Vox Intermundia
Dissertation research project undertaken as part of the Digital Society MSc at the University of Glasgow.Abstract
Trans people seeking to access hormone replacement therapy (HRT) in the UK are faced with interminable NHS waitlists and expensive private clinic fees, making this effective treatment inaccessible to many. For this reason, many seek to access HRT through other means, a practice referred to as DIY HRT. This evasion of the medical institution is a historical social phenomenon, the purpose of this research is to investigate how digital technologies have transformed the infrastructure that enables this alternate pathway to HRT. Situated within the field of infrastructural studies, this dissertation will undertake a reading of the divergent infrastructures of institutional trans healthcare and its DIY evasions for the vernaculars of transness being elaborated within this interrelationship. Examining the standards, procedures, and mechanisms required of users of these infrastructures to access to HRT will elucidate how transness is materialised by each, highlighting the (in)congruities of the trans imaginaries brought forth within and between these infrastructures. Ultimately, DIY HRT infrastructure will be understood as the institution’s ambivalent mimic, at once menacing and reiterating some of the normative impulses of the clinic. While the onto-epistemic repositioning of hormones enacted by the digital mediation of DIY HRT infrastructure has made it possible for HRT to slip underneath and into the infra of mundane trans existence.
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