Tag Archives: my long grey hair

gendertreyf, revolution, Uncategorized

trans health care: a taxonomy of HRT access

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in the department of screaming into the wind, it seems useful (if perhaps optimistic) to try to be concrete about the different pathways that trans liberals and antitrans organizers alike try to conflate, as part of their shared commitment to Professional Expertise (a/k/a doctors; a/k/a gatekeeping). that’s especially visible right now, as they attempt to redefine “DIY” in the context of HRT, pushing to keep us all dependent on state-licensed gatekeepers for access to the drugs many of us use, need, and want.

in the u.s. there are four basic pathways for getting drugs that you can use to adjust your endocrine system. (the specific examples i use are going to be about estrogens, since the greater legal restrictions on testosterones have made the process of developing autonomous pathways slower and quieter – but the same structure applies.)

two are commercial:

(1) by prescription. you go to a state-licensed gatekeeper, persuade them that you meet one or another set of arbitrary criteria, and are then allowed to pay a pharmaceutical company (directly or through an insurance company) for one drug off a very short list of possibilities1, with a state-licensed pharmacy taking a cut off the top.

(2) from unlicensed pharmacies/dealers. you go to a website2, and pay them (often using one or another form of blockchain pseudo-currency) to send you however many drugs you want, off a longer list of possibilities. the drugs come from the same manufacturers that supply the pharmaceutical companies.

two are autonomous:

(3) from community-based compounding projects. you go to a table at an event, or some other distribution point, and are given one or more drugs from a very limited selection3 (which is often just a choice between injectable and transdermal preparations of the same drug). you may be asked to contribute a nominal amount to support the ongoing project, but are not refused drugs if you can’t pay. the drugs are compounded (put into usable form) by community members, with the raw drug coming from the plants that supply the manufacturers of the commercial versions.

(4) from community-based redistribution projects. you go to a distribution point and are given a choice of whatever drugs they have on hand, which mainly come from the limited options available by prescription. you may be asked to contribute a nominal amount to support the ongoing project, but are not refused drugs if you can’t pay. the drugs come from either the prescription pathway (#1) or the community compounding pathway (#3).

there is a third possible autonomous pathway. i’m separating it off because i don’t know whether there are any projects currently working on using it. i hope there are, and i hope that they’re being very careful who they talk with about it.

(*5) from community-based production projects. when this exists, you’ll go to a distribution point (likely one established for the community compounding (#3) pathway) and choose from a limited selection on a pay-what-you-can basis. the raw drugs will come from a community compounding project, using raw drugs synthesized by a community-based manufacturing project.

of these pathways, only #3 is “DIY” in any meaningful sense (and #5 will be once it exists). #1 and #2 are gatekept efforts – one by the doctors and pharmacists who control access to prescription drugs; one more impersonally, by the prices they charge; #4, though very useful as a way around doctors and pharmacists, is basically dependent on #1 rather than an alternative to it.

but the distinction that matters here is between commercial and autonomous pathways of access. #3 and #4 (and #5 once it exists) are pathways in which trans people are directly supplying trans people with drugs, without the gatekeeping presence of either Professional Expertise or the profit motive. within the autonomous zone, #4 is much more limited in its scope than #3, since its supply of drugs depends on donors who both can persude a doctor to give them a prescription and don’t need to actually use all of the drugs they’re prescribed.

importantly, #2 is neither “DIY” nor autonomous in any meaningful sense. it’s an alternative to getting drugs by prescription, but it is neither community-controlled nor based on providing the maximum access to as many people as possible. and given that the people most likely to be uninsured (and thus without access to prescription drugs made affordable by insurance coverage) are poor people, no commercial operation does much of anything to change the patterns of who can and can’t get access.

trans liberals and anti-trans organizers both participate in the demonization of what they call “DIY hormones”. they tend to focus on #2, using the legitimate reasons to be especially cautious about that pathway4 as a starting point for attempts to discredit any pathway that doesn’t run through state-controlled gatekeeping checkpoints – that is, anything but #1. their arguments are garbage, and i won’t even get into rebutting them here.

but it’s important that we not accept their redefinition of “DIY”. if it’s not community-based and community-controlled, with no barriers to access (economic, diagnostic, age-based, or otherwise), it’s not DIY. it may be good; it may be useful; it may not involve the state directly. but it’s not DIY if we aren’t doing it ourselves.

if the past decade has taught us nothing else, it should teach us that we cannot rely on the state to provide or protect trans people’s access to health care of any kind. what the state gives – grudgingly, belatedly, and stingily – can be taken away by that same state – rapidly and enthusiastically – always, and at any time. “legality” doesn’t come into it; the state, after all, is what decides whether a law will be ignored or enforced (that “discretion” is an inextricable element of the state as a structure, at the core of every state, whether a theocracy, a people’s democracy, or a parliamentary republic).

autonomous trans health infrastructure is the only way that we can actually maintain access to the drugs and the care we need. community-based compounding and redistribution projects are laying the foundations for the decentralized network that will save our lives – if we make those foundations strong and broad, and build on them!

  1. on the estrogen side, usually the only drugs that are available by prescription are estrodiol cypionate and estradiol valerate (which can come in injectable, tablet, or transdermal forms). these have a notably steep absorbtion curve, which means that the drug’s effects vary significantly over the time between doses (for injectable versions, often a week). ↩︎
  2. or potentially, for some forms of testosterone, a dealer catering to the gym-rat/body-building crowd. ↩︎
  3. most current community compounding projects are making estradiol enanthate, which has a flatter absorbtion curve than cypionate or valerate, meaning that its effects are less variable over the time between doses). ↩︎
  4. which have much more to do with past periods of trans health access than the present. in the past, many (if not most) unlicensed sources were charging high prices for low-quality drugs, and often drugs that had been replaced in the prescription sphere. and some were selling actively harmful drugs, or alleged drugs that didn’t actually do anything. that’s much less true today. that’s much less true now, because the push to drive pharmaceutical manufacturing into low-wage overseas factories has made it much easier to get access to the supply chain for “legitimate” drugs, at either as raw materials (#3) or fully-produced medications (#2). but the profit motive can still lead to dangerous cost-cutting measures that make the actual dosage not match the label, or use harmful materials in the compounding process. and as in past periods, that a commercial supplier is trans, or has trans people willing to vouch for them, does not make them any less motivated by profit. ↩︎
gay wrath, revolution

for the record…

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well, i went back to look at something i wrote in september 2018 about the then-upcoming midterm election. and while i may have overestimated the degree that the senior partner in the current bipartisan fascist regime had its shit together then, and thus gotten some details wrong, it holds up well enough as a description of this year’s midterm election for me to post it here unedited:

Continue reading for the record… →
criticism, yiddish & jewish

“Ceci tuera cela”

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[written october/november 2021]

i was poking around in an anthology the other day, and found something about one of my favorite poets’ work that kinda blew me away. i saw in the table of contents that among celia dropkin’s poems was one called “tsu lutsifer / to lucifer”. that wasn’t surprising; part of why i adore her work is its gothy edge. the surprise came when i turned to it and found not a single poem but a triptych: a first section addressed (as promised) to lucifer, and then two poems i know quite well. they’ve been printed under a few titles; their first lines are “ikh hob dikh nokh nit gezen / i still haven’t seen you” and “du kvelst, ikh kvel / you rejoice, i rejoice”.

both are intense and erotic: in “ikh hob dikh nokh nit gezen”, dropkin declares “i want to see how you sleep / when you lose your power / over yourself, over me / … / i want to see you / helpless… / i want to see you / dead.” in “du kvelst, ikh kvel”, she demands “burn me up, be burnt up / take up all my desire”. but seen as parts of a larger piece, especially one dedicated to the light-bringing fallen angel, they take on a whole new dimension.

i’ll put the triptych below, in yiddish and english – you might want to skip down to read it now.

the three parts move from a cold, compelling, dominating object of desire to a fantasy of a lover stripped of all power to an image of sanctified purgation through excess. so far, so wonderfully goth: creepy, hot, disturbing, cosmic.

but what gets my head spinning in interesting ways is that all of this is done with specifically christian occult imagery. there’s not a jewish reference point to be found, and, as in a great deal of yiddish poetry by women, there’s barely a word from the hebrew/aramaic side of the language, which bears liturgical resonances as well as everyday meanings (to be precise, there’s one: “תל / tel” [ruin]).

Continue reading “Ceci tuera cela” →
gay wrath, revolution

the fantasy of “the rule of law”, and the concrete reality of the state

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As the U.S. President and other members of his administration say aloud that they will ignore court orders that disagree with their actions just as steadfastly as they will ignore legislators’ objections, there’s more and more talk about “the rule of law” and a “constitutional crisis”. That may, for certain purposes, be a reasonable account of what’s happening within the state, but it’s useless as a lens for looking at what’s happening in the country – that is, on the expanse of stolen land that the U.S. state rules. In fact, it is a way of actively avoiding dealing with what is going on in any way that can inform strategic or tactical thinking about how to resist.

Again and again, over the past five years of uprisings and discontent, we’ve seen progressive and radical groups (especially, but not exclusively, 501c corporations) and prominent movement figures fall back on two core strategies for responding to the far right.

One is elections: either backing the Democratic Party as a whole, as it moves steadily from the right to the far right1, or backing liberal candidates within it, who are uniformly marginalized, attacked, and defanged by the party leadership even as their presence legitimizes that leadership. It would be nice if that approach’s abject failure to win any material victories over the past decade discredited it, but given that its abject failure over the previous four decades didn’t, we can’t count on that.

The other is lex ex machina – intervention by the courts. That alleged strategy is based on the idea that legal decisions command a moral force that cannot be countered (which every U.S. justice movement’s history disproves), or that they are fundamentally self-enforcing magic words that control the state.

On the practical side, Andrew Jackson pointed out the problem with that last position back when the U.S. Supreme Court tried to restrict the State of Georgia’s authority over the Cherokee Nation. “Justice Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it” is the way Horace Greeley imagined him phrasing it; Old Hickory himself just called the decision “still born” (and in practice embraced, rather than rejecting, the court’s guidance on how exactly to go about committing genocide). But the problem for movement strategy isn’t the practical side, it’s the ideological underpinnings that let so many radicals who know that punchline continue to act as if they’ve never heard any such thing.

There is no such thing as a government of laws. There is no such thing as the rule of law. Laws are words on paper (or graven in stone, or incised on clay tablets, or preserved as digital 1s and 0s). They do not rule, they do not govern, any more than the Statue of Liberty does, or a pothole on I-95, or any other inanimate object.

States are made of people, say the state-preservationists of the left, and they’re correct. There’s even a grain of partial truth in their fantasy that this makes the state as a structure infinitely malleable. Laws are products of the state – of specific people within its structures – but what being a state means is that the people who act in its name decide what concrete effects its laws will have. The state is a specific kind of structure, and a key part of that specificity is the discretion that its agents hold.

We see this every day.

Continue reading the fantasy of “the rule of law”, and the concrete reality of the state →
revolution

signals across vast distances

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i wrote this almost two years ago, and forgot about it until last month; i don’t think it’s entirely done, but it felt worth putting here today. it’s built off of brecht’s “An die Nachgeborenen”, auden’s “September 1, 1939”, and rukeyser’s “Poem (I lived in the first century of world wars)”.

signals across vast distances (the second century)
       in three parts

III.

you up there, who observed the flood
in which we declined to perish,
consider
when you speak of our stubbornness
also the dark times
you arranged to avoid.

for we went out, frequently changing our appearance, bodies, shoes, 
through the class warfare, knowing
there was injustice and you were outraged at home.

and yet we knew:
a passive distaste for squalor
distorts the heart.
dissent without action
is the same as support. we
who you denied everything but a kind regard
know how to be gentle with each other.

but you, when at last the time comes
that you cannot survive alone,
do you expect us to be anything
but your enemies?

[8]

can this voice
unfold the lie
the romantic lie
of everyday senses
and of authorities
groping skies and asses?

there is no such thing as the state
and no one exists alone.

it is a choice to let one hunger or another
turn you into a cop, a guard, a soldier, a man.

loving one another is all that saves us.
in the end, we die.

—--

careless stories
products to the unseen
and unborn

to let go    to wake

a nameless way of living
almost unimagined values
as the lights of night brighten
criticism, revolution

about Andor: don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining

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piss on my leg and tell me it’s piss! how i respond will depend entirely on you, not on piss.

i just watched Andor, and now i’m having thoughts, and even opinions. i knew it was a bad idea. up til now, after a bone-deep enthusiasm that didn’t really last past 1988, i’ve been immune to the siren song of lucasville (aside from the visual design, which always looks great and makes no fucking material sense of any kind).

i know that makes me odd. but let’s get real, here.

Continue reading about Andor: don’t piss on my leg and tell me it’s raining →
gay wrath, revolution

when you say what the right says, you are the right

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i’m always impressed at how often, and how consistently, liberals & progressives repeat right-wing marketing rhetoric as if it were not just true, but self-evident.

lately, i feel like i’ve heard these floating around (all bullshit invented in the late 1900s, some of it in my lifetime):

– the right (or, sometimes, the far right) “moved from the margins to the center” between the 1960s and the 2000s. just absolute crap: if there’s one constant in u.s. politics since 1776, it’s the depth of white (especially wealthy white) support for the overtly white nationalist far right, which has never been separate from the rest of the u.s. right in anything but aesthetics.

– the right used to have an intellectually rigorous, morally grounded wing that kept its less respectable side in check. bill buckley’s patrician accent doesn’t make what he said, wrote, believed, and advocated – and who he was allied with – any different from what you’re hearing from any other rabid death-cultist, from calhoun to cohn to roof.

– the democratic party is in some way affiliated with the left. the least-justified fantasy since the faeries at the bottom of arthur conan doyle’s garden. perhaps such an alliance could could have been made at the 1964 democratic party convention, if it hadn’t refused to seat the multiracial Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegation. it says everything you need to know that in ’68, when a not-lily-white delegation was seated, it no longer claimed to represent “freedom”: it was the “Loyal Democrats”. that loyalty – still driving electoral progressives near you! – is part of why we do need a name for identifying with people who are actively trying to kill you instead of folks trying to keep you alive (“stockholm syndrome” is a misogynist lie invented to curb criticism of the police).

– the “elites” of our society are media workers and the professoriate (who’re supposedly liberal: also generally a lie), not the people with actual economic and political power (including the ones who own media corporations and control universities).

it’s more disappointing (if less common) for folks who’re actual radicals to do this, of course. in that zone, the one i see coming up all the time lately is this:

– the right, or the far right, or some parts of the right, are “anti-state”. now, there is a small slice of the libertarian right that might in fact oppose state structures as such. but most libertarians, and all neocons, paleocons, and other rightwingers who use an “anti-government” rhetoric base their whole political program on the existence of the state. some don’t want the current state, based on the slaveowners’ constitution of 1787, but all of them are aiming to maintain, and to control, a hierarchical, centralized, territorial structure of rule that legitimizes violence (by its agents, its supporters, and at times others) in service of its policies. you can tell because they want borders, they want enforced order, and they want “free enterprise” to be “protected”. that, my friends, is a description of a state and its policies, not of an “anti-state” position.

aside from making me annoyed, when liberals, progressives, and radicals parrot these various lines of bullshit, it strengthens the right. it turns their lies into “common sense”. and it makes them harder to fight. don’t do it. talk with your friends who do. and treat any analysis based on this junk as what it is: a right-wing analysis that supports and assists the right, even – especially – when it comes from liberals & progressives.

gendertreyf, longer writing

“a piss stop on the way”

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for gay stamina month, here’s my old comrade bob kohler zts”l writing in Come Out in 1970 about the kids who hung out at christopher street & 7th avenue – the ones who fought at stonewall and aren’t celebrated by name; the ones who hung out at the piers (and still do, despite gentrification and redevelopment); the ones who west village homosexual homeowners and tourists call the cops on; the ones who GLmaybeBfakeTneverQ NGOs have never given a shit about.

these are sylvia rivera and marsha p johnson’s people. STAR people. “street gay” => “street queen” => “street transvestite” => “street transgender” ~> some kinds of trans folks, but not the nice kinds. not the kinds that want to wrap themselves in the flag, talk to the cops, be entrepreneurial, or march alongside cops and corporations in a parade pretending that Everything Is Just Fine. and not the kind who think Identity is what matters.

the piece is also the earliest place i’ve seen “mopped” and “read” in print, though i’m sure they were used much earlier. bob used to talk about these kids leaving stuff they’d lifted at his store on christopher street. they were his friends, and some of them, especially sylvia, were his comrades in the Gay Liberation Front (till it stopped being a workable space for trans folks) and many other projects down through the decades.

bob, unlike so many of the other gay men who were in the streets 49 years ago during the stonewall riot, never stopped being a radical faggot. he knew that as long as the kids he wrote about here were “so fucking afraid – in a world they never truly made”, he could not rest. he knew that until we truly make the world we live in, none of us can.

revolution, yiddish & jewish

This Is an Old War – You Better Know What You’re Fighting For

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i wrote this a little while ago, but today seems like the right day to post it. today is the 75th anniversary, according to the christian calendar, of the װאַרשע געטאָ אױפֿשטאַנד, the warsaw ghetto uprising. there’s so much to say about that heroic act of resistance, and the years of less-commemorated struggle that came before and after it, but other folks have been saying it for years. look, if you haven’t already, at the wonderful writing of irena klepfisz (in poetry and prose), the songs and poems of shmerke kaczerginski and avrom sutzkever, the memoirs and interviews of marek edelman… it’s a day to think, as well, about the things that we can – that we need to – learn from those struggles. in that spirit: honor to their memories – koved zeyer ondenk – כּבֿיד זײער אָנדענק

like a lot of us – jewish radicals; antifascists of all flavors; folks thinking about concrete resistance to state violence – i’ve been thinking a lot about the jewish partisan fighters of the 1930s and 40s lately. this year, i’ve seen their memory invoked, in many ways, far more often than in the previous decade. i’ve done plenty of that, too, in my contribution to this year’s Radical Jewish Calendar Project, among other places.

but lately, especially after a conversation just before the new year (5778, not 2018) with my dear friend and comrade malcolm, i’ve been thinking about how we talk about partisans, which partisans we talk about, and what we do and don’t say. and i’ve been getting a little worried. this is a bit of an exploration of how this history is used, guided by walter benjamin’s warning that antifascists must think about the past knowing that even the dead will not be safe from our enemies if they are victorious (and that our enemies have not ceased to be victorious).

if you want a tl;dr, just skip to the end. there are conclusions drawn.

Continue reading This Is an Old War – You Better Know What You’re Fighting For →