Notes on the Anti-/Imperial Ecologies of Hormone Replacement Therapy

• In Event: Solidarities with, of, and alongside Palestine

Abstract

This paper traces the social metabolisms of commercial estrogen to explore the environmental entanglements and political implications of transgender experience in the U.S. with global ecological imperialism and the Palestinian people’s liberation struggles. While growing bodies scholarship are revisiting the imbricated physiological/epigenetic and social dimensions of the concept of metabolism; interrogating the manipulation of metabolic processes as a form of Israeli rule in Palestine; and even beginning to speculate specifically trans contributions metabolic theorizing; to date virtually no work has addressed the implications of trans metabolisms – which is to say life-making – in imperial territories like the U.S. for livelihood and struggle in Palestine. But the American medicalized trans body is materially connected to Palestine in significant ways, which this paper begins to unpack. The paper extends emerging work across trans studies, feminist political ecology and critiques of racial capitalism by interrogating the conjunctural conditions of possibility underpinning the everyday practice of hormone replacement therapy as an experience that is at once utterly ordinary and yet central to the ontology of medicalized transgender embodiment. Of course, not all trans people desire or prioritize hormone replacement to affirm their gender; too few of those who do can safely, reliably or affordably access drugs; and even those of us with regular access to hormones make any number of meaning by metabolizing them. Meanwhile, with U.S. legislative restrictions of trans peoples’ access to hormones proliferating at an alarming and unprecedented rate, it has become impossible to ignore the urgently contested political stakes of trans hormone consumption. Yet too often the politics of trans drug use end at the clinic door. This paper starts to push beyond that threshold, taking up the case of Israel’s TEVA Pharmaceuticals – the largest provider of generic drugs on the planet, the most valuable corporate share traded on the Tel Aviv stock exchange and a longtime financial backer of the IOF – and deploying what Rosenberg calls an anti-Zionist heuristic approach to trans medicalization to attend to the full social metabolism of estrogen, from its emergence in soy distillate to its watershed reuptake as an endocrine disrupting chemical (EDC) and everywhere in between.

Biographical Information

Danny Foster is a doctoral candidate in Geography at Rutgers University, writing from and with love for the city of Philadelphia (Lenni Lenape land).

Author

• Danny Foster, Rutgers University