Testosterone-Based Protocol, Transformation, and Reflections on Technobiopower in the Life Writing of a ‘Junkie’ Transgender

 

 

Virna Teixeira

 

 

INTRODUCTION

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Beatriz Preciado/ Paul B. Preciado is considered one of the main thinkers in the study of gender and sexuality. S/he is a philosopher and professor of Gender Theory, Political History of the Body, and History of Performance in Paris VIII, was the director of the Independent Studies Program (PEI) at the Museum of Contemporary Art of Barcelona, and is currently  Curator of Public Programs of documenta 14, Kassel and Athens (1). Her book ‘Testo Yonqui’ was published in Spain in 2008 (2) and translated into several languages with the edition in English appearing in 2013 as ‘Testo Junkie: Sex, Drugs and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era’.

 

‘Testo Junkie’ is the result of Preciado’s self-administration of topical testosterone for a year. During this voluntary protocol, while s/he observes the physiological effects of testosterone on her body and mutations of his psyche, s/he reflects on her personal history while growing up in catholic Spain and migrating to other countries; the internal transformation of her former identity as a lesbian feminist; the external transformations of love and loss during that time; gender, sexuality and queer studies; transgender activism; technology, colonialism and political hierarchies.  S/he also embarks on a critical historical and cultural analysis of how the pharmaceutical industry politicizes the body.

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From the history of sexuality, politics of the body, and history of illicit drugs, to the appearance of hormones and the invention of contraceptive pill and the industry of pornography, Preciado writes about biopower, and its connection to gender. To take testosterone illegally, at a time when healthcare for transgendered people had become more accessible is an act of activism and philosophical freedom outside the framework of the medical and legal protocol, in a modernity dominated by what s/he calls the ‘pharmacopornographic regime’.

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The ostensible catalyst for this writing is the loss of the queer friend that leaves her outside the margin of uncertainty between gender, body, languages, life and death.

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I have used the ‘life writing’ to refer to ‘Testo Junkie’ autobiographical content. For Smith and Watson (2010) ‘autobiography’ does not contemplate other historical kinds of self-writing, such as memoir, testimony, psychobiography, as well as contemporary forms of ‘new biography’. The term ‘life writing’ is ‘more inclusive of the heterogeneity of self-referential practices' (3). In the introduction of ‘Testo Junkie’, Preciado warns:

 

‘This book is not a memoir. This book is a testosterone-based, voluntary intoxication protocol, which concerns the body and affects of BP. A body-essay. Fiction, actually. If things must be pushed to the extreme, this is a somato-political fiction, a theory of the self, or self-theory.’ (4)

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‘Testo Junkie’ is a hybrid body-essay, where personal experience merges with a solid and critical academic background, with a mosaic of references and connections with each other: Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, Monique Wittig, Donna Haraway, Bruno Latour, Avital Ronell... According to Stryker (2006), Transgender Studies itself represent ‘an interdisciplinary field that draws upon the social sciences and psychology, the physical and life sciences, and the humanities and arts.’ (5)

        

Amidst this complexity, the scope of this essay is to focus on the direction of Preciado’s testosterone protocol, the micromutations it provokes in her body, feelings and perceptions of science and pharmacology.

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BECOMING TRANSGENDER

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The word ‘transgender’ was coined in the 1980s; but became influential after an activist pamphlet written by Leslie Feinberg in 1992 (Stryker, Whittle, 2006). According to Whittle (2006), ‘a trans person might be a butch or a camp, a transgender or a transsexual, an MTF (6) or FTM (7) or a cross-dresser’ (8), while the word trans appeared recently as an umbrella term for ‘transgender’. It was in the early 50s and into the 60s that the endocrinologist Harry Benjamin ‘systematized the clinical use of hormonal molecules in the treatment of “sex change” and defined ‘transsexualism’, a term first introduced in 1954, as a curable condition. (9)

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The latest issue of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM-V) reviewed the former diagnosis of ‘Gender Identity Disorder’ in DSM-IV, located among ‘Sexual Disfunctions and Paraphilic Disorders’. It gained a special chapter under the name ‘Gender Dysphoria’, removing the stigma of the word ‘disorder’. DSM-V describes the diagnostic criteria in adolescents and adults, and in general terms defines that:

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Gender dysphoria refers to the distress that may accompany the incongruence between one's experienced or expressed gender and one's assigned gender. Although not all indi­viduals will experience distress as a result of such incongruence, many are distressed if the desired physical interventions by means of hormones and/or surgery are not available. (10)

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This concept is important because hormone therapy and surgical treatment for transsexuals are indicated for ‘gender dysphoria’, and Preciado does not identify at all with this condition. Her revolutionary ideas move far away from the ‘establishement’ of medical manuals into other territories, those of mutating bodies and historical reviews of gender and sexuality, and philosophical questionings of ‘biopower’, a term coined by Michel Foucault – and substituted for by ‘techno-biopower’ by the post-feminist Donna Haraway:

 

It’s no longer a question of power over life, of the power to manage and maximize life, as Foucault wanted, but of power and control exerted over a technoliving and connected whole. (11)

 

TESTOGEL’S JOURNEY INTO SELF-UNCERTAINTY

        

The Testogel journey begins with loss. The death of a close Preciado’s friend, to whom s/he refers as William/ GD.  Guillaume Dustan was the nom de plume of the French writer and journalist William Baranès, HIV-positive, who apparently died of a drug intoxication on October, 3 in 2005. (12) The narrative starts on October, 5. Preciado receives a phone call. GD’s body is found in his apartment two days after his death. Her first instinct is to call a woman s/he has recently met for some support, referred as VD (13), who s/he will fall in love with. Death, and love. Under the emotional impact of the news, and the anger caused by this loss, s/he writes:

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‘That same day, a few hours later, I put a fifty-miligram dose of Testogel on my skin, so that I can begin to write this book. It isn’t the first time. This is my usual dose (…) I am not taking testosterone to change myself into a man or as a physical strategy of transsexualism; I take it to foil what society wanted to make of me, so that I can write, fuck, feel a form of pleasure that is postpornographic, add a molecular prostheses to my low-tech transgender identity composed of dildos, texts and moving images.’ (14)

 

This transformation, ‘to avenge the death’ of her friend, happens under a ritual of initiation in the first chapter that s/he calls ‘videopenetration’. The addressee of the performance-narrative carefully described is ‘the spirit’ of her dead friend. The material is disposed in her room: video camera, tripod, electric clippers, dildos, razor and shaving cream, glue, a mirror, white towels, a plastic basin filled with water testosterone, among other objects, and a GD’s book. Partially undressed, s/he shaves her head in front of the mirror and the camera, shaves the crotch, dresses up with the dildo: ‘As if for surgery, I expose only those organs on which instruments will be working’. (15) With a line of hair and glue s/he sticks in herself a ‘fag moustache’. S/he opens the testosterone in gel form is kept in a silver package, and administers it.

           

There is a strange scenario of drug taking, and also of erotic transcendence: ‘I dangle my silicone cock over the paragraphs tattooed across the pages of Dans ma chambre. (16) It’s your gesture’. (17) The objective is to cross-dress into her friend, intending to bring him back to life with this image.

 

THE TESTOSTERONE PROTOCOL

        

A few months after GD’s death, Del, Preciado’s ‘master gender hacker’ gives her a box of thirty packets of fifty-milligram testosterone in gel form. The box is carefully kept for months, while s/he spends time with her transgender friends:

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Some are taking hormones as part of a protocol to change sex, and others are fooling with it, self-medicating without trying to change their gender legally or going through any psychiatric follow-up. They don’t identify with the term gender dysphorics and declare themselves "gender pirates", or "gender hackers". I belong to this last group of testosterone users. We’re copyleft (18) users who consider sex hormones free and open biocodes, whose use shouldn’t be regulated by the state or commandeered by pharmaceutical companies. (19)

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When Preciado begins to take the Testogel, s/he does it in secret, like a drug user. S/he also have concerns about controlling its use; the risk of addiction; the reactions people will have after discovering that s/he is taking testosterone illegally; and the social impact of her transformation:

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I wait for nightfall. I take a packet out of the glass box, which I close immediately, to be sure that today, for my first time, I’ll take one, and only one, dose. I’ve barely started, yet I’m already behaving as if I were an addict of an illegal substance. I hide, keep an eye on myself, censure myself, exercise restraint. The following evening, almost at the same time, I take a second fifty- milligram dose (…) All the others are going to betray me. I know they’re going to judge me for having taken testosterone. Some, because I’m going to become a man among men, because I was doing well as a girl. Others, because I took testosterone outside the aegis of a medical protocol, without wanting to become a man, because I used testosterone like a hard drug, like any other, and gave bad press to testosterone at the very moment when the law is beginning to integrate transsexuals into society, to guarantee reimbursement from the state health service for the drugs and operations. (20)

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The secret place where her ‘addiction’ resides is her writing, paradoxically at the same time as her addiction ‘seals a pact with the multitude’ (21), as s/he is videotaping the ‘drug-taking’ ritual and sending images anonymously to a web page where hundreds of transgenders share experiences. On the fourth night of the protocol s/he is sleepless, writing frantically, energetic, like the first night s/he had sex with a girl (Preciado, 2013):

 

At six in the morning, after ten hours of not moving from my chair, of drinking only water, I get up and go out with my dog, Justine, for a walk in the city. (...) When I get home, I’m sweating. I notice my sweat has changed. I collapse onto the couch and watch i- Télé, the news only, and for the first time in three days I fall into a deep sleep drenched in that testosterone sweat, next to Justine. (22)

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Preciado is the scientist of her own experiment, and its narrator. S/he draws the testosterone molecule, its metabolic pathway, and copies the information presented in the insert of the drug. Testogel is the commercial name of topic testosterone produced by Besins Laboratories in France. S/he pays special attention to its clinical indication: illnesses related to testosterone deficiency; and to the main contraindication: the drug should not be used by women. No mentions about hormone therapy for the changing of sex.

        

Another point of concern is the risk of transfer of testosterone onto another individual through intimate and cutaneous contact, mainly to a ‘female partner’, and the safety instructions to minimize this risk. Preciado has the impression that s/he is reading a ‘manual of microfascism’, where ‘masculinity and femininity are pharmacopornographic fiction retroactively defined in relationship to the molecule with which they are treated.’ (23)

        

S/he decides to keep her legal identity as a woman while taking Testogel without subscribing to a sex change protocol. S/he reasons that it does not enter in conflict with the other transsexuals who opted for a legal route: ‘all of us are united by the same carbon chains, by the same invisible gel; without them, none of this would have any meaning.'(24)

        

The dosage suggested in the insert is 5g of gel, the equivalent to 50mg of testosterone. The maximum dose is 10g/day, to be supervised by a doctor. There is no mention of addiction to testosterone:

 

‘I take a mental inventory of all my friends who are taking more than fifty milligrams a day: HJ, PP, RZ, FU, KB, BS… I won’t be able to claim I didn’t know’. (25)

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Testosterone, including in topical form and in synthetic variants is medically prescribed for cross-sex therapy in FMT (Hembree et al, 2013). The ‘misuse’ of synthetic variants of testosterone for weightlifters, bodybuilders and athletes, and also the concern about an use of other illegal drugs in this context has been reported in a number of medical studies, but the question of dependence of these substances is unclear.

        

Copeland et al (2000) comments that ‘Anabolic androgenic steroids (AAS) use is a unique form of drug abuse that is not motivated by a euphoric effect, but rather the human drives to look better and achieve a competitive edge’ (26) - effectively to enhance masculinity. The route of administration used is usually intramuscular, in high doses of drugs cycles of 12 to 24 weeks or other sequential methods. Hildebrandt et al (2014) observed that despite the high prevalence of users (mostly male), reaching around 6.4% of male adults worldwide, ‘very little data are available on the behavioral or endocrine effects of AAS use among experienced AAS users’. (27) This is interesting, as Preciado’s concerns about the endocrine, behavioral and addictive effects of Testogel are genuine.

           

Beyond the side effects that Preciado reads in the insert, how can the effects of cross-sex hormone therapy in the body be predictable? Not much is known yet. Despite reports of treatment safety, clinical experience is still recent. The goal of the cross-sex hormone therapy is to reach testosterone male bloods levels in FMT (28), but what does it represent in terms of embodiment? The goals and body subjectivities of trans mutating individuals are variable. And so is sexuality and desire. By the way it was the psychoendocrinologist John Money who coined the term ‘gender’ in 1955, while working with hermaphroditism at John Hopkins University:

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The term gender role is used to signify all those things that a person says or does not disclose himself or herself as having the status of a boy or man, girl or woman, respectively. It includes, but is not restricted to sexuality in the sense of eroticism. (29)

 

In transsexual narratives, Prosser (1998) argues that it is ‘the body image that has a material force, not the physical body itself.’ (30) FTM transgender poet, Julian T. Brolanski in a sonnet “Fuck me harder” wrote: ‘Put me in a suit and call me Mary.’ (31)

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THE SEX-GENDER INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX

           

Preciado waits for the effects of the Testogel without knowing what is going to happen. S/he mentions that ‘at two hundred milligrams of T a week, I find it hard to go three days without fucking’; whilst also experiencing continual losses of blood which causes her to search for a gynaecologist.  S/he mentions the Testogel and is asked: ‘As a means of contraception? But you must know there are more reliable methods’. (32) The gynaecologists s/he had visited in the previous fifteen years were totally disinterested in her trans-queer sexuality, and suggested that s/he use the Pill as a contraceptive measure and to regulate the menstrual cycle.

           

Preciado knows that hormone therapy is an uncertain terrain, and scrutinizes its invention. S/he reviews the seminal works of the historians Andrea Tone (2001) and Lara Marks (2001) on the history of the contraceptive pill. Enovid, a combination of mestranol and norethynodrei, was the first contraceptive pill available and was released in 1957 by Searle & Co. Prior to that, because of legal restrictions on large-scale studies in the U.S., Puerto Rico had become the colonial pharmacological backyard for testing (Preciado, 2013). The dosages were far higher than today, and the side effects and lessons appeared later.

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The components of the Pill would soon become the most used pharmaceutical molecules in the whole of human history (Tone, 2001). In the same decade Hugh Hefner founded playboy, ‘the first North American “porn” magazine to be sold at newspaper stands’ (33). The sexual liberation movement associated with the pill bloomed, and the porn industry as well, mainly in the 70s after the great commercial success of ‘Deep Throat’ in 1972, one of the most watched film of all times:

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The invention of the contraceptive pill, the first biochemical technique enabling the separation between heterosexual practice and reproduction, was a direct result of the expansion of endocrinological experimentation, and triggered a process of development of what could be called, twisting the Eisenhower term, “the sex-gender industrial complex”. (34)

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Pornography became the dominant visual technology addressed to the male body to control his sexual reaction. Chemical and surgical prostheses were being researched for treatment of impotence by pharmaceutical industry and the discovery of sildenafil would later become the chemical treatment of choice for erectile dysfunction.

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SELF-EXPERIMENTATION

           

During her transformation under testosterone Preciado declares she has two biopolitical options to justify its use: either s/he is a transsexual suffering from gender dysphoria; or s/he must admit that s/he is addicted to the testosterone that s/he gets on the black market - a testo junkie. This introduces another theme – the relationship of traffic in illegal drugs to the pharmaceutical industry.

           

In ‘History of Sexuality’, Michel Foucault argues about the discourse and changing of attitudes towards sexuality during the Victorian period, when sex moved into the domestic scene, a regime we are still dominated by. Foucault comments that:

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At the beginning of the seventeenth century a certain frankness was still common, it would seem. Sexual practices had little need of secrecy; words were said without undue reticence, and things were done without too much concealment; one had a tolerant familiarity with the illicit. (35) 

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Illicit sexualities, illicit drugs. Escohotado (2008) did an extensive review thoroughly the history of illicit drugs and change of attitudes towards them in different periods and places. Foucault teaches that while the labour capacity was being systematically exploited in Victorian period, the pleasures of sex were put aside to the reproductive sphere. Escohotado (2008) comments on the huge interest for all types of psychoactive substances since the beginning of the 19th century, not only by doctors and chemists, but also by writers, philosophers and artists. Psychopharmacological progress was under way, a number of substances appear in that century (like morphine, heroin, codeine, cocaine), in parallel with the frailty of the industrial civilization, insomnia, tiredness and neurosis.

           

As Preciado recalls, ‘until the end of the eighteenth century, self-experimentation was still a part of the research protocols of pharmacology.’(36) Animal experimentation was not yet into question. S/he gives the examples of Sammuel Hahnemann with homeopathy, and Sigmund Freud. Freud’s case with cocaine is well known. In 1884, Freud ordered a gram of pure cocaine (just released in the market) from Merck laboratory to try it. He became an expert on the substance, used it, prescribed it, and worked as an advertiser for Parke-Davis laboratory (Cohen, 2011).

           

Freud’s self-experimentation, which lasted years, taught him many lessons about the substance, from the enthusiasm seen in his book Über Coca; to serious accidents, like the death of his patient and friend Dr Ernst Fleischl von Marxow from an overdose of cocaine.

           

American surgeon William Halstead who trained in Vienna also did research with cocaine as a promising local anaesthetic: ‘and just as with Freud’s experimental inquiries, Halsted’s principal guinea pig was himself.’ (37) He injected the drug in his muscles and nerves, and so did the doctors in his immediate circle. Halsted and his colleagues became cocaine addicts, and some of them died early deaths. The growing pharmacological knowledge about chemical substances in the 20th century, the power of pharmaceutical industry, the beginning of animal experimentation, and development of scientific research eliminated the practice of self-experimentation.

           

Due to increasing experience with the effects of recent psychoactive substances, their use in ‘marginalised’ and bohemian circles and innumerable changes brought about by industrialization and World War I and II, policies concerning drug use were transformed during the 20th century. However, in spite of the puritanism of the Temperance movement, the creation of laws governing the use of psychoactive drugs and punishing drug users, the appearance of new pharmacological industrialized drugs, the concept of the addictive power of some substances, the illegality and savage capitalism of drug trafficking, illicit drugs are still widely consumed, and junkies continue on the edge of society. 

           

Contemporary society has been inhabited by toxic-pornographic subjectivities and its pharmacopornographic desires, says Preciado:

 

‘So we will speak of Prozac subjects, cannabis subjects, cocaine subjects, alcohol subjects, Ritalin subjects, cortisone subjects, silicone subjects, Viagra subjects, $ subjects…’ (38)

 

S/he believes that the risks of romanticising autoexperimentation are individualization and depolitization. So what does s/he propose?  Not only to allow free access to cross-sex hormone therapy but a broader trans-feminist project, where bodies will be used as biopolitical platforms to test the pharmacological effects of hormones, and to create new frameworks for gender and sexual identities. Caught between being trans and a junkie, s/he also claims that:

         

‘It appears urgent that those dismissed as junkies (the users of illegal drugs) and those diagnosed with gender dysphoria (the potential users of sex hormones) must organize into associations of coypleft drug consumers and force the state-industry-pharmaceutical-drug-trafficking networks to facilitate free access without restrictions to these biocodes of the production of subjectivity.’ (39)

 

Transgender medicine is not taught in medical school curricula and nor is the understanding of gender, queer identities and different subjectivities, marginalizing individuals who question the hegemonic discourse of science.  For Donna Haraway (1988), ‘science – the real game in town – is rhetoric, a series of efforts to persuade relevant social actors that one’s manufactured knowledge is a route to a desired form of very objective power.’ (40) Complex narrative-essays such as ‘Testo Junkie’ offer rich material to explore and reflect on this.

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Virna Teixeira is a Brazilian poet, translator, curator and publisher. Her work has been published abroad, she runs a small press in the UK, and she has been working recently with film poetry.  She is a neurologist with a specialisation in substance misuse by the Federal University of São Paulo - UNIFESP. She did a MSc in Medical Humanities at King's College London, with a dissertation on women and illicit drug use in films. She lives and works in London.

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(Artwork: Rámon Peralta)