Autoethnography of a Pancreas

I explore the politics of hormone access and endocrine exposure in a world characterized by irrevocable toxicity and the many environmentally-derived chronic health issues that can come from it. Drawing on my own experience living with type 1 diabetes, I reflect on what it means to depend upon a synthetic, politicized, exogenous hormone—insulin—from the very pharmaceutical and medical industries responsible for widescale, non-consensual exposures to endocrine disruptors (like the estrogen-mimickers in consumer plastics), while simultaneously barring trans, non-binary, and chronically ill people from accessing necessary and/ or desired hormones (like insulin, estrogen, testosterone). What determines whose body—human or nonhuman—is disruptive? Musing on my life as a full-time pancreas whose existence is made possible by laboratory-made insulin and wearable pumps and glucose monitors, I argue that to access humanity is more than being unadulterated, and aspiring towards a non-toxic or pure future is both impossible given the legacy of forever chemicals and missing the point, which is that humanity is more than the hormones that do or do not innately constitute us.