Introduction (pp. 1-7)
Gargulec
impact!
- Location
- a garden
Just the other week, I was doing a little bit of research while working on my book. To be precise, I was trying to find out the exact date and circumstances of the first laboratory synthesis of estrogen. In the process, it struck me how while I can name at least three different books about the culture and history of testosterone (Cordelia Fine's Testosterone Rex, Rebecca Jordan-Young and Katrina Karkazis' Testosterone: An Unauthorized Biography, and Carole Hooven's Testosterone: The Story of the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us), I could not recall ever coming across an analogous study of the distaff counterpart "male hormone". So I dug deeper, and found a few potentially promising volumes, chief among them being Bob Ostertag's Sex, Science, Self. A Social History of Estrogen, Testosterone, and Identity, published in 2016 by the University of Boston Press. The book billed itself as a critical history of hormone therapy, with a special focus on how such therapies were and continue to be marketed and employed. As the big fan of science and technology studies that I am, I was immediately sold. I acquired a copy and started reading.
Soon enough, my interest shifted into a sharp sense of frustration. Partially it is because, and let us be blunt here, Sex, Science, Self is a transphobic book. I understand that the author did not intend it to be such, and to a degree I can almost empathize with that, but that does not substantially change what the takeaway from his writing is. Ostertag's work represents the kind of transphobia that is perhaps least represented in the contemporary landscape of the culture war surrounding trans people: it is a one that derives not from socially conservative, religious right wing positions, nor one that has its roots in trans-exclusionary feminism. Instead, it is a queer transphobia, based in a particular understanding of queerness (especially as routed through radical gay politics of the 80s and the 90s), and which has its intellectual origins in the anti-psychiatry movement and variants of queer anti-capitalism. It is an intellectual position which enjoyed a degree of popularity in the 90s, and is today mostly marginal within queer studies. Nonetheless, it pioneered a series of practically, if not intentionally, anti–trans arguments that have made their way to more mainstream and more vicious forms of anti-trans rhetoric, and as such it deserves attention. Hence, Sex, Science, Self.
But really, the actual reason why the book frustrates me so is that it is not that great as a piece of scholarship. It has a number of relatively obvious flaws—and very telling ones, at that. In a way, Sex, Science, Self shows how not to research transness, and more importantly, how not to do critical history. This is not to say that it is worthless: it very clearly isn't, and especially the parts of it devoted to studying the history of the emergence of the sex hormone markets are useful, as reference material if nothing else. But when it comes to analysis—well, things get complicated then.
Here, I'd like to quickly go through the introduction to the book and use it as a demonstration of what I mean both by queer transphobia, and by bad scholarship. If there is enough interest, I may possibly end up providing a let's read of the rest of Sex, Science, Self, but due to the number of obligations I am procrastinating on by writing this, I can't promise that it will happen.
Anyway.
Sex, Science, Self.
Bob Ostertag is undoubtedly a veteran of the gay movement—a man who has been involved in it since the seventies, and as such has seen several decades of activism. It is a perspective he purposefully centers in his writing, partially to preemptively deflect accusations of an anti-queer bias (more on that later). And in those opening words, he lays out, relatively clearly, what Sex, Science, Self is supposed to be: a critical history of the rise of the pharmaceutical hormone industry, as understood through the lens of radical queer activism.
And in the same paragraph, he also demonstrates an issue that plagues his work from the very start. It lies in the mention of the demand made by "queer activists" in the 1960s. Obviously, this is a mental shorthand: Ostertag knows very well that "queer" activism, or activism that refers to itself as "queer" comes much later than that (it develops in the late 80s, to be specific). What he is referring to, here, is the new gay liberation movement which grows out of the dissatisfaction with the mostly tepid and assimilationist politics of the 50s homophile activism, and out of a fascination with various radical social movements of the 60s, including the Civil Rights Movement, student anti-war protests, and the general birth of the so-called New Left. One could charge this formulation with being anachronistic, but for reasons I'll outline shortly, I don't really care all that much. What I care for, however, is that by implying a direct continuity between the gay liberation movement and the contemporary trans demands for gender-affirming care, he collapses gay liberation and early trans activism together into one blob. And while it's true that it was trans women who led the Stonewall riot, those two movements were not synonymous at all. Early trans activism has made its own slew of material demands, including demands for transition access, social justice, and so on which were not congruent with gay liberation calls for demedicalisation of homosexuality. Already in the 70s (if not earlier), there were people asking to be left alone by the doctors, and the people asking to be cared for by those doctors: and they were not the same. However, by positing that the movements were always one, Ostertag can then charge trans activism with the loss of the radical, emancipatory position of skepticism towards the establishment medicine. More broadly, however, this also shows Ostertag's lack of attention towards trans history as trans history, not simply an off-shoot of the mainline gay history that he is better-attuned to.
Here is the other problem with Ostertag's basic assumptions. Briefly setting aside the use of scare-quotes around the word "transition", here the author makes a very bold, but rather shaky claim that is at the center of his book. He assumes that the logic animating gender transition is broadly comparable to the one behind the "brain organisation theory" and various attempts at finding the gay gene and explaining away homosexuality through flatly biological terms.
This, incidentally, is I think the crux of his entire work, as it reflects the core anxiety behind Sex, Science, Self: Ostertag's eminently justified dislike of attempts to provide a medical justification for homosexual desire becomes projected on any kind of an attempt to associate sex, gender, and biology. It is a position that has strong roots in critical humanities, especially feminism and queer theory, which share a deep and abiding distrust of attempts to understand human diversity through reference to their biology. However, it is also a position which, as many STS scholars show, is based on a misunderstanding of biology as the static, pre-cultural, and ultimately unconstructed oppositional pair to the fluid and historical culture. As writers like Elizabeth Wilson or Donna Haraway show, this type of thinking ultimately cannot help but to reinforce the image of biology as the domain of the unassailable, non-political truth. In other words, Ostertag implicitly makes a claim that reinforces the nature-culture dualism, instead of interrogating how the distinction between "nature" and "culture" is being created for political ends. Put a pin in that: this will be a running theme.
Incidentally, his ability to make such claims also betrays a broad lack of familiarity with the scholarship in the field he is engaging with. His book was published in 2016, which means he probably wrote it between 2014 and 2015. The troubling thing is that the statement that "few are aware" of the problems with brain organization theory is either flatly wrong in a way that is self-contradictory (Ostertag will shortly cite a lot of scholarship which denies the notion), or shows how Ostertag is starting to construct a model of the "trans community" which is completely inattentive towards trans scholarship itself. I have never met a trans person who explained their use of hormones through reference to various theories of the "sex of the brain", and yet Ostertag seems intent on proving that this is the governing logic.
But of course, as Ostertag rightly notes, this is not just a trans thing. He follows those opening paragraphs with a mention about how his intellectual project expanded during research. Instead of focusing purely on trans people, he instead sets his aim on hormone therapies in general, for both cis and trans folk, correctly noting that Americans consume hormones at prodigious rates for a variety of ends, only some of which have to do with transitioning. At the same time, however, he also gets lost in this expanded perspective, as his implicit assumption is that the rise on transgender visibility has to do with the rise in hormone use; this is a techno-determinist argument that has a long history (to which I will return, too). This assumption practically erases any sort of concern about the different ways that hormones are procured and used by different populations, which will then enable Ostertag to follow it with his suspicion that Big Pharma is pushing hormones onto the community, and the expansion of transness is merely indicative of that.
This is the part, incidentally, where my alarm bells started to go off.
Next, he proceeds to argue that we know relatively little about the long-term effects of hormone use, and charges trans people and queer activists with incuriosity about that. Now, I am not an endocrinologist (and neither is he, really), so I can't argue with or against this point. What I can say, however, is that there is some dubious historiography happening here. To demonstrate:
First of all, they did not. Paul B. Preciado's wildly popular auto-theoretical study of testosterone, its history, its involvement in the market economy, and its potential use a bio-hacking tool has been available in English since 2013—a no small feat for a book originally written in Spanish, given the broad incuriosity of the American academic world for works that to not originate in the Anglophone sphere. In fact, the absence of Preciado's work (however one may feel about it) from Ostertag's study is absolutely striking, as it represents a bare failure to engage with then-leading scholarship.
Secondly, however, and more importantly, Ostertag own incuriosity about trans studies leads him to ignoring the fact that the relative paucity of scholarship focusing on the history of technologies of gender transition, especially when it comes to hormones, was also the product of the broad lack of scholarship on the history of transness in general. Ostertag wrote near the start of the period marked by a rapid proliferation of trans studies, and within a few years of the publication of Sex, Science, Self, there was already a broad variety of books in the field touching precisely on the problems that he named. To name but a few: Jules Gill-Peteron's landmark Histories of the Transgender Child, Emma Heaney The New Woman, or Ruth Pearce's Understanding Trans Health.
I am willing to give Ostertag a pass here: obviously, he could not have consulted works that had not yet been written while he was working on his study. However, I have serious doubts as to his assertion about trans people's incuriosity or, worse yet, passive acceptance of the narratives peddled by Big Pharma about what hormones are. And this, in particular, gets rapidly worse.
In the next section, Ostertag references a whole slew of standard reference texts when it comes to the history of hormones and that "science of sex", including, but not limited to, Anne Fauso-Sterling Sexing the Body and Elizabeth Watkins' The Estrogen Elixir. He follows that up with the claim that he has been "astonished" that transsexuals and transgenders do not feature in those histories, correctly charging the authors of those books with trans issues, and charmingly observing that they all had "good reasons why they might not wish to have their main story get sidetracked in trans issues, which may not have even been on their radar" (p. 4, emphasis mine).
Here is the rub: the studies he cites, mostly coming from the early 2000s, did not have trans issues on radar, because extremely few people outside of the specialized and still nascent trans studies, were even thinking about them, then. This, incidentally, answers his question about why there is so little attention paid to the idea of "gender transition" —because up to relatively recently, there has been extremely little attention paid to trans people in general. The question why, however, does not entirely interest Ostertag. He does not pause to ask why trans people are a footnote in the history of sex hormones and their marketing, instead of being the main character—which is, by the way, precisely the question animating both Preciado's work, as well as Gill-Petersen's. But forgoing it allows Ostertag to frame his own study as a critical intervention into a field mired in politically-motivated incuriosity. Which, as we all know, is a move that has since become thoroughly adored by various GC types. Anyway.
Ostertag then proceeds to note about the "meteoric rise" in the visibility and media cachet of the term "transgender" itself. And this is the first seriously and blatantly objectionable section of the introduction.
He starts with the stock narrative of the 2014 "transgender tipping point" and reference to now-famous Laverne Cox TIME magazine cover, spinning it into a broader rumination about have we gotten to this point, and what even hides behind the notion of "transgender". And yet, as he returns to time after time, all this interest is not matched by the internist in the history of sex hormones and HRT, which he sees as the one shared element of all disparate understandings of the word "transgender". There is a lot to unpack here.
I don't really like the performative dunking which has become one of the leading styles of internet criticism, so please, mentally insert the obligatory "bruh" here. Because, oh boy.
A few things.
One, perhaps the fact that those books do not, in fact, spend so much time on arguing about who own hormones is because the history of HRT is not the history of transness. Nowhere could it be more blatant than in Feinberg's book which specifically eschews a medicalized language of transsexuality to extend the category of "transgender" onto a dizzyingly wide array of historical characters, most of which would never cross their paths with the idea of sex hormones, let alone of HRT. Now, one can argue that Feinberg's approach was notably flawed and represented an anachronistic tendency to gather all kinds of gender variance under a single, Western-centric umbrella term of "transgender", but this a subject of another shelf of books, so I will spare you that.
Two, Susan Stryker's Transgender History: Roots of Today's Liberation engages very openly with the idea about feminist criticism of medicine, mainly to argue about the different histories of trans and feminist movements. In fact, she makes this point clear because it is necessary to understand why the rift between trans women and radical feminism has even occurred.
Three: Transgender Studies Reader, while admittedly massive, is not a collection of primary sources. It contains a few, but is mostly a source of excerpts representing the state of scholarship of transness at the time of it's publication (2006). In 2013, it has been followed by another, just as massive (693 pages) Transgender Studies Reader 2, this time edited by Styrker with the help of Aren Z. Aizura. In Reader 1, the student can find out about the history of hormones, their synthesis and first employment in trans affirming care, by reading Henry Rubin's essay "The Logic of Treatment". In Reader 2, meanwhile, one can find a reprint of a massively popular work by Michelle O'Brien which "traces the links of a commodity chain: from her own consumption of feminizing hormones to the pharmaceutical corporations that produce, market, and distribute synthetic estrogens; to health insurance companies that exclude coverage of transgender healthcare; to government agencies that regulate pharmaceutical distribution; and to transnational free trade agreements that structure the imbalances that make buying medicines in Mexico or Canada more "affordable'' than in the U.S.A". Incidentally, O'Brian's essay, first delivered as a speech, comes from 2003.
Four: on pages 335 to 364 of Transgender Studies Reader 1, there is an excerpt from Bernice Hausman 1995 book Changning Sex. It will become very relevant, very quickly.
The next few pages of the introduction are an extension of the enumeration quoted above; Ostertag goes down the list of what you could and could not find in scholarship available to him, consistently charging it with eliding the market nature of pharmaceuticals, their historical use in attempted gay conversion therapies, or the fact that Harry Benjamin was something of a kook. Or to put it differently, Ostertag claims (and his claims are not really supported by the literature he cites) that trans scholarship has taken the sex hormones for granted, and in doing so fell victim to the pharmaceutical industry's drive to expand its reach onto new markets.
He claims that trans people have been duped by Big Pharma. That they have become the dupes of sex hormones. Or, as one could even say, the dupes of gender. And I have heard that phrase somewhere before.
Ah, yeah, it's from a book.
So, about Bernice Hausman. Here is how the Transgender Studies Reader 1 introduces the excerpt from her book:
What grinds me isn't even the fact that Ostertag arrives at the same conclusions. Rather, it is the fact that he does it while seemingly being completely unaware of Hausman's work, and the debate it sparked—despite sharply criticizing a collection in which her book is excerpted for failing to address those precise issues.
Right. I don't even care if this is transphobic or not. I am just disappointed as an academician. This is just a flat-out fail when it comes to engaging with prior scholarship. If you want to bash trans folk for getting addicted to the titty skittles that Big Pharma pushes onto them, at least quote some actual authorities on trans bashing.
We are now 8 pages into the introduction, and 4.000 words into this essay. So I will pause for now, and try to return to it at a later point - if there is any interest in that. So, let me know: do you want to see more? Do you want to see how Ostertag defines the term "transgender"? Or where anti-depressants come into all of this?
Soon enough, my interest shifted into a sharp sense of frustration. Partially it is because, and let us be blunt here, Sex, Science, Self is a transphobic book. I understand that the author did not intend it to be such, and to a degree I can almost empathize with that, but that does not substantially change what the takeaway from his writing is. Ostertag's work represents the kind of transphobia that is perhaps least represented in the contemporary landscape of the culture war surrounding trans people: it is a one that derives not from socially conservative, religious right wing positions, nor one that has its roots in trans-exclusionary feminism. Instead, it is a queer transphobia, based in a particular understanding of queerness (especially as routed through radical gay politics of the 80s and the 90s), and which has its intellectual origins in the anti-psychiatry movement and variants of queer anti-capitalism. It is an intellectual position which enjoyed a degree of popularity in the 90s, and is today mostly marginal within queer studies. Nonetheless, it pioneered a series of practically, if not intentionally, anti–trans arguments that have made their way to more mainstream and more vicious forms of anti-trans rhetoric, and as such it deserves attention. Hence, Sex, Science, Self.
But really, the actual reason why the book frustrates me so is that it is not that great as a piece of scholarship. It has a number of relatively obvious flaws—and very telling ones, at that. In a way, Sex, Science, Self shows how not to research transness, and more importantly, how not to do critical history. This is not to say that it is worthless: it very clearly isn't, and especially the parts of it devoted to studying the history of the emergence of the sex hormone markets are useful, as reference material if nothing else. But when it comes to analysis—well, things get complicated then.
Here, I'd like to quickly go through the introduction to the book and use it as a demonstration of what I mean both by queer transphobia, and by bad scholarship. If there is enough interest, I may possibly end up providing a let's read of the rest of Sex, Science, Self, but due to the number of obligations I am procrastinating on by writing this, I can't promise that it will happen.
Anyway.
Sex, Science, Self.
Article: My hope is that this book will be useful for anyone who has taken estrogen or testosterone, or considered doing so, for any reason. Given the sales figures for these products, and the advertising that has accompanied those sales, this includes many millions of Americans. When I began this project, my interest was more narrowly focused. I wanted to write a book, first and foremost, for young people wondering if they should begin hormone treatment in order to undergo what has become known as "transitioning" between genders. And their families. And their friends. This group has recently grown far larger than it was in even the recent past.
This turn to pharmaceuticals is coloring queer culture more generally. Beginning in the 1960s, one of the principle rights demanded by queer activists was the right to be left alone by doctors. Today, one of the principle rights demanded by queer activists is the right to receive medical treatment. This fact alone merits our attention. What were the causes and what will be the consequences of this about-face? The medical industry is a powerful and complicated beast, with billions of dollars, entrenched hierarchies of power and authority, and a rapidly expanding arsenal of technologies. In seeking not to isolate ourselves from that beast but rather to embrace it more fully, queer culture is changing in ways both subtle and profound.
Bob Ostertag is undoubtedly a veteran of the gay movement—a man who has been involved in it since the seventies, and as such has seen several decades of activism. It is a perspective he purposefully centers in his writing, partially to preemptively deflect accusations of an anti-queer bias (more on that later). And in those opening words, he lays out, relatively clearly, what Sex, Science, Self is supposed to be: a critical history of the rise of the pharmaceutical hormone industry, as understood through the lens of radical queer activism.
And in the same paragraph, he also demonstrates an issue that plagues his work from the very start. It lies in the mention of the demand made by "queer activists" in the 1960s. Obviously, this is a mental shorthand: Ostertag knows very well that "queer" activism, or activism that refers to itself as "queer" comes much later than that (it develops in the late 80s, to be specific). What he is referring to, here, is the new gay liberation movement which grows out of the dissatisfaction with the mostly tepid and assimilationist politics of the 50s homophile activism, and out of a fascination with various radical social movements of the 60s, including the Civil Rights Movement, student anti-war protests, and the general birth of the so-called New Left. One could charge this formulation with being anachronistic, but for reasons I'll outline shortly, I don't really care all that much. What I care for, however, is that by implying a direct continuity between the gay liberation movement and the contemporary trans demands for gender-affirming care, he collapses gay liberation and early trans activism together into one blob. And while it's true that it was trans women who led the Stonewall riot, those two movements were not synonymous at all. Early trans activism has made its own slew of material demands, including demands for transition access, social justice, and so on which were not congruent with gay liberation calls for demedicalisation of homosexuality. Already in the 70s (if not earlier), there were people asking to be left alone by the doctors, and the people asking to be cared for by those doctors: and they were not the same. However, by positing that the movements were always one, Ostertag can then charge trans activism with the loss of the radical, emancipatory position of skepticism towards the establishment medicine. More broadly, however, this also shows Ostertag's lack of attention towards trans history as trans history, not simply an off-shoot of the mainline gay history that he is better-attuned to.
Article: But there's more. Estrogen and testosterone, the so-called sex hormones, have become important to the queer community for reasons that go far beyond their use in transgender "transitioning." The idea that queers are "born that way" because of prenatal exposure to "sex hormones" has become the foundation on which many of the social and political claims of the community rest—enshrined in judicial rulings, legislation, health insurance policies, and medical practice, emblazoned on t-shirts, banners, and placards, and sung in pop songs. Few are aware that the science behind this claim, currently known as "brain organization theory," is shaky to nonexistent. Even fewer are aware that this same research is routinely invoked for social and political ends many would find appalling. When Lawrence Summers, one of the most powerful men in the nation and at the time the president of Harvard University, provoked a furor by arguing that men outperform women in math and science because of genetic differences between men and women, he was invoking exactly the same research used by queers to claim that they too are "born that way."
Here is the other problem with Ostertag's basic assumptions. Briefly setting aside the use of scare-quotes around the word "transition", here the author makes a very bold, but rather shaky claim that is at the center of his book. He assumes that the logic animating gender transition is broadly comparable to the one behind the "brain organisation theory" and various attempts at finding the gay gene and explaining away homosexuality through flatly biological terms.
This, incidentally, is I think the crux of his entire work, as it reflects the core anxiety behind Sex, Science, Self: Ostertag's eminently justified dislike of attempts to provide a medical justification for homosexual desire becomes projected on any kind of an attempt to associate sex, gender, and biology. It is a position that has strong roots in critical humanities, especially feminism and queer theory, which share a deep and abiding distrust of attempts to understand human diversity through reference to their biology. However, it is also a position which, as many STS scholars show, is based on a misunderstanding of biology as the static, pre-cultural, and ultimately unconstructed oppositional pair to the fluid and historical culture. As writers like Elizabeth Wilson or Donna Haraway show, this type of thinking ultimately cannot help but to reinforce the image of biology as the domain of the unassailable, non-political truth. In other words, Ostertag implicitly makes a claim that reinforces the nature-culture dualism, instead of interrogating how the distinction between "nature" and "culture" is being created for political ends. Put a pin in that: this will be a running theme.
Incidentally, his ability to make such claims also betrays a broad lack of familiarity with the scholarship in the field he is engaging with. His book was published in 2016, which means he probably wrote it between 2014 and 2015. The troubling thing is that the statement that "few are aware" of the problems with brain organization theory is either flatly wrong in a way that is self-contradictory (Ostertag will shortly cite a lot of scholarship which denies the notion), or shows how Ostertag is starting to construct a model of the "trans community" which is completely inattentive towards trans scholarship itself. I have never met a trans person who explained their use of hormones through reference to various theories of the "sex of the brain", and yet Ostertag seems intent on proving that this is the governing logic.
But of course, as Ostertag rightly notes, this is not just a trans thing. He follows those opening paragraphs with a mention about how his intellectual project expanded during research. Instead of focusing purely on trans people, he instead sets his aim on hormone therapies in general, for both cis and trans folk, correctly noting that Americans consume hormones at prodigious rates for a variety of ends, only some of which have to do with transitioning. At the same time, however, he also gets lost in this expanded perspective, as his implicit assumption is that the rise on transgender visibility has to do with the rise in hormone use; this is a techno-determinist argument that has a long history (to which I will return, too). This assumption practically erases any sort of concern about the different ways that hormones are procured and used by different populations, which will then enable Ostertag to follow it with his suspicion that Big Pharma is pushing hormones onto the community, and the expansion of transness is merely indicative of that.
This is the part, incidentally, where my alarm bells started to go off.
Next, he proceeds to argue that we know relatively little about the long-term effects of hormone use, and charges trans people and queer activists with incuriosity about that. Now, I am not an endocrinologist (and neither is he, really), so I can't argue with or against this point. What I can say, however, is that there is some dubious historiography happening here. To demonstrate:
Article: This troubled me. Yes, of course, we should know what dose to take, but surely there were bigger questions to ask. The idea that gender has a chemical essence, or that taking a pill can cause one's gender to "transition," are extraordinary claims. They cannot have just fallen from the sky. They must have a long history. Does anyone know it? Doesn't anyone want to learn about it? And what do we really know about the effects of long-term use? Are these well understood?
To my surprise, few even seemed curious about such questions. To the contrary, I encountered more than a little hostility for even asking them. This was especially striking since so much of the intellectual energy fueling transgender activism comes from that part of academia that takes pride in deconstructing ideas scientists take as given. Why were hormones getting a free pass?
First of all, they did not. Paul B. Preciado's wildly popular auto-theoretical study of testosterone, its history, its involvement in the market economy, and its potential use a bio-hacking tool has been available in English since 2013—a no small feat for a book originally written in Spanish, given the broad incuriosity of the American academic world for works that to not originate in the Anglophone sphere. In fact, the absence of Preciado's work (however one may feel about it) from Ostertag's study is absolutely striking, as it represents a bare failure to engage with then-leading scholarship.
Secondly, however, and more importantly, Ostertag own incuriosity about trans studies leads him to ignoring the fact that the relative paucity of scholarship focusing on the history of technologies of gender transition, especially when it comes to hormones, was also the product of the broad lack of scholarship on the history of transness in general. Ostertag wrote near the start of the period marked by a rapid proliferation of trans studies, and within a few years of the publication of Sex, Science, Self, there was already a broad variety of books in the field touching precisely on the problems that he named. To name but a few: Jules Gill-Peteron's landmark Histories of the Transgender Child, Emma Heaney The New Woman, or Ruth Pearce's Understanding Trans Health.
I am willing to give Ostertag a pass here: obviously, he could not have consulted works that had not yet been written while he was working on his study. However, I have serious doubts as to his assertion about trans people's incuriosity or, worse yet, passive acceptance of the narratives peddled by Big Pharma about what hormones are. And this, in particular, gets rapidly worse.
In the next section, Ostertag references a whole slew of standard reference texts when it comes to the history of hormones and that "science of sex", including, but not limited to, Anne Fauso-Sterling Sexing the Body and Elizabeth Watkins' The Estrogen Elixir. He follows that up with the claim that he has been "astonished" that transsexuals and transgenders do not feature in those histories, correctly charging the authors of those books with trans issues, and charmingly observing that they all had "good reasons why they might not wish to have their main story get sidetracked in trans issues, which may not have even been on their radar" (p. 4, emphasis mine).
Here is the rub: the studies he cites, mostly coming from the early 2000s, did not have trans issues on radar, because extremely few people outside of the specialized and still nascent trans studies, were even thinking about them, then. This, incidentally, answers his question about why there is so little attention paid to the idea of "gender transition" —because up to relatively recently, there has been extremely little attention paid to trans people in general. The question why, however, does not entirely interest Ostertag. He does not pause to ask why trans people are a footnote in the history of sex hormones and their marketing, instead of being the main character—which is, by the way, precisely the question animating both Preciado's work, as well as Gill-Petersen's. But forgoing it allows Ostertag to frame his own study as a critical intervention into a field mired in politically-motivated incuriosity. Which, as we all know, is a move that has since become thoroughly adored by various GC types. Anyway.
Ostertag then proceeds to note about the "meteoric rise" in the visibility and media cachet of the term "transgender" itself. And this is the first seriously and blatantly objectionable section of the introduction.
He starts with the stock narrative of the 2014 "transgender tipping point" and reference to now-famous Laverne Cox TIME magazine cover, spinning it into a broader rumination about have we gotten to this point, and what even hides behind the notion of "transgender". And yet, as he returns to time after time, all this interest is not matched by the internist in the history of sex hormones and HRT, which he sees as the one shared element of all disparate understandings of the word "transgender". There is a lot to unpack here.
Article: The silence of "sex hormone" scholarship on trans history is reciprocated by the silence of trans scholarship on "sex hormone" history. Major books about trans issues began to appear in the mid-1990s, such as Leslie Feinberg's Transgender Warriors (1996). The most comprehensive is Joanne Meyerowitz's How Sex Changed (2002); Deborah Rudacille's The Riddle of Gender (2006) is also excellent. Transgender History (2008), by the transgender activist and scholar Susan Stryker, is a historical introduction for a general readership. For primary source material, there is the massive, 752-page Transgender Studies Reader, edited by Stryker and Steven Whittle. And we have just scratched the surface.
You could read every page of all these books and never learn that the corporations which own the patents for the major estrogen and testosterone products spent millions of dollars over several decades selling the idea that testosterone and estrogen are the chemical essences of masculinity and femininity. You would not learn that contesting this marketing had been a major goal of the feminists of the 1960s and 1970s, and that for many of those women, the first step in resisting the patriarchy was to "take back their bodies" by rejecting the "sex hormone" marketing hype pharmaceutical companies were heaping upon them. Nor would you have any inkling of the decades of research and debate about the safety of long-term use of these products, debates that are anything but settled.
I don't really like the performative dunking which has become one of the leading styles of internet criticism, so please, mentally insert the obligatory "bruh" here. Because, oh boy.
A few things.
One, perhaps the fact that those books do not, in fact, spend so much time on arguing about who own hormones is because the history of HRT is not the history of transness. Nowhere could it be more blatant than in Feinberg's book which specifically eschews a medicalized language of transsexuality to extend the category of "transgender" onto a dizzyingly wide array of historical characters, most of which would never cross their paths with the idea of sex hormones, let alone of HRT. Now, one can argue that Feinberg's approach was notably flawed and represented an anachronistic tendency to gather all kinds of gender variance under a single, Western-centric umbrella term of "transgender", but this a subject of another shelf of books, so I will spare you that.
Two, Susan Stryker's Transgender History: Roots of Today's Liberation engages very openly with the idea about feminist criticism of medicine, mainly to argue about the different histories of trans and feminist movements. In fact, she makes this point clear because it is necessary to understand why the rift between trans women and radical feminism has even occurred.
Three: Transgender Studies Reader, while admittedly massive, is not a collection of primary sources. It contains a few, but is mostly a source of excerpts representing the state of scholarship of transness at the time of it's publication (2006). In 2013, it has been followed by another, just as massive (693 pages) Transgender Studies Reader 2, this time edited by Styrker with the help of Aren Z. Aizura. In Reader 1, the student can find out about the history of hormones, their synthesis and first employment in trans affirming care, by reading Henry Rubin's essay "The Logic of Treatment". In Reader 2, meanwhile, one can find a reprint of a massively popular work by Michelle O'Brien which "traces the links of a commodity chain: from her own consumption of feminizing hormones to the pharmaceutical corporations that produce, market, and distribute synthetic estrogens; to health insurance companies that exclude coverage of transgender healthcare; to government agencies that regulate pharmaceutical distribution; and to transnational free trade agreements that structure the imbalances that make buying medicines in Mexico or Canada more "affordable'' than in the U.S.A". Incidentally, O'Brian's essay, first delivered as a speech, comes from 2003.
Four: on pages 335 to 364 of Transgender Studies Reader 1, there is an excerpt from Bernice Hausman 1995 book Changning Sex. It will become very relevant, very quickly.
The next few pages of the introduction are an extension of the enumeration quoted above; Ostertag goes down the list of what you could and could not find in scholarship available to him, consistently charging it with eliding the market nature of pharmaceuticals, their historical use in attempted gay conversion therapies, or the fact that Harry Benjamin was something of a kook. Or to put it differently, Ostertag claims (and his claims are not really supported by the literature he cites) that trans scholarship has taken the sex hormones for granted, and in doing so fell victim to the pharmaceutical industry's drive to expand its reach onto new markets.
He claims that trans people have been duped by Big Pharma. That they have become the dupes of sex hormones. Or, as one could even say, the dupes of gender. And I have heard that phrase somewhere before.
Ah, yeah, it's from a book.
So, about Bernice Hausman. Here is how the Transgender Studies Reader 1 introduces the excerpt from her book:
Article: In Changing Sex, Bernice Hausman historicizes the relationship between the discovery and synthesization of the so-called sex hormones, gender reassignment surgeries, and theories of gender identity. She asks how medical practitioners have justified the physical transformation of the transsexual body, and concludes that the theory of the gendered self originated precisely in the efforts of those practitioners to manipulate the sexed body. Transsexualism, rather than being a very marginalized and esoteric concern, thus is actually central to the development of contemporary Western notions of self, gender, body, and sex.
Hausman clearly believes that greater freedom of gender expression is a social good, yet she takes a remarkably conservative ethical perspective on bodily transformation. Unlike Janice Raymond, whose analysis she follows to a significant degree, Hausman does not presume that transsexual people are in themselves dangerous to women, but she starts from the premise that they reproduce gender stereotypes, which are quintessentially opposed to personal freedom and feminist progress. Consequently, her explicitly goal is to produce a compelling argument for the discontinuation of medical gender-reassignment procedures. In her advocacy of this position, she assumes that she, as a self-styled feminist scholar, should have greater authority over transsexual embodiment than transsexual people themselves.
What grinds me isn't even the fact that Ostertag arrives at the same conclusions. Rather, it is the fact that he does it while seemingly being completely unaware of Hausman's work, and the debate it sparked—despite sharply criticizing a collection in which her book is excerpted for failing to address those precise issues.
Right. I don't even care if this is transphobic or not. I am just disappointed as an academician. This is just a flat-out fail when it comes to engaging with prior scholarship. If you want to bash trans folk for getting addicted to the titty skittles that Big Pharma pushes onto them, at least quote some actual authorities on trans bashing.
We are now 8 pages into the introduction, and 4.000 words into this essay. So I will pause for now, and try to return to it at a later point - if there is any interest in that. So, let me know: do you want to see more? Do you want to see how Ostertag defines the term "transgender"? Or where anti-depressants come into all of this?
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