Testopoison

Poison in the water
You lap it up
I know you’re very thirsty baby for this drug
We mind control you just for fun

My Agenda, Dorian Electra

Content note for transphobia/misogyny throughout

Last week, on a Twitter thread by another trans woman, I witnessed a number of AFAB (assigned-female at birth) trans people arguing that they had been indelibly and irrevocably scarred by their taking of testosterone. That there were terrifying side effects like dick/clit growth, body hair, and voice changes that would happen swiftly and without mercy. Putting to one side that it is empirically untrue that testosterone acts this fast, and that all of these changes may be actively desired (even permanently!) these arguments represent a wider movement to paint the taking of exogenous testosterone as a marker of “irreversible damage”. This damage is figured as ultimately destroying the sanctity of the pure female body, as reflected in Abigail Shrier’s shit book of the same name. That this one-drop-kills rhetoric is reminiscent of hypodescent theories of racial classification is not lost on me, and speaks to how transness and race are co-constituted in the logics of medical plasticity: that Blackness or transness are corrupting factors of ‘pure’ white women in hegemonic discourse (Gill-Peterson 2018). Relating testosterone talk back to my own experience of puberty, it further struck me that whilst I have been changed by having a T-dominated body, I certainly haven’t been poisoned by it. And it’s made me think more about what ‘poison’ is standing in for — a threshold point beyond which you cannot return, a corruption, an endocrinological pathogen that scars enough to mark one out permanently.

There are some interesting connotations of this T-as-poison discourse. First, most simply, that there is something abject about transitioning, that people that have visibly altered their endocrine systems are doing both social and biological harm to their bodies. Second, the somewhat banal point that testosterone is being treated as threatening and violent, whilst estrogen is presented as weak and effeminate, which is clearly and boringly misogynistic, as well as being factually baseless. Most of the impacts of both hormones start between one and six months in, and peak between one and three years, excluding longer term changes like body fat redistribution (WPATH 2012). Third, there is the simultaneous belief that transitioning is a one way street, and that it would be desirous to be able to return back to exactly the gendered subjectivity that one ‘started’ with. Part of this is a belief that testosterone is an inherent blocker of plasticity, but for what it’s worth, I agree that it is ultimately impossible to return, that the movement of transitioning changes you, and that is why I use ‘retransitioning’, rather than ‘detransitioning’ language. But added onto that is the belief that transitioning is a qualitatively different sort of bodily change than ageing, falling in love, going on birth control etc — that transitioning is a special kind of hell that you put a body through. This is patently untrue, and serves to exceptionalise transsexual transitions so that transness can be made into something to be prodded, poked and ridiculed in the public sphere. It moves the focus of transition away from an intentional resisting of forced sexuation/gendering to an impossible and tragic attempt by people that have been indoctrinated into the TRA cult to mutilate their bodies.

And again, reflecting this back onto my own experiences with testosterone, an uneasy love affair of 25 years, none of this rings true. I have done many socially and biologically harmful things to myself over the years, but neither my puberty or my transition made me inherently abject. They changed me, sure, and I have their histories are marked on my body, but no more so than going to university or moving city. Transition isn’t special, it is not the only thing that constructs our gendered lives, and exceptionalising it only serves to bolster those whose biopolitical horizon is an easily assimilable monoculture.

Being a terminally online trans woman, I posted about what I saw as a clearly missing piece of the T-as-poison discourse, that I was not irreversibly damaged by my testosterone-dominated puberty, and that in fact I have been able to transition into someone desiring and desired, someone I’m quite proud of. In the intervening six days since posting this, the tweet has gotten a couple of thousand likes, and hundreds of comments and quote tweets. These started out fairly good-natured, some people asking where the discourse was originating from, some people agreeing with me, and some people arguing that the word “meltdown” was too severe. This quickly morphed into something a lot uglier when it moved from my own corner of twitter (of mostly good-faith trans and queer people in their mid-late 20s) into both specifically transmisogynistic and transmedicalist transmasculine circles, and into TERF twitter. These two groups, whilst overlapping, had somewhat different responses — whilst the former were persistently arguing that I was being a narcissist for talking about my own experience of *the exact same hormone*, the latter were just out-right calling me a man.

The more boring responses involved calling me ableist (for using the word meltdown: reader I am autistic), misogynistic (for not understanding the ‘fact’ that testosterone is the singular cause of violence against women), or transmisandrist (for pointing out that AFAB trans people could learn a thing or two from AMAB trans people and their experiences with testosterone). None of this particularly bothers me. I am far enough in my transition, embedded enough in my communities, and self-confident enough in my gender-sexuality to not be put off by the realisation that some people, shock horror, do not see me as a lesbian: in fact, the confusion over my self-identification with the term ‘boydyke’ was oddly affirming.

However, what stuck with me was a tweet that said “No matter how much estrogen these males have in their body they are still gonna be misogynistic and undermine trans AFAB experience” (@Opoaloo). As you might have gleaned from this writing, I use assignation-at-birth language intentionally: I believe that it points to the originating sin of much transphobia — our compulsory sexuation. I name this to draw attention to the fact that my life is difficult because a) I was forced to take on a gender at birth, b) that this gender did not ultimately suit me, and c) that this gender being male has led to me subsequently experiencing the specific oppression of transmisogyny, itself not universal but partial and contextual (Krell 2017). This is important to my experience of the world as a trans woman, and I am frankly getting tired of people pretending that the experience of AMAB nonbinary people is isometric with that of AFAB nonbinary people. Opoaloo seems to be using this framework in an alternate way, not pointing to the disaster of forced sexuation or oppression, but using assignation as a positive descriptor of a biologically unified class. This is a complete inversion, one that sees cisgender women and AFAB trans people as part of that same class, papering over the heterogeneity of those groups, and at the same time painting AMAB trans people as, in the end, part of the male oppressor class. Simultaneously generally transphobic in binding your gender to your assignation, and transmisogynist, this notion of an inherent AFAB solidarity must be completely resisted.

To the people that believe that there is some universal AFAB subjecthood, I would invite you to reach beyond your own limited communities and explore the entangled nature of your subjectivity, and its multivalent and contextual power. I promise that you will find the world more vibrant, open, and empowering.

My Twitter has mostly calmed back down now, and I am back to the regular procrastination cycle of writing, reading, and drinking overpriced coffee. What has stuck with me, however, is a note from a mutual that he, upon tweeting similar, hadn’t “had an inch of the backlash you’ve gotten for this”. AFAB solidarity, in the end, means attacking trans women that step outside their lanes.

It’s about time that we reconfigured how we view hormones, not as either miracle or mutilator, but as complex, messy, and situationally useful tools to extend our bodies to match with our embodied experiences of gender. Testosterone is not a poison, it is much smaller than that, and a hyperbolic view of transition that sees easy linearity and reversibility as the only goals cannot be how we imagine a transitional commons. Handcraft your genders, in the collective, and listen to the collective stories we tell of ourselves.

Gill-Peterson, Jules. 2018. Histories of the Transgender Child. University of Minnesota Press.

Krell, Elias Cosenza. 2017. “Is Transmisogyny Killing Trans Women of Color?: Black Trans Feminisms and the Exigencies of White Femininity.” TSQ 4 (2).

WPATH. (2012). Standards of Care for the Health of Transsexual, Transgender, and Gender-Nonconforming People (7th Ed).