Hormonal Hinterlands: Mapping a Materialist Prehistory of Trans Medicine

ABSTRACT This article reexamines social histories of sex hormones in relation to critical theories of trans embodiment. It aims to foreground the entanglement of medical transition's materials in the uneven development of space, labor, and value under racial capitalism. Focusing on hormonal hinterlands —the sites and processes of primary commodity production which furnish molecules consumed to express sexed embodiments—the article draws attention to early social metabolisms of synthetic sex hormones. The article examines tensions and contradictions entailed in these hormonal social metabolisms: oscillations of spatial fixity and circulation; displacements of production from consumption; industrialized orchestrations of coerced reproduction and mass slaughter. Rereading the formative years of endocrine science alongside the consolidation of the American meatpacking industry, the article argues that, across discontinuous “prehistories,” modes of embodiment now hailed as trans have taken shape partly through assemblages of matter shaped by specific forms of human and nonhuman labor and struggle.