Care and Freedom From Below: Experiments in Trans Autonomy Through DIY

Abstract

Care and Freedom from Below examines trans do-it-yourself (DIY) health practices, with a focus on gender-affirming hormone therapy, as a communal form of care responding to oppressive, alienating, and inaccessible trans medicine. I use anarchism as my conceptual framework to theorize the political meanings, potentials, and limits of these practices. By analyzing the public texts of this community, including guides, websites, and zines, this dissertation presents trans DIY as a field of knowledge, a set of ethical principles, and a political imagination for trans autonomy. Though not an explicitly anarchist practice, I argue trans DIY shares an affinity with anarchism through its values and forms of organization, including autonomy, nonhierarchy, direct action, mutual aid, and harm reduction. Trans DIY represents a fundamental challenge to the medicalization, alienation, and gatekeeping at the heart of institutional trans medicine. Through autonomous knowledge production and communal resources, trans DIYers work to make self-medication as safe and effective as possible. Moreover, DIY enables new pathways for and meanings around transition that escape the medicalized model. Ultimately, though, DIY is not a solution to the barriers and contradictions within trans medicine, nor is it a ready blueprint for postcapitalist healthcare. Rather, trans DIY practices are imperfect experiments in autonomy, convoking a trans radical imagination of how care might look otherwise.