If you’re anything like me you’ve thought “it’s fucking ridiculous that pharmaceutical companies have control over production of estrogen so we have to either submit ourselves to cruel gatekeeping or import it through expensive and legally at-risk means. Wouldn’t it be great if we trans women could seize the means of hormone production and make our own estrogen and distribute it to each other without all the gatekeeping?”
It turns out @drcab1e has had similar thoughts and wrote this very simple guide to isolate estrogen from piss - more as an artistic statement than a practical guide (I’m not sure what the dangers are with this method), but it’s still a really cool thing.
Introduction
This is a guide that lets you make dangerous things at home. I believe you should have that ability, but I’m not responsible for what you do with it.
This is, at its core, a guide for self sufficiency. Think of it as a guide on how to grow food not useful in the day to day, but maybe something to experiment with one day, to keep in a drawer in case it gets bad.
This is foremost a practical guide to making estrogen, and it is seconderily an artistic intervention. Activism before art, always.
The means of production
What is the purpose for telling people how to make estrogen? Surely we have enough access to it already, through “legitimate” means such as the GIC, or “grey market”, the legal-but-frowned-upon net-works that get us our meds when the GIC decides we’re not heteronormative enough for them.
The short answer is that this measure isn’t- for now. This measure is for what’s next. This methdology, while semi-practical, is a starting point, not an ending point.
This guide points the direction, towards community reclamation of the means of production of our genders. And not just the genders of trans women - estrogen shapes the lives of cis women as much as it shapes our lives - birth control, menopausal depression, and a thousand other conditions.
The capacity to localise gender control is a tide that will raise all boats.
This guide has implicit cases where it might be used- blockades, state crackdowns, those living without access to post or the internet.
But it’s designed to open the possibilities, not close them. Access to this knowledge allows us to begin thinking about what what women marginalised by their transness can do to seize control of their own lives, and organise outside of the infrastructures and systems of the state.
This guide is not in itself an end to the biopolitical control of trans womens lives, but it might be the beginning of the end.
What comes next is up to you, in your community, your family, your activist meetings.
There’s work to be done on how to decolonise this work- the history of hormone therapy is a history of Black, Brown and Jewish bodies, from Nazi Germany to Puerto Rico, and I do not pretend to be able to talk to this.
If I can help, with any struggle, let me know. Go and make something weird, that works for you, that gives you autonomy and freedom, that’s hyper-focused to your lives and habits. I know I’ll be doing that.
The method described is:
- mix 3l urine with 2l butanol
- allow to separate for about six hours
- siphon away the upper, mostly-butanol layer and discard
- pour 330(unit?) sodium hydroxide into the remaining liquid
- allow a solid to precipitate out of the mixture
- siphon away the remaining liquid
- boil away the liquid
resulting in about 0.7g of powder that’s 96% estrogen by weight.
I’m not a chemist, I don’t know how many ways you could fuck this up and make actual poison, so like as the leaflet says:
Please note that while this estrogen is theoretically safe to consume, it is far easier, safer and cheaper to use a more traditional, established methodology. For more information, please consult: downwithcis.org
(sadly downwithcis.org points to a now dead tumblr)
I don’t recommend this. Like, really really don’t.
I am not a chemist, but I can tell you the following: “Estrogen” is not one substance, there are many estrogens, and they change forms while being metabolized, meaning that what you pe out isn’t the same as what you took in.
If you’re on typical transfeminine HRT regimens you’re PROBABLY taking estradiol, which chemically-converts into the significantly-weaker estrone (a carcinogen that can make you violently sick and isn’t recommended for human consumpotion on the grounds it’s dangerous) and estriol (not so bad, but not as general-purpose effective as estradiol).
I’m definitely going to ask @drcab1e about the details of the reactions here and what estrogens this method produces when she’s up tomorrow
It’s been absolutely ages since I did chemistry that I’ve probably forgotten most of what I did. I thought that the point of the sodium hydroxide reaction was to reduce estrone to estradiol, but I’m not certain anymore. Estrone and estradiol differ only in that estrone has a C=O group where (17β)-estradiol has a C-OH group; going from estrone to estradiol is reduction. But NaOH is a base, not a reducing agent. And I don’t know what relevance the butanol has.
I trust Ada enough to expect that she would do the research. But I will ask her to provide more info.
moreover, isn’t this just isolating the estrogen (or whatever form of something to which estrogen gets converted that is eventually excreted) in your urine, rather than synthesising it? i.e. this is only going to work if you have estrogen (or estrogen by-products) already in your urine. i.e. if you are already taking HRT.
a similar method *might* make your stash last longer. but as mentioned above: there are so many things that could go wrong here.
