Non-binary testosterone users: Re-making trans gender hormone practices

• In Event: Producing Transformations: Drugs, Bodies, and Experimentation 2

Abstract

Within the context of trans masculinity testosterone is intimately, almost inextricably, attached to binary trans men. Testosterone is deemed the ‘magic drug’ that turns female appearing people into men, manifesting onto the external body the internal ‘true’ (male) self. It is the ‘treatment’ for being in the ‘wrong body’. When testosterone is a substance that moves a person from one’s assigned sex at birth as female into one’s felt gender as a man how does one account for non-binary people’s desire to use testosterone?

Non-binary people occupy a gendered space that is neither strictly one, nor the other, of the apparent two binary gender options. Rather they reside outside of, between, or move through different attachments to gender.

This paper centres the experiences of non-binary people who use testosterone to elicit some form of gendered body alterations. Attempting to grapple with the seeming contradictoriness of non-binary gender identities meeting binary gendered drugs, I explore the strong desires for some non-binary people to use testosterone, and the specific sets of imperatives for its use. I then look at how some non-binary people go about negotiating testosterone’s gendering, how they may dissolve, circumnavigate and resist its tight attachment to binary trans men, and how these processes may allow them to envision their future selves and their bodies on testosterone. Finally, in thinking through an STS frame, I ask what do these new enactments of testosterone do to, and with, testosterone as a gender-effecting substance.

Author

• Rillark Zac Bolton, Gender & Cultural Studies, University of Sydney