Elena Gonzalez-Polledo
T as informed material. Testosterone and relationality in FTM transition.
This paper examines the role of testosterone in FTM
(Female to Male) transition. After having been diagnosed GID (Gender
Identity Disorders), and sometimes privately without the diagnosis,
FTMs start a lifelong testosterone treatment through which they adjust
their bodies to male secondary sex characteristics. Although biomedical
discourses characterize hormones as functional ‘messengers’ of sex, and
limit their action to a series of mechanistic interactions among
‘independent’ domains –such as ‘the body’, ‘emotions’, ‘the
psychological’, etc-, I argue that in transition experiences
testosterone is a relational agent that connects not only cells, organs
and functions within the body, but different dimensions of becoming
FTM, including biological, social, legal, political and experiential.
Thus, in this paper I characterize testosterone
not as a fixed substance but as an event. I explore how testosterone
connects the biological, technological and informational dimensions of
transition insofar it embodies particular informational routes, from
its production in progressively industrialized and global contexts to
the ways in which it creates assemblages of matter, meaning and
experience in FTM transition. I argue that testosterone is in this way
an ‘informed material’ (Barry 2006), and explore how, rather than
remaining fixed, it is transformed in relation to the different
assemblages it forms as a route of interactions. This conceptualisation
of the role of matter in transition experiences not only recognizes the
role of testosterone in actively producing change, but highlights its
relationality as a key to understand transition.
E. Gonzalez-Polledo is a PhD candidate in the anthropology department at Goldsmiths College (University of London).
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