in an expectation of whiteness when transitioning, or a lack of knowing what to expect when beginning testosterone. A lack of knowledge, even after actively seeking out the information, resulted for some in difficulties in predicting and making choices around using testosterone. Many participants moved forward in their transitions with testosterone through looking to familial connections to try to predict the effects that testosterone would have on their under-represented experiences, desires and practices.

While some white trans interviewees did mention their immediate male relatives, mostly concerned with possible balding, the trans participants of colour that I interviewed were much more likely to engage with their relatives’ bodies when trying to establish the parameters and future possibilities of their own bodies on testosterone. Having to navigate the lack of representation of trans people of colour in online spaces all but one trans participant of colour strategically gathered alternative observational information about how their bodies might change when they began testosterone. Alexander, a transmasculine pansexual who identifies as “living /experiencing life as a non-white person” for instance told me that they were “looking at pictures of my brother, or my biological father, just to get an idea of like ‘yes, I could be

135 something along the lines of that’…. just to get an idea of where things might go”. Sam looked to their family members to establish “hairiness”, “getting like a really big gut” and to think about “baldness in my family” which they tied explicitly to “if I have those genes or not”. Jake too turned to his family, saying that beginning testosterone was in part the result of his “younger brother start[ing] to go into puberty” and the “increased dysphoria” he felt when he “compar[ed] myself to my brother”.

Lucas demonstrates an even greater attention to relatives when he is faced with a lack of age relevant male sibling, often the easiest comparison point for testosterone’s ongoing effects. In discussing hirsutism, he said “in my family my dad is absolutely hairless, he’s got hair on top of his head, a bit of a beard, and the rest of him is hairless. And my mum is also, but my little sister has quite a bit of body hair. And so, I wasn’t quite sure which way it would go”. Here Lucas utilised his closest male relative, his father, as well as his sister and mother as indicators of the possible effects of testosterone, even as his sister and his mother are (presumably) not significantly affected by high levels of testosterone. He strategically includes his immediate female relations to garner further materials to form a picture of what his transition might look like. This is unusual for all participants, but especially the white trans masculine participants who would occasionally refer to their male relatives to understand the potential for balding but who never referred to their female relative’s bodies as indicators for how one might experience a substantial increase in testosterone.

While most trans masculine participants of colour articulated a degree of distress, difficulty and delay in accessing testosterone because of these limitations, Jake talked about the fear and the excitement present in a lack of comparison. He told me: It was pretty scary, because it felt like I was kind of going into the unknown but it was also pretty thrilling in a way because it was like I don’t really have anyone to compare myself too, I don’t really have any boundaries... His lack of boundaries, of a certain degree of freedom offers both excitement, and fear for Jake. He shaped possibilities through the forming of connections to his familial relations, but he fundamentally walks into the unknown, without boundaries, and with the thrill of potential.

Lucas also mentioned his lack of framework with which to help form his expectations of his transition. He told me:

136 [Lucas:] I was going to say that there wasn’t really much to base it off, not on how other people had gone, and so you kind of have a leap of [long pause] [RB:] Another participant talked about that being exciting because there were no “boundaries”, how did you find that experience? [Lucas:] Yeah a little bit of “it’s just happening”. Evidently for Lucas, compared to Jake, he reconciled this relation as “just happening” rather than a trek into the abyss. Lucas, along with his expectation work, was happy to allow transition to “just happen” and did not have a similar experience of excitement and possibility.

Conclusion Somatic ontological experimentation with audio-visual technologies, testosterone and trans people, grounded in trans social knowledges and practices produce, rather than merely observe, trans testosterone transitions. Transition as an emergent phenomenon also produces particular capacities for those within the arrangement. Shifts to attention, to time and to attachments become available within transition, shifts that are also shaped by race and racism. In the formation of these specific transitions audio-visual technologies, alongside testosterone and trans biology, are active participants, or “actants”. When audio- visual technologies are recognised as agentic then trans people, through the hand holding the camera or the online collective creation of audio-visual practices, must also be considered as actants. However, while the trans person is no longer the passive recipient of testosterone’s effects, neither are they the determining factor in transition: Agency is not produced by humans in the traditional sense (i.e. it does not emanate from “within” pre constituted individuals), but by humans and objects, discourse and materiality in their intra action (Fraser & Moore, 2011, p. 8, emphasis in original). Or, as Sullivan (2014, p189) notes it is crucial not to reinstitute an “instrumentalist view of technology, one in which technology is (constituted as) an object external to and manipulable by the subject(s) who deploy it to their own ends”. Trans people are participants in the dynamic formation of the phenomena of transition alongside the crucial participation of other material and semantic phenomena like audio- visual technologies.

In this re-envisioned transition, there are shifts to the place of medicine and the wrong body narrative.

137 Testosterone, as a product deeply attached to medicine, corrects the wrong body and addresses dysphoria through catalysing transition. However, when attending to transition as a socio-material arrangement that yields specific capacities, transition, and perhaps even the imperatives for transitioning, shifts. If testosterone transitions arising from encounters with audio- visual technologies shape modes of attention, then perhaps trans people desire transition to alter their attention to the body. If transitioning with audio- visual technologies enacts specific temporalities, then perhaps trans people desire transition to shape and affect their experience of bodily time. If using testosterone and audio-visual technologies enact a transition that alters attachments to the body in particular ways, perhaps the imperative for transition is to explore, experiment and find “good” attachments that may exist beyond an alignment between the mind and the body. Conceivably, this may include experiments with, or rejection of the rigid demands of, chronological time. While this thesis is limited to mere speculation as to what these alternative desires might be, it is evident that the singular imperative for aligning through transitioning limits the prolific potentials for why a trans person may undertake a process of transition.

An analysis of the encounters between audio-visual technologies, testosterone and trans bodies and publics, demonstrates how audio-visual technologies in these moments form crucial prostheses with the body. They are as attached to the body as testosterone has become and they form a central nexus for creating different bodies and different experiences of the body that can manifest positive relations with the body. This testosterone audio-visual technological apparatus is a far cry from a transition that is a singular result of the effect of testosterone on the body, a process that resolves the dysphoria arising from the discrepancy between the body and the mind. It enacts a multitude of effects beyond the rectification of a misalignment, in ways that are contingent, embedded and never fully determined. Transitioning becomes a social and a technical practice, one that is embedded in trans online publics and elaborated by trans testosterone users. It is an experimental creative practice that enacts new forms of bodily attention, different temporal relations to the body and, at least for some, new capacities for positive life-saving, attachments to the body.

138 Vignettes

Not my kind of people

Day Eighty-Six I’m doing research about absorption rates and the effects of testosterone gel. Rather than the bodybuilding websites I used for injections these are “health” related websites. Gel is not for bodybuilders, but for sick old men. I don’t know how this makes me feel. The non-binary websites alleviate this association somewhat, they mostly concern low testosterone levels. I don’t really want to be on a low t dose right now, but at least it feels closer to my “people” then sick old men do.

Getting testosterone “You’ll become a man” he said, “and living as a man is very different from living as a woman”. The therapist I used to get the okay for testosterone was a gentle, straightforward white man. His assertions about the effects of testosterone on my (about to be altered) socially received body came as part of his assessment of my capacity to give informed consent, a process that seemed rather (fortunately) brief. Perhaps he was persuaded by my (well-rehearsed) trans narrative, my solid support network and my understanding of the impacts of testosterone on the body, perhaps he was just sick of hearing the same old story. We continued the conversation; he relayed his ideas about “men” and “women” and the apparent inherent differences between men and women’s bodies, I tried not to jump down his throat. All I could manage was a subtle intellectual kick asserting that physical differences tended to vary across bodies, not strictly tied to gender. I knew that if I pushed back too hard I ran the risk of being that “angry trans person” and that his opinion of me, to be distilled in The Letter, would determine if he would speak for me, or against me. Submitting sufficiently to his world view, and of course being able to give that informed consent, he audio recorded his letter to my GP in our session and we organised for me to return once I had started testosterone.

139 Chapter Five Unmaking gender: Non-binary people using “men’s hormones”

Becoming a man was what I wanted when my psychiatrist so eloquently told me that that was what testosterone would make me. A few years after I had started testosterone, in early 2010, I came across the use of the term non-binary. Peaking in the mid-2000s “non-binary” (originally spelled “nonbinary”) is both an umbrella term and an identity label for people who do not feel strongly attached to the binary gender options of man or woman. Non-binary people can identify with a host of different labels from agender to bigender to genderqueer or non-binary in ways that may connote a sense of being in the “middle” of binary gender, feeling outside of gender, in opposition to or sliding along the gender spectrum across time and space (Kean & Bolton, 2015). The primary division between binary and non-binary identities is that while binary trans people feel strongly attached to one of two binary gender options, man or woman, non-binary people tend to feel a looser alignment to binary gender or a lack of alignment at all. For me, this term sat quietly (or loudly) in my mind for a long time, eliciting a new process of trying to understand yet again who I was, and who I might want to be. While it didn’t quite fit me precisely it became a close approximation of how I felt about my gender, as one not attached to manhood, and in the words of Bobby Noble (2006), accommodated my “incoherent” testosterone-altered trans body.

While non-binary people turn away from binary gender identities, “sex hormones” such as testosterone, as well as trans surgeries, occupy highly gendered places within bio-social discourse. Testosterone is positioned as the “male hormone” and is often framed as the source or cause of masculinity and manhood (Fine, 2017). It has, within the context of transgender treatment, been positioned as a way for trans men to manifest onto their external bodies an internally felt gender, a solution to the issue of the wrong body (Cromwell, 1999; Rubin, 2003). Similarly, as Sullivan (2008) critiques, social and medical approaches to transsexual surgeries situate those surgeries as only acceptable if they align with a binary gender system. That “the modification of bodies in ways that do not render them either male or female”, that produce bodies that are “unhealthy” or incoherent, is a “kind of madness we cannot really afford to condone” (Sullivan, 2008, p. 110). Increasingly, non-binary people have begun to seek out gendered medical interventions, including hormones such as testosterone, to affect their bodies and lives (G. E. Butler, 2017).

140

This chapter explores how non-binary people who do not feel attached to manhood reconcile their desire for testosterone when it is deeply entwined with men and masculinity. Underpinned by a STS approach that asserts all phenomena as existing only through their embedded relations, and drawing upon the experiences of seven non-binary participants, this analysis allows us to shift away from the traditional rationale of testosterone being used to correct a wrong body. Reconstituting testosterone in this way situates the hormone as something that breaks down gender and assigned sex at birth, rather than something that confirms gender; it is a gender unmaker. Testosterone used here also produces a shift away from an inside/outside discourse, it sits athwart a treatment frame that externalises the internal self. And finally, testosterone use in this context moves beyond a treatment frame and rather becomes a practice in gender.

Non-binary participants Seventeen of the thirty participants who generously agreed to share their time and experiences with me identified in whole or part as non-binary. Of these seventeen, seven participants will be centrally attended to in this chapter. What became evident from the material provided by my non- binary participants was a degree of difficulty in accessing testosterone as a result of the pervading discourse that positions testosterone as inherently tied to men, masculinity and manhood. These difficulties are threefold and intertwined. They stem from the medicalisation of trans treatment, the biological essentialism that positions “sex hormones” as highly gendered, and the subsuming of these frames into trans community boundary making processes. These discursive flows have been solidified into a kind of idealised trans treatment frame that positions testosterone as a means for trans men to enact a binary gender shift into manhood – to make one’s external body align with one’s identity as a man.

While a number of non-binary participants had difficulties navigating the gatekeeping practices of medical systems, and many had trouble negotiating their family’s and friend’s understanding of their identities and their desires for testosterone, this chapter focuses on participant’s internalisation of the relations between men, masculinity and testosterone. It centres the self-limiting beliefs of my participants, their feelings about who can validly access testosterone, and their subsequent need to negotiate and re- create their own non-binary logics around testosterone. How non-binary people reposition testosterone

141 in relation to their use yields altered ways of conceiving of testosterone and the gendered body, and crucially opens up possibilities of non-binary futures that may allow for a body altered by testosterone.

Despite having a high number of non-binary interviewees, and being a non-binary testosterone user myself, I had no intention of attending to non-binary and binary trans testosterone use separately. Identities and lives are complex and entwined in ways that defy binary categorisation, a special kind of truth when looking towards the nuances of trans gender experiences. And yet, throughout the long process of interview transcription and coding, it became evident that some of my non-binary participants had substantial difficulties with how testosterone has been positioned within a binary sex-gender system: as a hormone for and of men. Many binary participants faced similar difficulties when grappling with their desire for testosterone, often expressing concerns with being unable to meet the requirements laid out by medical systems embedded in a sex-gender binary. In some ways, the limitations felt by non-binary testosterone users and binary trans men are tightly overlapping and stem from similar histories. However, what this chapter attempts to do is to centralise the specificity of non-binary encounters with the highly sexed hormone testosterone, by attending to the ways in which medicalised histories surrounding a binary sex-gender system may affect non-binary people in ways less immediately evident than for their more binary identified counterparts. In focusing on non-binary experience, we can see the logics that surround testosterone use and the difficulties that some non-binary people may face when negotiating those logics. In doing so, we can also elaborate those limitations, and the inhibiting discourses permeating testosterone (as well as other “sex hormones”), that may harm and constrain all people who find themselves sheltering under the trans umbrella.

Non-binary identities – A brief history and context Much like the emergence of trans masculinity discussed in Chapter One, “non-binary” did not merely arise out of the ether. It, like all things, has multiple histories.122 The term non-binary’s transition into common usage arose as a way for people to describe an experience of gender that does not feel strongly

122 This is one history; the dominant Western understanding of “non-binary” as an identity label and category. While it is useful to situate current moments within historical lineages there is also political work done when specific histories are held over others. Another history of “non-binary” could be understood through non- Western genders, or through an attention to the historical overlaps between gender and sexuality. See Vincent and Manzano (2017) for a brief history of “culturally diverse” “non-binary” identities.

142 attached to “man” or “woman”. The shift into the use of non-binary echoes prior shifts from the term transsexual to transgender. According to Susan Stryker (2008, p. 18) the term “transsexual”, popularised by Harry Benjamin in the 1950s, was used to denote individuals who desired to change their sexed bodies in order to “live entirely as permanent, full-time members of the gender other than the one they were assigned to at birth”. In the 1990s trans activists and communities took up the term “transgender” to attempt to encompass a variety of non-normative gender identities and expressions that did not rely on the permanent alteration of genitalia (Stryker, 2008, p. 123). Influenced by the work of post-structuralists such as Judith Butler (1990, 1993), Teresa de Lauretis (1987) and Michel Foucault (1978/1990), and trans activists and theorists including Allucquére “Sandy” Stone (1987/2006), Leslie Feinberg (1992/2006, 1993/2003), Kate Bornstein (1994), and Stephen Whittle (1996), “transgender” was deployed to resist and oppose the binary sex-gender system and to explore the possibilities of gender, bodies and practices beyond a cis (that is non-trans) centric model (Bergman & Barker, 2017; Love, 2014; Stryker, 2008).

Twenty years on, transgender (along with transsexual) has become in some spaces the term used for people who attach to, rather than resist, the gender binary123 (Killermann, 2012 cited in Tompkins, 2014). This became the moment for “genderqueer”, a semantic reflection of the political imperative to queer gender. While coined in the 1990s, genderqueer gained popularity in the mid 2000s to (yet again) centralise the rejection of a binary sex-gender system and to embody a resistant political orientation to gender (Bergman & Barker, 2017). While genderqueer is still used today, its arrival was quickly subsumed into the mass of new gender identity labels, all of which were collected under the term “non-binary”. The possibility of selecting one of fifty-two gender label options introduced by Facebook in 2014 was a marker of a shift out of queer obscurity and into popular culture (Bergman & Barker, 2017, p. 32).

These shifts have, to a limited extent, penetrated medical engagements with trans experience. For instance the most recent version, the DSM-V (2013), has made some interesting concessions to their previous highly resisted Gender Identity Disorder found in DSM-III (1980) and DSM-IV-TR (2000). Replacing Gender Identity Disorder with Gender Dysphoria marks a shift away from trans/gender/sexuality as a

123 In other spaces, there has been an interesting return to “transsexual” as a gently tongue in cheek reclamation, possibly in response to media over-use and spectacularisation of the term, or possibly as a return to the materiality of the body as “cross-sexed”.

143 “mental disorder” and centres on the apparent “presence of clinically significant distress associated with the condition” (American Psychiatric Association, 2013).

Within this new symptom-centred engagement with trans-ness, the language used to describe Gender Dysphoria, and its “diagnosis”, opens up possibilities of recognising a non-binary gender identity. For instance, symptom number four, of the six symptoms of Gender Dysphoria in Adolescents and Adults (of which you need at least two for diagnosis) is “a strong desire to be of the other gender (or some alternative gender different from one’s assigned gender)” (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). This somewhat tacked on option of being a gender “other than one’s assigned gender” suggests the possibility of being neither a man nor a woman; neither one’s assigned gender, nor the “other gender”. While a notable shift from the criteria for Gender Identity Disorder in DSM-IV-TR (2000), there is considerable discrepancy throughout the parameters of Gender Dysphoria, sometimes referring to the possibility of a non-binary identity category and sometimes maintaining a binary gender framework. Perhaps the most notable reflection of the maintenance of a binary gender system is when the conditions concern sex or the body.124 Symptom three for instance is “a strong desire for the primary and/or secondary sex characteristics of the other gender”, similar to the pre-caveated section of symptom number four, there is a maintenance of a two sex-gender system, one gender assigned at birth to feel detached from, and the “other gender” whose bodily characteristics you desire.

With the development of non-binary as a site of identification, Meg-John Barker (Bergman and Barker, 2017, p. 32) reminds us that the evolution of the term can, in a similar way to the apparent opposition between transsexual and transgender, reiterate a false dichotomy between old/binary/wrong and young/non-binary/right. Transgender itself, having arisen within the context of queer theory and post- structuralism, has always had a history of resisting gender as binary, and the use of non-binary in this way may be reproducing a schism, rather than enacting new resistant movements (Bergman and Barker, 2017, p. 33). And yet, S. Bear Bergman (Bergman and Barker, 2017, p. 41) also notes that transgender/sexual people may “rail against the non-binary among us with just as much vigour” as cis people because of an unfailing attachment to a binary gender system and the fear of undercutting trans

124 This appears to enact a bounding of the disruption to, what Judith Butler (1990) terms, the “heterosexual matrix” at the site of sex, during a moment when gender is being disrupted in abundance. A kind of balancing act in the scales of intelligible sex-gender personhood.

144 political rights. While these different kinds of border policing practices can have notable and significant impacts on life-making possibilities of trans and non-binary people, rather than becoming embroiled in these debates this chapter will be focusing on the ways that non-binary people who wish to use testosterone, and not all non-binary people do, face a history of trans medicalisation that has relied upon and enforced binary transition narratives.125 Further, the attempts to enforce a binary sex-gender system in and through trans treatment has found an alliance with testosterone’s own embedding in a binary sex- gender system, one that asserts testosterone as a man’s hormone. These narratives, as Stone (1987/2006) has so eloquently illuminated, harm all trans people.126 Even if these constraints result in somewhat divergent outcomes for trans as compared to non-binary individuals and groups, the source of that harm, the binary sex-gender system, often remains the same.

It is pertinent to note at this juncture that while “non-binary” has been a recent term used by people living in countries such as the U.S., U.K., Australia and New Zealand to denote identities outside of the Western binary gender system, there are also a host of contemporary terms and cultural positions that have, and continue to, resist the binary gender system enforced (often violently) by Western colonialism. It is entirely likely that Western non-binary identities have been influenced by identities and experiences existing across the globe that reside outside of the Western binary gender system. The topography of this indebtedness is currently unclear but is likely significant.127

Academic engagement with non-binary experiences Non-binary experiences in the West are receiving increasing attention in academic and social discourse.

125 In focusing on non-binary identities, especially in “opposition” to binary trans identities, there is an issue with reinstituting an opposition between non-binary and binary trans identities. This is perhaps inescapable. To suggest that binary and non-binary trans identities are situated in identical positions with regards to trans medicine or Western binary gender paradigms is to ignore the specific violence that occurs to non-binary people (as well as to binary trans people). In reluctantly participating in a separation of binary and non-binary, a new binarism, I try to hold how deeply threaded all trans experiences are, and how the specific gendered experiences of one person cannot be contained by their identification with a binary or a non-binary gender. Hopefully this melding of experiences has been more evident throughout the previous four chapters. 126 Blake, a binary trans man for instance told me that he felt deeply limited by the expectations of the trans narrative. Stating that “you so often see the same thing all of the time, like everyone has the same experience, but that’s not mine, is that… is that me? Can I say that I am this [trans] if I don’t have that?” Instead Blake felt that “as I became an adult I feel more comfortable being this [a trans man]… it was kind of like realising that my experience doesn’t have to relate to anyone else’s”. 127 For an introduction to non-binary genders outside of the West see Vincent & Manzano (2017).

145 Within the context of health (see for instance Frohard-Dourlent, Dobson, Clark, Doull, & Saewyc, 2017; Matsuno & Budge, 2017; Reisner et al., 2015; Richards, 2016), education (see for instance Beemyn & Brauer, 2015; Goldberg & Kuvalanka, 2018; Stewart, 2017), and the law (see for instance Bennett, 2014; Davis, 2017; Kennedy, 2013), non-binary lives are being increasingly considered as relevant and discreet experiences.

While a notable turn towards this under-encountered group, non-binary lives still receive relatively minimal attention, with non-binary identities largely being included under the gender non-conforming or trans umbrellas (see for instance Austin, 2016; Catalano, 2015; Hansbury, 2005; Marinkovic & Newfield, 2017; Warren, Smalley, & Barefoot, 2016). When attending to the material practicalities of being non- cis, there is an even tighter assumption of sameness between the two groups. For instance, when looking at hormone administration protocols and desires, non- binary practices are deemed akin to (binary) trans treatments.128 While this inclusion can be strategically useful, it can also negate the specificity of non- binary people’s genders, and may fail to see the potential for tension between trans and non-binary experiences.

Studies that do aim to attend with greater specificity to non-binary experience have the tendency to bisect these groups into one of two categories based on their assigned sex at birth as male or female (see for instance Bauer, Pyne, Francino, & Hammond, 2013; Hyde et al., 2014). This is especially true concerning medical interventions such as hormones or surgeries (see for instance Richards, Bouman, & Barker, 2017). Division along assigned sex at birth assumes and elicits a sameness across sexed experience, rather than an openness to the possibilities of resonance across gender identity. The possible similarities between people assigned male and female at birth, and their navigation of their bodies, families and aesthetics, or how non-sex segregated non-binary publics cultivate knowledges about non-binary genders, seem like potentially fruitful sites of exploration.

This chapter too falls into this trap, albeit in a slightly more circular fashion. In attending to trans and non-binary experiences with exogenous testosterone, it was much more likely, although not exclusively true, that people assigned female at birth would be included, and people assigned male not. Despite this

128 The one exception I have found to this is a chapter titled “Child and adolescent endocrinology” (G. E. Butler, 2017) in the book Genderqueer and non-binary genders (Richards, Bouman & Baker, 2017).

146 limitation there is still use in attending to non-binary people’s encounters with exogenous testosterone, and their potentially divergent experiences from binary trans men’s testosterone use. We can see the different and new ways in which non-binary people may be enacting their bodies and genders with hormones. And how non-binary publics can uphold, reassert or resist logics around gendered medicalised technologies making viable new practices and realities, but not others.

The trans and wrong body narratives Non-binary experience has an attachment to transsexual and transgender histories. This is particularly the case when concerning encounters with medical systems and medical technologies such as testosterone. Thanks to the work of Stone (1987/2006) in “The empire strikes back: A posttranssexual manifesto” we can see how trans medicalisation in the West has historically relied upon and enforced a binary sex-gender model. Binary gender, having been reluctantly altered to incorporate transgender experience through the concurrent production of the wrong body and trans narratives makes non-binary people’s desires for testosterone incoherent. The binarism of early trans treatment having filtered through to contemporary experience of transgender accounts for at least some of the difficulties non-binary people face when their desires for testosterone are held up against the normalised binary trans experience. Stone (1987/2006) presents us with a sharp and damning critique of the gatekeeping practices of U.S. trans medical systems designed to validate or invalidate those transsexual applicants who sought access to gendered medical interventions. The criteria for access to medical interventions through these systems was only formally accessible to transsexual people who experienced (or at the very least convincingly articulated) their genders in ways that were believed to be only minimally disruptive to a binary sex- gender system. Transsexuals were allowed to disrupt binary sex, through undertaking hormonal and surgical interventions to alter one’s sex, if in all other ways the binary sex-gender system could be maintained. This impetus enforced a set of criteria, outlined in Harry Benjamin’s The transsexual phenomena (1966), that has come to be known by trans people as the trans narrative. The trans narrative first and foremost centres an unshakable identification as the opposite gender to one’s assigned sex at birth. This unshakable identification was required to have begun from the genesis of one’s gendered existence, assumed to be within early childhood. Along with a strong identification as the “opposite” gender, was the desire to live “fully” as one’s felt gender in ways that were deemed legible to cis normative society, including the need to aspire towards a “complete” body transition. Finally, and crucial to Stone’s (1987/2006) political imperatives, a successful transsexual applicant must be committed to the complete

147 denial of any trans history, to blend seamlessly and unproblematically into cis dominated (U.S.) society.

Crucially, being “trapped in the wrong body” became a kind of logical addendum to the trans narrative, arising out of a rhetoric where being trans is a result of a discrepancy between the (true) gender of the mind and the (incorrect) sex of the body (Bettcher, 2014; Engdahl, 2014). The issue of the wrong body, produced in part through medicalised discourse (Meyerowitz, 2004), became correctable and treatable with gendered technologies, such as hormones and genital and chest surgeries (Cromwell, 1999; Rubin, 2003). These interventions aimed to fully align the external incorrect sex with one’s internal correct (binary) gender.

Testosterone – a treatment for the wrong body Lending itself almost seamlessly to the wrong body narrative is testosterone, a substance already deeply gendered as male. In her work on male steroid users, Helen Keane (2005, p. 190) notes that testosterone is understood as the “male sex hormone” and is framed as “a kind of concentrated essence of masculinity”. The administration of steroids, such as testosterone, to male bodies maintains a degree of coherence due to its pre-existing association with those bodies. It holds a degree of acceptability because male bodies are the “natural” domain of testosterone, even as it can also be understood as a risk to health and as socially destructive.129

Female bodies’ encounters with testosterone yield additional gender related anxieties. Keane (2005, p. 191) briefly touches on this anxiety when she says: Use [of steroids] by females is described by author, anti-drug campaigner and athlete Bob Goldman as “the drug bastardization of the female form” (1984: 44), resulting in the spectacle of “female athletes turning male” (1984: 47). Female bodies are positioned as incoherent with testosterone and the fears of its absorption by those bodies elicits even further social and cultural tremors and greater degree of discursive, material and governmental regulation.

129 This acceptability is of course contingent in many ways on the legality and illegality of these practices, and its control through medicine (see Keane, 2005).

148 The enmeshing of testosterone, masculinity and men is not a recent development but, according to Nelly Oudshoorn (1994) and Celia Roberts (2007), has had a history stretching back, albeit in different permutations, into ideas of the body before science “discovered” the hormone. Oudshoorn (1994) and Roberts’ (2007) critical tracings of testosterone and its scientific formation as a male and masculine substance emphasises the grafting of gender onto testosterone. Cordelia Fine (2017) notes that this link works to embed testosterone within social and cultural stereotypes of masculinity such as aggression, dominance and an aversion to child rearing. And yet, as Paul B. Preciado (2013, p. 141) in Testo junkie so succinctly puts it, “testosterone isn’t masculinity”, it is merely that the effects of testosterone have, so far, been associated with cis men. Marking a substantial rise in intra-bodily regulation through the increasing advent and use of biomedical products that arose with industrial capitalism, and which became ubiquitous during the cold war, Preciado (2013, p. 101) argues that “male and female are terms without empirical content beyond the technologies that produce them”.130 Undertaking a process of bioresistance to the enforced binarisation of gender and increasing bodily control through pharmacological products, Preciado (2013) used low levels of black market testosterone gel to explore the sensations of the body and its capacities, without the intention of enacting a transition from female to male. This use of testosterone is highly opposed to traditional medicalised treatment frames that position testosterone, as liquefied masculinity, as a means to create or confirm trans men’s manhood and to fix trans men’s wrong bodies. In doing so Preciado (2013) elaborates the body as a site of resistance, and illuminates the possibilities of exogenous testosterone use beyond a medicalised binary trans treatment frame.

Despite evidence of a lack of inherent relation between men, masculinity and testosterone (Fine, 2017), the deep gendering of hormones is still strategically central to a treatment frame for transgender and the trans man’s wrong body. Hormone use allows a “real” trans person to rectify the apparent incongruence between their body and (binary) gender identification, in a way that both capitalises on and reinforces the gendering of hormones. A trans man, who is deemed to be lacking in biological maleness can be “treated”, the “wrong body” rectified, by the administration of the “essence of masculinity”; testosterone.

Within (some) trans masculine spaces, the attachment between testosterone, male-ness and masculinity

130 Preciado (2013) does not suggest that bodies are not technologies, but rather that gendered and sexed bodies are constituted as particular bodies through their encounters with hormones, surgical interventions, sexology research, pornography and power (to name just a few).

149 seems to have resulted in a notion of testosterone as an almost “magical” substance that will produce (near instantaneously) a male body. For instance, in Testosterone files: My social and hormonal transformation from female to male by Max Wolf Valerio (2006), a trans man of Kainai, Sephardic Jewish converso and Northern European decent living in the U.S., discussed his first shot of testosterone. He says: This first shot is what I’ve waited and plotted for…I’ve injected a powerful elixir, the workings of which hurtle me into a web of energies and impulses I couldn’t have anticipated. The doors are blasted open. I begin to enter the realm of male life. (Valerio, 2006, p. 16). This “powerful elixir” flings Valerio into “the realm of male life” and testosterone is the key to this movement, on one side a female person, on the other a male, produced predominantly by testosterone’s administration.

This logic is often particular to testosterone for trans masculine people. Rubin (2003, p. 152) in Self- made men: Identity and embodiment among transsexual men contrasts transition related surgeries such as chest surgery with testosterone use stating that trans men frame surgery as taking away the “offending female parts” while testosterone “actively makes the man”. Sometimes the line between surgeries and testosterone is somewhat blurrier. Jason Cromwell for example states in Transmen & FTMs: Identities, bodies, genders & sexualities (1999, p. 129) that “surgeries allowed me to reconstruct my body, just as bodybuilding allows me to construct my body….The point is that my body has been constructed to better suit my self-image as a man”. Testosterone assisted bodybuilding, and surgeries are made somewhat distinct by the slight differences between a notion of reconstruction and construction, but they both tie to creating Cromwell’s creation of his “self-image as a man”.

Unfortunately, when a certain standard of what it means to be trans is maintained intra- community regulation tends to occur. Hansbury (2005, p. 258) discusses the experiences of genderqueer trans masculine spectrum people, he states: The pressure [to take testosterone] comes not only from the general nontrans population, but also from the transmasculine community, from whom the Genderqueer receives the subliminal or overt message, “Without testosterone, you’re not trans enough—not man enough”. How can you be trans, without transition? In response, the Genderqueer may turn to testosterone for a beard to hide behind and wear as a badge of validating masculinity.

150 In this way testosterone and the effects of testosterone, or their predicted effects, validates not just the masculinity of the trans masculine/genderqueer person, but also their transness, and their valid belonging within the trans masculine community. Testosterone becomes a passport into a community where boundaries131 are often highly guarded.

Science and Technology Studies – rethinking testosterone as masculine Non-binary people who desire testosterone must negotiate, on the one hand, their genders as neither men nor women, and on the other, the highly entrenched notion of testosterone as a masculine object. The use of testosterone by non-binary people has the potential to threaten a non- binary gender due to its attachment to masculinity.132 But the potential benefits for non-binary people’s use of testosterone can also be life changing. Shifting away from a concrete understanding of testosterone as only ever tied to masculinity and manhood is a vital process for non-binary negotiations of testosterone and some STS scholarship might be a means through which we can approach testosterone as a fluid object, formed within its material and semiotic entwinings, and enacted in practice.

Annemarie Mol’s (1999; 2002) work unpicks the perspectivalism in medical discussions and observations of diseases such as atherosclerosis and anaemia. According to Mol (1999), medical technologies, particularly diagnostic techniques, do not merely observe the different elements of a singular disease, but rather each method of “observation” enacts different, sometimes contradictory, realities. She argues that different realities are “done and enacted rather than observed” (1999, p. 77). Testosterone then, becomes the object that it is through the ways in which it is enacted, and the web of relations in which it is held. This web, and the testosterone within it, is not singular but shifting, variable

131 Halberstam (1998a) elaborates the border wars between transsexual men and butch people. They undercut the discreet segmentation of butch/transsexual categories contingent on social and somatic relations to the gender body and self; that many identities express non-normative gender expressions and many people feel “dysphoric” about their bodies. 132 While this chapter only grapples with individual non-binary people’s navigation of testosterone as a “man’s hormone”, these logics permeate medical definitions of trans interventions. This has the potential to limit non- binary people’s access to medically monitored testosterone. As Preciado (2013, p. 257-258) notes: If I self-administer certain doses of testosterone and run the risk of increasing my facial pilosity and the size of my clitoris, and changing my voice and the size of my vocal fold, without identifying politically and socially as a man, I become, inevitably, nuts. I won’t be able to go directly to the pharmacy to get my doses of Testogel. I’ll have to ask D to send me one or two boxes from London or I’ll have to buy them on expressdrugstore.com, or on the sports black market, and must take what I’m given.

151 and multiple. Thinking about phenomena through an STS lens can provide us with a way to understand what testosterone is, and what it might become, when it is bound to the (il)logic of non-binary gender.

Non-binary testosterone use

Limiting non-binary testosterone use I now turn to the seven non-binary participants who navigated the association between masculinity, manhood and testosterone. According to these participants, online spaces are the central, and sometimes only location where trans people can access information, a sense of community, and the apparent range of viable encounters with testosterone. This trend has also been consistently found in academic research on trans experience (see for instance Horak, 2014; Marciano, 2014; Raun, 2012). These online spaces contain much of the material that informs how trans people perceive and understand themselves, their lives and their possible futures. This becomes quite pertinent when many of these spaces tend to assert the dominant conception of testosterone, of what it can do for and to trans bodies, and positions it as central to trans masculine gender. It was here that my participants encountered the dominant frame for testosterone use, as distilled masculinity, able to correct a trans man’s wrong body by producing a binary transition into manhood. This singular possibility, contingent upon testosterone being a man’s hormone, inhibited alternative possibilities for non-binary people, limiting their ability to think beyond testosterone as tied to masculinity and to consider their own use of testosterone to enact gendered changes.

Pike and Dillon were the two non-binary participants who articulated most explicitly the difficulties they experienced as non-binary people who desired testosterone. Like the vast majority of trans and non-binary people, Pike and Dillon both grappled with a host of social, medical and familial barriers in coming to use testosterone. Like many non-binary participants, they struggled to educate health professionals and their families on what non-binary identities are, and what gendered bodily interventions were possible for non-binary people. Many non-binary participants also struggled to establish what was likely to happen to their bodies when they undertook lower testosterone dose levels (although many also used “standard” testosterone regimes). What Pike and Dillon asserted as central to their difficulties was how to reconcile their own desire for, and orientation to, testosterone when they did not identify as trans men.

Dillon is a white genderqueer person who uses “they” pronouns and was twenty-two years old at the time

152 of the interview. Dillon talked fast, laughed easily and their aesthetics were delicately dapper. In discussing their exposure to trans testosterone users on the internet they told me that “testosterone was always associated with people who are like ‘no, I have always identified as being male and have always felt that way … even when I was a small child’”. Dillon’s exposure to the trans narrative asserted a valid testosterone user as a binary trans man who had experienced a male gender from childhood. As someone who felt neither attached to a male gender, nor a strong gender identification as male from childhood, Dillon felt unable to consider using testosterone.

Pike felt similarly to Dillon when first coming across testosterone. Pike was a gentle but enthusiastic talker, our conversation involved repeated interruptions followed by rapid apologies. Pike is Jewish, was twenty-two years old at the time of the interview, uses “they” pronouns and identifies as “nonbinary”. Pike told me that as someone who was not a trans man they “spent a lot of time assuming that there was no way of going on T, unless you were deciding that you wanted to make a … kind of binary transition. I didn’t want to… I’m not a trans man, and that had been all I had encountered previously”. While Dillon believed that one’s past must cohere with a male gender identification in order to use testosterone, Pike felt that their future must involve a desire for a binary transition into manhood to access the substance. As someone who did not desire to enact a binary transition into manhood Pike did not feel able to use testosterone.

Dillon and Pike’s expectations of who and what a trans testosterone user was flowed out from their experiences in predominantly online trans spaces. These spaces asserted trans testosterone users as binary-identified men who aimed to enact a binary transition. Testosterone’s position as a man’s hormone and its enmeshing with the historically and medically validated wrong body and trans narrative, has been absorbed into intra-trans discourse. In online spaces this has been used to implicitly and explicitly regulate the boundaries of who is a valid trans person and who can use testosterone for gendered bodily alterations.

Exi, is a white non-binary person based in Melbourne and identifies as being “disabled”. We huddled against their heater in the Melbourne winter as they discussed their feelings about their encounters with intra-trans regulation. They surmised their experiences in this way: “I got fed up with reading a lot of the resources [about testosterone use] because they aimed at a specific kind of narrative, I got really trutrans

153 truscum vibes from it”. Exi here is referring to the more extreme forms of inter-trans regulation, which has been known as “trutrans” and “truscum”. These trans people regulate and reject other trans and non- binary people who do not conform to strict notions of what it means to be trans, the criteria of which is attached to the trans and wrong body narratives. The vernacular critique expressed through the use of the terms trutrans and truscum reflects one site of negotiation around the wrong body narrative and the borders of a valid trans identity and experience within trans and non-binary spaces. It demonstrates the rolling ways in which trans and non-binary people take up or resist discursive norms and the colloquial terminology used to align themselves with, or reject, certain ideologies and subcultural attachments. For Exi, their experiences of discussions about testosterone, saturated with highly medicalised wrong body narratives resulted in their temporary self-removal from these spaces. They later reconnected to other online and offline support places and continue to navigate their relationship to testosterone in reflexive and strategic ways.

Testosterone is not just embedded within expectations of a binary transition, it is also central to online and the few offline trans masculine spaces. Alec, a queer white non-binary person, told me that “it’s almost like you couldn’t be part of this [community] unless you were already doing this [using testosterone], or intending on doing this anytime soon”. Charlie, a mixed race Indigenous, Chinese, Indian and Caucasian twenty-seven year old genderqueer person, also echoed this sentiment. They told me that there were “informal hierarchies – with those who were on T and transition[ed higher up] and those who hadn’t or weren’t [were lower down]”.

As Exi, Alec and Charlie’s experiences in online spaces illuminates, testosterone acts as a significant site for individual value in trans masculine spaces where it is deeply attached to the trans and wrong body narratives and binary transitions into manhood. Unsurprisingly, this intra- trans regulation and the strict criteria on who could and should access testosterone creates barriers for some non-binary people who may feel that their desires for testosterone are not valid. For Pike and Dillon, the attachment between testosterone, masculinity and binary male gender identity left them at a loss as to how to form their own connections to testosterone that did not require them to identify as binary trans men, or to pursue a binary transition.

154 The multiplicity of testosterone The result of understanding testosterone as only a treatment for trans men’s wrong bodies was that some non-binary participants had a great deal of difficulty envisioning themselves as being able to become testosterone users. To shift testosterone away from being only available to trans men, each non-binary participant had to find novel ways of extracting, detaching or circumnavigating the presumed naturalised relationship between men, masculinity and testosterone. Considering how deeply the social and cultural attachments are between these elements, it is unsurprising that for many of my participants this process continued for numerous years. While each user enacted unique ways around, through or athwart this barrier the following section attends closely to Dillon and Pike’s navigation of this enmeshment. Mol’s (1999, p. 75) work on ontological multiplicity where “reality does not precede the mundane practices in which we interact with it, but is rather shaped within these practices”, evidences how different enactments are “multiple forms of reality. Itself.” (p. 77). Pike and Dillon encountered the multiplicity of testosterone, stretching out the potentials for testosterone to be something other than a means to enact a binary transition into manhood.

Dillon spent hours canvassing the Internet, reading forums, scientific papers and books, and watching YouTube clips on trans masculinity and testosterone prior to considering their own use. Despite Dillon’s strong desire to not be “gendered female by other people” they felt that they didn’t “qualify to be allowed testosterone” because they were not a binary trans man and they hadn’t felt themselves to be male from childhood. Through Dillon’s online exploration, they also came across other practices with testosterone, namely bodybuilding practices. As discussed in Chapter Two- bodybuilding practices were gaining popular media attention during similar moments as trans masculine practices with testosterone were emerging in abundance. As also discussed in Chapter Two the rhetoric around steroid enhanced bodybuilding practices can also align quite closely with trans masculine practices in terms of the attribution of masculinity to testosterone, and the drive to alter the body in “masculine” ways.

Dillon attended closely to the “hyper” masculinity of these spaces and their use of steroids. They said with derision and humour that bodybuilders “were like ‘yeah T dose I’m going to get super jacked’ …you know ‘yeah take your dude juice’133 or whatever… I was like this is ridiculous”. Dillon also emphasized the

133 There has been extensive research conducted into the gendering of drugs (including steroids) (see Halkitis, Moeller, & DeRaleau, 2008; Irni, 2016; Keane, 2005; Measham, 2002).

155 specific use of testosterone, saying that bodybuilders use testosterone as a “drug, people who were treating it as a drug, like a performance enhancing kind of thing”. In emphasising testosterone as a “drug” and as a “performance enhancing kind of thing”, Dillon draws on doping discourses that frame exogenous testosterone use as dangerous, unhealthy and illegal.134

While the masculinity that Dillon so closely attends too resonates with some of the ways that trans masculine spaces uphold testosterone as a “magic drug”,135 the use of testosterone as a “drug” is deeply opposed to a “treatment” paradigm for the wrong body present within trans masculine discourse. Dillon also situates testosterone use by bodybuilders as “performance enhancing”, something divergent from trans masculine testosterone rhetoric. Further, while steroid-using bodybuilders apparently intend to cultivate an intense muscularity, trans masculine users apparently aim towards the cultivation of a male body. Both intentions are highly attached to masculinity and the formation of certain bodies but they are not identical, at least to Dillon. Dillon’s encounters with bodybuilding steroid use evidences a group of people using testosterone in a way that, while remaining highly attached to masculinity, is still outside of the wrong body narrative and binary transitions. For Dillon, this creates a kind of micro-dislocation; an initial movement away from trans masculine testosterone use and into bodybuilding testosterone use. This opens the cracks in the possibilities of testosterone away from its use to enact a binary transition into manhood.

Dillon’s encounters with cis men’s bodybuilding practices allowed them to consider their testosterone use, tied to gender but not defined by a binary gender transition. Testosterone used by bodybuilders was not the only “version” of testosterone that Dillon encountered. During their period of researching testosterone, Dillon had several conversations with different trans people in their life, some of whom were trans women. Through these conversations about testosterone, Dillon determined that “trans women [whose bodies produce high levels of endogenous testosterone] are still women. So, like you can have feminine testosterone I suppose”. In combination with testosterone used by bodybuilders and testosterone used by trans men, Dillon began to experience testosterone multiply and therefore less rigidly.

In thinking with Mol’s (1999) work on ontological multiplicity we can understand these different

134 For a discussion of some this rhetoric see Beauchamp (2013). 135 This specific phrasing was used by two participants in the interviews.

156 enactments of testosterone as three separate, intertwined and non-determined testosterones: “bodybuilding testosterone”, “feminine testosterone” and “trans men’s testosterone”. Feminine testosterone is present in trans women’s bodies, but does not define their genders. Trans men’s testosterone is deeply tied to gender, a binary gender identity and a binary gender transition. Bodybuilding testosterone, at least according to Dillon, is drenched in normative masculinity and is a drug used to enhance performance and increase musculature. The multiplicity of testosterone, its flows of attachment to different bodies and its emergence through specific practices, allows a destabilisation of the inherent attachment between men, masculinity and testosterone. There are multiple and varied, although overlapping and attached, possibilities that are made available when encountering the different forms of testosterone. As Dillon sees testosterone in its variability, and as existing beyond trans men’s transition practices, they can also begin to engage with testosterone in ways that do not yield a binary transition into manhood. With testosterone as variable, the possibilities for encounters with it and of who Dillon might become with testosterone stretches and multiplies. It unfolds new ways for Dillon to be, as someone who no longer wants to be read as a female but who does not want to be/come a man.

Pike too capitalised on the multiplicity and increased availability of testosterone, albeit in a substantially different manner. Pike, like Dillon, had significant issues reconciling their desire to use testosterone because of their non-binary identity. They told me that they felt that testosterone was only available to people who wished to make a “binary transition” as a “trans man” and that as someone who was not a trans man, or overly attached to masculinity, Pike was not able to use testosterone. While grappling with their gender identity, Pike was also struggling with the symptoms of endometriosis, a condition where uterine-like cells grow in parts of the body outside of the uterus. Pike was diagnosed with this condition in their late teens and spent a long period of time attempting to prevent the debilitating pain they experienced when they menstruated.

After undergoing some (subsequently unsuccessful) surgery for their endometriosis in their late teens, Pike came across a Facebook group where someone who was both non-binary and had endometrioses was successfully using small amounts of testosterone to address both their gender dysphoria and their endometriosis. Until this point, Pike had only come across exogenous testosterone used by trans men to enact a binary gender transition and had never heard of using testosterone to treat endometriosis. This new form of testosterone was substantially different to trans men’s testosterone and offered them

157 possibilities for addressing their endometriosis as well as their gender.

Testosterone for trans men and testosterone for women with endometriosis are two separate albeit very proximate “testosterones”. This division occurs at multiple highly gendered sites. Testosterone for trans men is for men, it is a male hormone that is intended to enact a binary gender shift in the body from female into male. Testosterone to treat endometriosis a reluctant possibility for cis women, and is solely intended to prevent the symptoms associated with endometriosis through preventing ovulation and menstruation.136 While both are framed as “treatments”, the impacts of testosterone use is highly attached to the outside body for trans men, while for endometriosis the site of affect is the internal body. As will be discussed in a moment, any shifts to the visible gendered body when treating endometriosis for women is deemed a risk and a side effect to be managed.

The gendered segregation in treatment can be seen in the material attachments surrounding each form of testosterone. The standard hormone regime for trans men is intra-muscular injections every fourteen days or every three months, while for endometriosis the daily application of creams or gels are the recommended regimen. While creams and gels often positioned socially as more feminine amongst the testosterone creams, there are further gendered stratifications. For instance, a more recent form of testosterone delivered in a cream explicitly genders their testosterones. The lower percentage testosterone cream is called Androfeme (emphasis added), and its packaging is pink, while the higher percentage testosterone creams are called Androforte, and is either blue or dark blue.137

These material differences separate the kinds of substances that these testosterones are, the subjects emerging with its use, and the boundaries on who is able to use them. It upholds the binary sex-gender system that separates men and women through articulating divergent testosterones; one that can encounter women and one that remains with men. As Latham (2017b, p. 187) states, “one cannot be both” male and female, man and woman, and these structures attempt to hold apart these always potentially colliding

136 Cis women also have histories of using testosterone as a sports doping practice. See Chapter Two for a discussion of cis women athletes using exogenous testosterone and the ways that the fluidity of women’s genders and bodies in sports become a site of heightened cultural anxiety and scrutiny. 137 For an image of the order form of testosterone cream with the gendered colour differences see Appendix 5. I received a copy of this order form when I was discussing alternative testosterone administration options (for my experiments with testosterone) with my endocrinologist. My endocrinologist did not know about my self- directed testosterone regime changes.

158 testosterones, the fluidity of all sex-gendered bodies and ameliorates the possible risks attached to any contact between men’s hormones and women’s bodies.

Risk here is central to this division. Irni (2017) and Beauchamp (2013) discuss the processes of medical and bureaucratic regulation designed to prevent the use of testosterone by women. While Beauchamp (2013) attends to the sports doping and cross border penetration between the U.S. and Mexico, Irni (2017) attends to sports doping as well as testosterone as a viable but not recommended treatment for menopausal and post-menopausal symptoms in cis women. These regulatory systems have been designed to prevent and limit the possibility of women’s masculinisation in the context of sports and medicine. Beauchamp (2013) and Irni (2017) assert that fundamental to these regulatory mechanisms is the need to prevent evidence of the precarity and vulnerability of the West’s binary sex-gender system.

Irni (2017), in a remarkably similar context to Pike’s experience of endometriosis, shows how medical systems in Finland are extremely reluctant to prescribe testosterone to treat menopausal and post- menopausal symptoms in women because of fears of masculinisation. This is despite evidence suggesting its higher efficacy and significantly lower risk of side effects (other than masculinisation) compared to other treatments that involve “female sex hormones” (Irni, 2017, p. 120). In treating women for either menopausal symptoms or endometriosis, testosterone administration is deemed too risky to a binary sex- gender system because only women experience endometriosis or menopause and testosterone is a hormone only for men. The potential to alter the gendered aesthetics of the body of cis women is deemed such a risk that less effective and more dangerous treatments are privileged over testosterone use.

Despite being assigned female at birth, trans men are permitted testosterone because, as we have already seen, it is a means to rectify a wrong body and to align it with an internal (binary) gender identity as a man. And yet providing testosterone for assigned female at birth trans people has its own constraining structures. In enforcing psychological and medical barriers, including the wrong body narrative, or the “real life” test, only those people who assert a specific kind of trans subjectivity and experience can access medical intervention (Irni, 2017, p. 115). The specificities of these regulatory processes vary from clinician, to state, to country but are broadly tied to the minimisation of the disruption to a sex-gender binary.

159 Crucial to Pike’s accessing testosterone was the complex and overlapping entanglement between their endometriosis and their gender dysphoria. For instance, when talking about menstruating they said, “you know I’ve always felt dysphoric around having periods, but you know in addition they’ve always been really painful and made me… really mentally unwell and really physically unwell”. Here Pike’s experience of their period aroused strong experiences of gender dysphoria, which they often discussed as extreme disassociation. It also felt extremely painful because of their endometriosis. Menstruation produced at the same time mental and physical un-wellness because of the intersection of gender dysphoria and endometriosis. Throughout their interview they rarely spoke about one without the other, reflecting for Pike the deep enmeshing of their endometriosis and their gender dysphoria. This overlap allowed an openness to accessing testosterone through the treatment of endometriosis which was also facilitated by, rather than inhibited by, the disruption to the sex-gender binary associated with the administration of testosterone to “female” people.

Pike’s overlapping experiences between their endometriosis and their gender was not the only feature that permitted their access to testosterone within a treatment frame for endometriosis. Crucial was the specificity of their desires for the gendered effects of testosterone and the method through which they felt they could access those effects. Pike was less interested in aesthetic changes that might take place through testosterone use, than affecting an emotional and psychological break with cis womanhood. In fact, they were actively concerned about the possibility of beginning to look too much like a (trans) man on testosterone. Because of this concern, and the possibility of quick changes to their body’s appearance, they were content to be prescribed testosterone gel within a system for treating endometriosis. They told me that this helped them because the “gel is slower acting” and they felt more able to control its effects. They also said this “feels less dramatic or gendered to the medical establishment”, which was one of the motivating factors for their GP’s prescription of the gel. Here then Pike’s desires for the effects of testosterone align neatly with the administration of testosterone for endometriosis, and they were not forced to sacrifice an intervention into their gender dysphoria.

In accessing testosterone through endometriosis to treat their gender dysphoria as well as their illness, Pike could rework the apparent gender disrupting risks associated with giving “women” testosterone. Rather than a risk, testosterone gel’s gentle masculinisation became one of Pike’s intentions for its use. It became a way to shift their gendered body and gendered experiences away from cis womanhood. In co-

160 opting this risk, Pike also blurs the highly cultivated boundaries between the two testosterones erected by medical and social systems. It became a means to treat endometriosis as a “woman’s illness”, and to disrupt the binary sex-gender system; to confirm Pike’s experiences as not a cis woman and to effect some gender bodily alterations. Accessing testosterone away from trans men’s wrong bodies allowed Pike to eke out a new bodily and affective reality. One where the effects of their gender dysphoria and their endometriosis could be somewhat ameliorated, no longer so negatively affecting their capacity to be active and present within their own life.

Shifting non-binary relationships to testosterone A few participants used a non-binary identity as a way to validate their testosterone use, asserting that they desired testosterone because of their identification as non-binary, sometimes asserting the use of testosterone as a way to effect certain changes that they felt made their bodies more “non-binary”. Speaking within the current terms of discourse, negotiated between trans medicine and transgender and transsexual activists, is a strategic way to understand the self, to communicate that understanding to others, and to justify one’s desires for gendered bodily alterations. However, some participants, while including non-binary identification as one partial way to validate testosterone use, did not rely solely on this justification as a means of forming a use-based relationship with testosterone. Rather, these participants re-negotiated the terms of use of gendered body alterations and re-worked the relation between their bodies, their genders and the testosterone they desired. With testosterone, they unmade their genders, decentred an internal identification and articulated testosterone use as a practice.

Gender is unmade Trans people’s use of testosterone within the wrong body narrative is framed as an intention to enact a gendered body shift from being read, understood and treated as women into being read, understood and treated as men.138 This intention is productive, it is making or confirming a male gender. Both Dillon and Pike mark a substantial and significant break with testosterone use shaped by the wrong body narrative because their desires to use testosterone were not productive, they were not creating or confirming their genders. Instead Pike and Dillon were unmaking their genders.

138 This can also be seen in the use of “to” in Female to Male (FTM).

161 Having encountered testosterone use beyond a binary transition into manhood, Dillon could begin to consider their own relationship to testosterone. They tell me that they had always felt a “deep like all- encompassing discomfort with being gendered female by other people” and that the desirable effects of taking testosterone would be to produce “a deeper voice or whatever the obvious markers of people being read not female”. For Dillon, taking testosterone was entirely about being able to “occupy some kind of physical presence in this world as not being read as female”. Dillon repeatedly frames their desires in opposition. They articulate discomfort in having been read as female, not a desire to be read (or born) as male. They desire physical markers of being “not female” like a deeper voice, rather than desiring markers of masculinity or manhood. They assert the need for their future body to be “not read as female”, not the need for their future self to be read as a man. Dillon does not frame testosterone use as a way to produce a male gender, or any gender at all. For Dillon testosterone is being used to unmake their gender.

Pike, in a similar vein to Dillon, wanted to move away from being associated with women. They told me that one of their main intentions for their testosterone use was to make a “really dramatic break with cis womanhood”.139 For Dillon, their desires for testosterone were to oppose their assignation of female, to no longer be read as female, but where being read as a man is an acceptable albeit incidental state. For Pike, their need to break with cis womanhood did not centre their body’s appearance, and how it was received by others, they repeatedly expressed their concerns about testosterone bringing their appearance uncomfortably close to (trans) manhood. Testosterone use for Pike is about their emotional and psychological discomfort with the presumption of their womanhood. Their break was an internal experience, a rejection of cis womanhood through low level testosterone use. It is a way to validate for themselves the sense of their gender as not a cis woman. Pike wanted to shift away from their assigned sex at birth but this shift did not need to be written on the body.

Dillon continually reiterated their desires for testosterone in opposition to being read as a female, while Pike asserted a need for testosterone to break their forced relation to womanhood. Dillon and Pike use testosterone to remove themselves from their enforced sex-gender, but it was a use intended to oppose. They do not speak of creating or confirming, shifting into their gender, rather they speak of rejecting or unmaking their assigned and enforced sex-genders. They used testosterone to jump into the gender void,

139 Pike’s intentions also echo Preciado’s (2013, p137) use of testosterone and their aim to “try to cut one of the wires attaching me to the cultural program of feminization in which I grew up”.

162 but they had no intention of coming out the other side.

Identity is decentred What also became evident in some non-binary participants’ discussions of their testosterone use was a notable shift away from thinking about testosterone as a means to externalise an internal identity. As we saw with Pike and Dillon, neither desired an attachment to manhood through using testosterone, even as they worked to move away from cis womanhood or being read as female. Further, neither Pike nor Dillon grafted a non-binary identity onto the logic of making an internal gender identity visible on the external body. They did not discuss testosterone as a way to enact a move from one gender as female/women into another as non-binary, or as a way to manifest an external body that matched their internal gender.

Grey, a deep thinking fast talking non-binary Chinese Australian, who was twenty-four years old at the time of the interview and uses “they” pronouns, had a slightly different orientation to their desire for testosterone than Pike or Dillon. While Dillon desired to be read as not female, and Pike wanted to make a break with cis womanhood, Grey felt that testosterone might alleviate some negative feelings they had about their body. They said that they were “experience[ing] dysphoria … like voice dysphoria … and getting your period …[and] I came to the conclusion that it [testosterone] would probably help me”.

The use of dysphoria by Grey is interesting here. Conventionally dysphoria is used to denote the psychological and emotional effects, the pain and distress, that results from a misalignment between the internal sense of one’s gender and the incorrect external opposite sexed body. But Grey does not identify as a man and they were not using testosterone to look like one. Grey did not aspire to make a binary transition into manhood and their pain, their dysphoria, did not arise from this particular incongruence. What initially seems like an identical set of logics appears instead to be a shared sense of affect, of discomfort and pain. Grey uses “dysphoria” to articulate an amorphous sense of bodily discomfort. It is a shared and easily communicable discourse around trans experience and becomes a way for Grey to centre their pain and to quickly validate their impetus to change their body with testosterone.

When Grey spoke of their desire to alleviate their dysphoria, their bodily pain, they, like Pike and Dillon, also did not speak about using testosterone to produce a non-binary body. While Grey desired to alter and affect their body with testosterone, it was not to become a man and it was not to become non-binary.

163 Rather Grey desired to enact alterations to certain features of their (gendered) body – specifically its capacities (voice) and functions (menstruation).140 Grey, like Pike and Dillon, sought out new ways to facilitate a more comfortable relationship with the body, new potentials for learning the sensorium of the body, but one that was not held quite so tightly by the scaffolds of a binary sex-gender system.

Testosterone as a practice The non-binary people discussed in this chapter shifted testosterone use away from being a means to externalise an internal gender, to correct a wrong body, and towards testosterone use as a practice. Dillon indicates this shift when speaking of cis male bodybuilding spaces. In finding themselves not wanting to use testosterone in the way they understood bodybuilders to use testosterone, they said “I guess [I found] something a little bit recuperative in being like ‘yeah but I’m doing me and that’s also fine’”. While possibly an incidental colloquialism, Dillon, in their “doing me” and being “fine”, articulates an anti-climactic culmination of their encounters with bodybuilding and indicates a new way of thinking about their relationship to testosterone. As a significant shift away from static identities and a singular being, this “doing me” instead centres action and practice. It emphasises a “self” defined through movement, rather than a self as tethered to definable containable qualities. The decentring of identity and attuning to a doing sense of self allows for a permeability, a rapid change of course if required, and an openness to future possibilities.

While the vast majority of non-binary interviewees had come out as non-binary in some way to certain sections of their social or familial spheres one participant, Frankie came out in a substantially different way. Frankie is white, was twenty-six years old at the time of the interview, uses “they” pronouns, and when asked to write down an identity wrote “non-binary (trans masculine femme)”. Frankie’s initial experiences with their gender involved them spending a great deal of time trying to figure out what they were, they told me that they were “trying to figure out… the identity thing like what I might be as a result of what I was feeling”. After a number of years of engaging with their gender, and struggling with finding

140 This framing by Grey is a convenient example of the messiness of positioning and crafting oneself in relation to discourses and practices. While Grey is using testosterone beyond the wrong body narrative, they are also using testosterone as a treatment. A treatment for bodily discomfort. The idea of shifting from a treatment frame to a practice frame does not mean we entirely leave behind testosterone as a treatment, but it does situate it as a possible site to jump off from, a position to exist in opposition to, or a touchstone for some elements of ourselves that sit most comfortably within this logic.

164 a term to describe their gender identity, they began a period of testosterone use. Discussing the early stages of their testosterone use and their ongoing negotiation of their gendered experience, Frankie told me that “I never came out in terms of gender stuff; I have come out as a testosterone user”. This is a deep disruption of the expectation that one will come out, will confess the truth of oneself, assert oneself as something definable, as an identity and a category. Their method of coming out illuminates a rather novel undercutting of the contemporary investment in the notion of a true and static inner self, something that contemporary identity politics heavily relies upon.

Critiques of an internal truth to be confessed was a central concern of Foucault’s (1978/1990) History of sexuality volume 1. Foucault (1978/1990) argues that rather than being released in the process of confession, one becomes subjected to regulatory power, a power that itself, as Judith Butler (2005, p. 75) succinctly summarises, “produces the subject as one who is obligated to tell the truth about his or her desire”. The confession is central to trans experience as a means to declare to others one’s internal true self. Crucially, the assertion of the discrepancy between one’s internal true self and one’s incorrect body is the first step in justifying access to hormones and other gendered medical interventions (Pyne, 2017, p. 105).

Frankie, in coming out as a “testosterone user”, has not come out as non-binary, or genderqueer, or trans. Frankie instead has come out as and with a practice, a practice of using testosterone. Frankie wanted to use testosterone because of their “gender stuff” and they felt it was important to share these new encounters with those around them. And yet, they chose to share that they were using testosterone, not that they existed as a particular thing, or that they had a clear internal state. Frankie turns away from internal identity categories’ apparent dictation of action, or the production of certain actions resulting from being a particular kind of self. Instead Frankie centralises the practice of testosterone use in their coming out, they come out as and with this practice. Testosterone for Frankie shifts away from being a treatment for a wrong body and rather becomes a highly relevant and significant feature of Frankie’s self- in-action and their relation to others (coming out is of course mostly relevant in the presence of others). It is not a solid identity category that Frankie asserts, as any one particular thing, but rather they assert themselves as formed through and with the practice of testosterone use.

165 Conclusion Non-binary people can and do have practical difficulties in accessing testosterone within a medical system that understands trans experience as binary, although there appears to be some shifts, for some people, in some spaces. Equally importantly however are non-binary people’s own self construction and the capacity to situate a non-binary gender identity coherently alongside an understanding of testosterone, a substance that has been understood as tightly attached to masculinity, manhood and the wrong body narrative. To form selves that allow for an exploration of testosterone use, non-binary people have to find new ways to think of and with testosterone beyond this association. They navigate novel relationships to testosterone and its use that does not merely shift the logics of the wrong body narrative, externalising a non-binary identity onto the body, aligning the external with the internal. Rather, through their interactions with testosterone, they shift away from gender identities and towards the potential for testosterone to unmake one’s gender, to feel better in one’s body and to assert testosterone as a practice. These new intimacies with testosterone not only allow non-binary people access to a substance that they desire, but they also shift what testosterone is and what it is able to do, it becomes a gender unmaker, a means to re-sensorialise the body and to practice one’s gender. These new ways of enacting the self and testosterone do not hurl the self into the depths of masculinity and manhood. Rather, testosterone as a practice allows people to creatively and experimentally craft new ways to enact selves and bodies and to look towards new kinds of futures.

166 Vignettes

A return to injections

Day One Hundred and Forty-Nine After all the work of getting the testosterone gel script and regretfully changing my Medicare sex so I can afford filling it, this morning I’ve decided to go back to injections, at least for a little bit (at least that’s what I tell myself). I think my body shape has changed, becoming wider at the hips and smaller at the shoulders. It could be because of all the jogging I’m doing but it could also be the lower absorption levels from the gel. I feel sad about the potential loss of the ability to cry.

I do my first injection. When I look at the needle of testosterone, I feel that upwelling of connection and pleasure. It’s something about the liquid, its consistency, mellifluous, like honey but clear. It’s beautiful. I didn’t think I would feel this way, still so attached. I never felt that way about gel, even as it was a smoother and softer experience.

The injection is more painful, it feels like the needle is blunt. I try not to think that it hurts so much because I haven’t had one for so long. When I pull out the injection I realise why, dark thick blood rises out of the insertion site, I’ve gone through a vein. The blood runs down my skin in a red tear drop. My body cries, but I’m not sure why. Perhaps its sadness that this connection to testosterone hasn’t been maintained, or that I’m having to force a needle into my muscle again.

I start weights again. I hate starting weights again, I dread it, loathe it, but it’s the quickest way to get back to the body I like. I make myself do then, and it’s better than I had feared. It’s not so much that I can do more weights, at this point on my higher testosterone level the effects wont kick in for a little bit. It’s that weights feel good, the energy, the movement of the heavy load, the flexing of my muscles all sing harmoniously. Running suddenly feels very difficult on higher testosterone. On the lower levels I felt like I could run forever, on a higher dose I feel like I’m dragging my body along the footpath. When my body matches the activity it vibrates with energy, when it doesn’t its nails on a chalk board, a grinding misplaced gear shift. Both are still possible, it might still work, but it sure doesn’t feel good.

167 Conclusion

Withdrawing the syringe

Trans transitioning and trans gender “journeys” are often situated as processes that end. Perhaps it begins with the discovery of the self, coming out to friends and family and the social recognition of one’s felt gender. Perhaps it is tied purely to physical changes; the movement through (seemingly endless) medical appointments, bloods drawn, injections given, bodily changes made. Sometimes the transition trajectory is located only within physical changes; beginning when the syringe is withdrawn from the skin. But as trans transitioning and trans travels are seen to begin, so they are understood to end.141 Usually with coherence: an alignment between the body and the mind, or the internal self and the social self, or the social self and the legal or bureaucratic self. But elaborating and experimenting with the ways one wants to be (gendered) in the world never really concludes in any neat fashion. Three weeks before the submission of this thesis, and eight years since starting testosterone, I found myself waiting for two hours at Births, Deaths and Marriages to try to change my legal name (again), a process I had been avoiding for the past two years. It seemed immanent in the shadow of my looming thesis submission date and the last-minute panic about the possible confusion between my social name and my legal and bureaucratic name: a difference I should have been used to after my third name change. After choosing my most recent name – Rillark – my family jokingly asked me if this was the last time they would have to start using a different name for me (something they are getting quite skilled at). I took the question seriously and said that it might not be; that I am no longer interested in guaranteeing any particular future-self to others, or expecting others to do the same for me. The world seems too variable for that; too unclear and too full of potential to try to lock myself, and those around me, into assuming a coherence of self.

As I refuse to tie myself up neatly for others, this thesis can also never be fully and neatly concluded. While it may be an ending of one aspect of my life and work, the bounding of one object or one process, it is also another beginning; another potential (for me and this thesis) to evolve into something else. This

141 I am often asked, “When did you transition?” as if my ongoing testosterone use, or my gendered exploration, or my self is not always shifting and changing. At the same time, in a strange inverse, I am often told that trans people always aim towards a body that they never achieve, and that dysphoria “never goes away” (Chu & Harsin Drager, 2019, p. 104). Both suggest a static-ness of transition and of being trans, as either ending after transition or always held in a place of “essential” trans-being. Neither presumptions recognise the ongoing ways that bodies always change (with health, age, social settings) and are always felt in different ways in different moments.

168 thesis was always designed to have an impact on the lives of those it concerns: trans people who use exogenous testosterone and/or who identify with trans masculinity. To do so it will first need to evolve, in terms of form, language, or accessibility, and it will certainly look different to those who receive it. But it will carry the ideas and imperatives elaborated in this thesis forward and this conclusion aims to summarise some of those experiments with the self.

Trans identities and practices, as well as exogenous testosterone used for trans treatment, are largely situated as static. Be it a kind of trans-historical account of trans experience that situates trans people as having “always existed”, even as they have come into being via encounters with medical technologies (see Hausman, 1995). Or a notion of individual trans people having always experienced dysphoria: the negative affect of a discrepancy between the gendered mind and the sexed body (as seen in the DSM-IV, 2013). Testosterone and its administration is also situated as static; a way to align the body and rectify dysphoria through a chemical phenomenon that is always one and the same. Solving the wrong body is tied to both Cartesian models of self-hood and trans people and patients’ relations with medicine and medical authority. These approaches reinforce and rely upon the apparent unitary nature of testosterone and trans identity, and as a result limit trans gender and testosterone possibilities and realities.

But as STS demonstrates, all phenomena are stabilised and made durable by “the material associations and practical relations that transform contingent relations among heterogeneous entities” (Race, 2019, p. 1). Trans identities, practices and hormones are made coherent and singular through trans medicine, institutions and regulatory practices (to name just a few), validated by the apparent objectivity of medical authority (Latham, 2017a, 2017b). But reality is “done and enacted” (Mol, 1999, p. 77, emphasis in original); it is an emergence of material and discursive encounters and flows. In the making of fluid realities, trans phenomena, identities and chemicals cannot always be enacted unitarily, they are also variable, multiple and formed in action.

Trans identities and trans testosterone are multiple, emerging through the intra-actions amongst phenomena, arising from experimentations with selves, bodies, drugs and technologies. Trans phenomena and their emergence are deeply entwined with histories and contemporary practices of subcultural experimentation and fugitive (often digital) pedagogies. As seen in Chapter Two, these experimental practices are evident in early Western trans masculine histories, arising in the 1990s and

169 early 2000s. Trans masculinity emerged in attachment to bodybuilding and drag king subcultures, and with experiments into the performativity of gender and the malleable materiality of the body effected by pharmacological substances. Shifts in transgender politics and activism also played notable roles and resulted in increased possibilities for people assigned female at birth to explore embodied and enacted genders beyond womanhood. Trans subcultural practices have also been indebted to feminist and HIV medical activism of the 1970s, 80s and 90s, themselves defined by intense moments of counter-cultural experimentation with bodies, drugs, networks of care, pedagogies and pharmacologies (see Epstein, 1996; Race, 2018). These earlier experiments in survival and resistance created contexts and models for trans masculine activism to encounter medicine and to lay claim to and assert the need for more accessible pathways to medicalised bodily intervention, at least in Australia. In unearthing the experimental historical activism taking place in trans masculine counterpublics, and their implication in the emergence of contemporary trans identities, I have provided a basis for destabilising the regulatory nature of dominant accounts that associate the legitimacy of trans identities solely with trans medicine. In destabilising these dominant accounts I hope to increase the possibilities, and potential variability of trans gendered bodily interventions, both now and in the future.

Contemporary subcultural experimentations are also evident in digital trans spaces, discussed in Chapter Four, where collective and creative encounters between trans people, audio- visual technologies, testosterone and medicine can be seen to enact transitions’ effects, rather than merely document them. This is a form of somatic-ontological experimentation that is not (only) a means to correct the wrong body with testosterone. It is also a series of practices that emerge with modes of attending to the body, the experience of the body (one might say bodies) in time, and the formation of ‘good’ attachments with the body. Medicine and especially medical technologies like testosterone are vital to this process but crucially they are not the singular constituents of transition.

They emerge with the body, attention, time and audio-visual technologies to form transition as a specific kind of phenomenon. It is not a singular teleological process but a co-constituted, non- determined – although not infinite – process of becoming. This is likely only one of the ways that transition emerges, and an exploration of other possibilities of transition’s emergence, in different moments, different places and with different phenomena, can lead to the proliferation of trans (and cis) possibilities of sex-gender and gendered bodily alterations.

170

Chapters One and Five also evidence the lack of seamlessness of testosterone as a singular pharmacological hormonal object, separated from history and from practices. As was evident from Chapter One, testosterone has been embedded within different discursive nexuses, different human groups and individuals, and with different practices and materials over time. It has emerged in its particularity through the negotiations of science, medicine and cultural norms of gender, sexuality and race, which have formed it as a specific kind of fluid object.

Chapter Five, likewise, demonstrates the multiplicity of practices and experiments with testosterone through elaborating testosterone’s use by non-binary participants. Non-binary encounters with testosterone unmake gender, decentre identity and enact testosterone use as a practice. These experiments disrupt the wrong body narrative as an internal/external discrepancy and position gender as no longer something that one is or that one must be. In doing so testosterone’s identity as a male hormone is also destabilised, as much as the identities of its users elude easy categorisation. In its messy enactments testosterone is no longer unitary; it is trans women’s “feminine” testosterone, “trans masculine” testosterone, “body-building” testosterone and testosterone to treat endometriosis. It, like all medical practices and objects (see Mol, 1999, 2002), exists multiply; in overlap and contradiction, in friction and in flow. And testosterone exists in these ways despite attempts to contain or stabilise it, or the identities of those who wish to use it. The open-ended nature of these experiments can be attributed to the fact that non-binary practices currently exist closer to the edges of dominant discourse. But existing at the edge is often a strenuous counter-cultural practice that can have substantial tolls on non-binary individuals. The possibilities of non-gendering, or the further proliferation of gendering, of testosterone, bodies and medicalised interventions must be embraced if the radical potential of non-binary practices and experiments into gender is to be realised without extensive individual tolls being extracted.

In approaching trans phenomena as variable, open experiments with the body and self, the hold of medical authority over trans gendered lives, worlds and bodily possibilities is challenged and disrupted. These dynamics can be seen in Chapter Three where dysphoria is currently situated as the definitional feature of trans experience, where it must be articulated to such a degree that bodily intervention (for those who desire it) becomes an acceptable course of action (Heyes & Latham, 2018). In this singular focus lies the problem of instituting a politics of trans ressentiment; an attachment of the trans person to being ‘unwell’

171 and reinforcing the subordination of trans/gender/sexuality to trans medicine. But in situating dysphoria as an emergent phenomenon attached to encounters with attention to the body, the potential of the body, and hope for a different future, dysphoria can be extracted from the realm of sex-gender discrepancy. No longer the defining feature of trans existence, this reconfiguration of experiences of dysphoria dislodges trans people from their automatic subordination to trans medicine. Dysphoria as emergent can become one tool to describe bodily experiences that can never be fully contained or defined, while also offering a framework to ground experiments into the trans body and self that aim to create a better kind of self- world.

Testosterone practices and trans identities are multiple; never entirely bound by trans medicine, intra- trans discourse or specific ways of being and doing trans gender. Where STS has elaborated significant methods for attending to the stability and consolidation of medical and technological realities, just as significant for trans (and queer) studies is the proliferation and multiplication of trans identities, practices and experiments – the destabilization of reductive realities (Race, 2019). Drawing on insights and approaches from STS, as well as the critical and destabilising force of trans and queer studies, this thesis has attempted to develop new approaches and resources for what Stone (1987/2006, p. 232) once referred to as a “revision[ing]” of transsexual lives. We must take hold of an approach to trans phenomena that proliferates practices and identities, experiments with the body, selves, technologies and others in ways that create new and better possibilities for the liveability of trans lives.

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196 Appendices

Appendix 1- Interview plan

• Introduction o Consent forms and information about legality o Demographics sheer o Outline of what we will cover • First experiences with testosterone and trans masculinity o Discussion of their initial experiences with the trans masculine community and when they first came across testosterone o When did you first started to think about your gender? And transition? What was community like then? • Drawing task- draw your relationship to testosterone

• Testosterone experiences o Discuss the process of deciding to go on testosterone § The process, emotions, thoughts, feelings, medical processes § Learning the technique of self-injection?? § What kind of t did you use? And why? Did this effect your experience of going on T? § Have you ever ‘traded’ T? § Have you ever used black market T? o When you first found out about what T would do to you/a body, did it make you think differently about your own? o What did you expect to happen on T? Was this accurate? § How did you notice testosterone’s changes taking place? Was that a different experience of the body? § Were there things that you noticed more or less intensely during testosterone use? And did these occur at different times or places? o How in control of the process did you feel? o Do/did you know what your T levels are? o Why did you/do you plan to stop using? o Do/did you think about T as part or not part of you?

197 § Does this feeling change? If so when/where? - How do you feel about the changes to your body re above answer? § Did you think this was how you would feel before taking T? - How do you think about your ‘self’ in relation to taking T? • Intimate networks

o Did your experiences with friends or family change when you started T? o Have you noticed changes to your erotic or intimate life after starting T? o What role do you think T played in that? o Are there occasions where that is different?

Appendix 2- Participant demographics

Race/culture:

• 18/30: White (All ‘white Australian’ except, one Jewish, one ‘NZ European’, and one ‘(white) Irish’) • 12/30: Argentinian born Australian, Greek and Italian Australian, Maltese Australian, Chinese Australian (2), ‘living/experiencing life as a non-white person’, Filipino and Australian, Middle Eastern/Anglo Australian, mixed race, Indigenous, Chinese, Indian (Caucasian) and ‘Sri Lankan ethnicity’

Age:

• 20/30 were 20-29 years old • 5/30 were 30-39 years old • 2/30 were 40-49 years old • 2/30 were 50-59 years old • 1/30 were 60-69 years old

Education:

• 25/30 having completed or completing a bachelor level university degree • 5/30 include apprenticeship, TAFE qualification (3) and Year 12 certificate (1)

198 Testosterone use:

• 29/30 currently or previously having used testosterone • 1/30 never used testosterone

• Average time on testosterone was just over two and a half years, with a range of a few weeks to twenty years on testosterone

Gender identity:

• 16/30 included non-binary or genderqueer as a part of their gender identification • 8/30 as ‘male’ or ‘man’ • 6/30 identify as trans man or trans masculine

Current residence:

• 19/30 Sydney, Australia • 4/30 Melbourne • 1/30 Canberra • 5/30 rural or regional locations • 2/30 ‘N.S.W.’

• 11/30 participants had grown up or lived for longer than ten years in rural or regional Australia. • 4/30 participants had spent 3-5 years in rural or regional Australia

Dis/ability:

• 14/30 noted some form of physical disability, neuro-divergence or mental health issue

Socio-economic status:

• 12/30 grew up or were currently ‘lower’ socio-economic status • 10/30 Middle SES • 1/30 High SES

199 • 7/30 unclear/variable

Sexuality:

• 3/30 straight/heterosexual • 3/30 gay or ‘gay/queer’ • 21/30 queer • 2/3 within the asexual umbrella • 1/30 no response

Appendix 3- Lucas’ drawing full size

200 Appendix 4- A select of participants’ drawings

201

202 Appendix 5- Order form: Testosterone gel

203