 You'll hear a little bit about biohacking today. This lecture is called Open Source Estrogen, and it'll tell you a little bit about the possibilities in do-it-yourself biohacking and extracting and detecting estrogen. So it's do-it-yourself. Basically, you can probably do it in your own kitchen. So it's a lot of fun. This issue is relevant for many, many people, because today hormone therapies are very normal and a lot of people, even though there are not that many problems in doing stuff, don't get the therapies that they want. So with Open Source Estrogen, we have a solution for a small part, maybe, for some of you, that might actually change the world. How that works will be explained by Maggie. Give me a warm welcome for her, please. Yes, have a great talk. Thank you. Thanks. Is it working? Hello, hello. Can everyone hear me? Okay, yeah? So thanks for the introduction. My name is Mary Magic, and I'm born and raised in Los Angeles, and now I'm based in Vienna. And today I'm going to talk about estrogen biopolitics. So to give you a brief introduction, I'm an artist, first and foremost, but my methodology is in biohacking, and that's for me to get a familiarity with my medium, which is hormones. So I'm also interested in the cultural discourse, as well as body and gender politics. So when we talk about hormone biopolitics, we must first ask, how did we arrive at this black box fact that estrogen produces a female body and testosterone produces a male body? Because we didn't just discover hormones in some lost corner of the planet, we ourselves called them into existence. In the late 1800s, there was this concept of organotherapy, this idea that if you ingest the same organs as the one that you're trying to cure, then, yeah, you would cure that organ by ingesting it. So there's a scientist named Brownsacard that claimed that if he ate the testicles of dogs and roosters and monkeys, then this would rejuvenate him of old age and regain his vitality and his masculinity. He called it the medicine of the future. That sounds familiar to any transhumanist in the room. But back then, there was no way to visualize or verify that what they had isolated from these organs and purified was indeed estrogen or testosterone. So what they had to do was rely on these bioassays, so basically human and animal test subjects where, for example, I'll give a story about Eugene Steinach, who was an Austrian scientist and had his lab in the Vienna amusement park. And what he would do is perform these gonad transplants. So basically remove the testicles of rats or roosters, and then he would observe, well, now these rats are acting more feminine, they're more docile and less aggressive. So it is the testicle that contains the male essence testosterone. So you can see from these studies that it's a sort of gender fiction that he's promoting that the notion of gender is already inscribed into the gonads, into the chemicals and into the experiments. So from these experiments came kind of the beginning of an industry where they would use these organ concoctions, like extracts, to rejuvenate men of old age, to cure homosexuality and to basically fix women who are too tall or too masculine and men who are too feminine. And to further understand how these somatic fictions became more entrenched and normalized, we have to follow the funding. So pharmaceutical and chemical companies, they saw a huge profit in these molecules and they decided, well, there needs to be a race to see who can conquest these hormones, isolate it, source it and market it to the masses. The marketing aspect was crucial, for example, the disease depression does not exist without the synthetic molecule serotonin, the same way that clinical masculinity does not exist without synthetic testosterone. These somatic fictions were used to create diseases that would have a hormonal cure. Initially they sourced testicles and ovaries from animals such as bulls, cows and goats and even marginalized people like the poor, disenfranchised and incarcerated. But soon they moved on to urine because urine came in larger quantities. Thousands of women had their urine sourced from hospitals and gynecological clinics not knowing that they were contributing to big pharma's research. After women came horses, which have to be continuously impregnated to produce their hormone-rich urine. These estrogens isolated from urine are conjugated estrogens, meaning that they are not potent enough for gender transition therapy, but enough to treat symptoms of menopause such as hot flashes. However, since the 1970s, research has shown that pre-marin, what you see on the slide, has greatly increased breast and endometrial cancer in its users. When they discovered diethylsobasterol or DES, it's a form of synthetic estrogen which actually came from the petrochemical industry, not the pharma industry. This was the dominant prescription for pregnant women to prevent miscarriage until they found a huge rise of cervical cancers in these women and also their daughters and their granddaughters. So this left a really terrible legacy in the U.S. and during its dominant usage between the 40s and 70s, then it was finally canceled and it's off the market now. And of course I have to talk about the pill, which I like to call the American lifestyle drug. So over 50 percent of women in the U.S. are prescribed on some kind of hormonal contraceptive pill. And we have to remember that this was something that feminists fought for in the second wave feminism movement. It was a symbol for reproductive freedom until they realized that the pill actually kills women. It causes cancer, pelvic inflammatory disease, depression, all kinds of other horrible side effects. But at the same time, you know, if you are a woman born in the developing world and where, you know, women actually die from having too many complications, from too many pregnancies, then the pill actually prevents death. So it really depends on the body that you're born into, whether the pill saves lives or kills people. Either way, I think we can all agree that it's time for a non-hormonal contraceptive method and we shouldn't wait around for Big Pharma to get to this. And of course when ecologists began noticing frogs growing ovaries next to their testicles, the media decided, okay, well, let's blame the suburban housewives for peeing their birth control subscriptions into the water supply until they soon realized that what's causing these gonad deformations was actually coming from atrazine, a really common pesticide used in the U.S. and the agro industry. And a lot of the media also called, or even scientists called these frogs transgender frogs and the fish also transgender fish, which I have to say is the wrong terminology because that's like referring to our trans friends that they are the result of some chemical mutation, which is completely false. And PCBs are another highly persistent and pervasive molecule from the petrochemical industry and when they invented it, they actually called it a magic fluid because it increased the stability and longevity of everything that it touched. So PCBs I think are one of the most pervasive chemicals that we have in existence and after the 1929 economic collapse, actually Monsanto took over its production. So we think of Monsanto now as an agricultural industry, but actually it started out as a petrochemical company and if you are familiar with the effects of dioxin or agent orange, PCBs have the have basically the same effects and this is the last one. We have the very popular BPA and this molecule was also coming from petrochemical, but they decided that before DES they wanted to try it on women because they knew that it had estrogenic effects. So since the 1930s, the industry has known this has estrogenic effects, yet it's one of the most commonly used plasticizers in the packaging industry, in the food and packaging industry. And you might notice that a lot of your water bottles say BPA free on them now. Well, they might still contain BPS, which is just another version of BPA, which is just as toxic, but the companies are not legally obliged to label it containing BPS. So despite all these warnings about the toxic impacts of these endocrine disruptors, all of these Xenoestrogens, these hormonally active compounds in the environments, the lobbying of petrochemical, agricultural and pharmaceutical industries continues to influence the regulatory institutions in favor of their capitalist interests. I see this as a kind of molecular colonization on our bodies and bodies of non-human species, which also forces us to rethink our definitions of normal and natural, our relationships with our bodies with the environment, and also how we can face our shared species vulnerability in this all-toxic alien becoming. Because to state it bluntly, these molecules have no respect for jurisdiction nor concern for human and environmental health. I mean, why would they? They go wherever they please, wherever they're released. And more often than not, these places are concentrated in marginalized, disenfranchised and indigenous communities. There are several cases of toxic dumping happening in the US, mostly on Native American reservations and so on. So when we talk about the non-human and embracing the non-human, we also can't forget those bodies which we already treat as non-human who, I mean, they live very precarious lives. So the effects of these endocrine disrupting molecules, they range from obesity to lower IQ to early onset puberty, cervical and testicular cancers. And it's important to note that it's not just the reproductive effects that the reproductive organs that are affected by these molecules. We have just general, I mean, these molecules are affecting our entire hormonal stability that goes from the neurological centers and to the normal metabolism of the body. However, it is the reproductive effects that we tend to focus on, especially in public discourse. And I'm going to go back to that a little bit later. So what can we do about this? So I started to work on this project called Open Source Estrogen about two and a half, three years ago. And it's a collaborative investigative project seeking to demonstrate the various entrenched ways that hormones have colonized every aspect of our being. The project is Open Source in the sense that the protocol is generated, are shareable, hackable, and constantly improved on. And another sense that it's Open Source is the fact that the estrogen is all around us, it's all pervasive, it's ubiquitous, and in a sense it's available for us to hack and to collaborate with and to refigure new subjectivities. The project takes a lot of influence from tactical art collective, critical art ensemble, and the concept of fuzzy biological sabotage, the idea that organisms could be hacked and reversed and manipulated and used for social resistance. The project is also heavily influenced by cyberfeminist collective Subrosa. In this picture, there are performance hosting the world's first woman-friendly expo on advanced reproductive technologies, ART. It was a way to perform science publicly, mimicking the language and rhetoric used to capitalize and commodify female marginalized bodies. So Open Source estrogen, we started with a really simple question, which was, what if it was possible to make estrogen in the kitchen? This question opened up more questions as to whose bodies are currently affected, who's currently controlling its distribution, and whether the ethics behind self-administering self-synthesized hormones that haven't gone through FDA approval or clinical trials. What are people willing to risk to gain greater body autonomy? We didn't want to underestimate the power of speculative fiction. Using the format of a fictional cooking show, which is called Housewives Making Drugs, not only are we demystifying the scientific protocol of hacking estrogen in a DIY kitchen setting, it's also presented as a practice of decolonization, a way to unravel how bodies can be managed, disciplined, and pathologized, and then say, well, here's a way we can engineer our own form of resistance, sharing estrogen recipes in the kitchen. This is a 10-minute film, Housewives Making Drugs, starring two amazing trans performers, Jade Phoenix and Jade Renegade. Now, I want to switch gears and tell you more about how I got to these recipes in the first place. So get into a bit of biohacking, or what I like to call estrogen-geeking freak science. So the first protocol that I started exploring was a low cost way to detect estrogen. So I started exploring transgenic yeast biosensors. By the way, the text in the yellow is a shout-out to all the people I worked with because estrogen-geeking freak science is not something you can or should do by yourself. It's more fun with friends. So with these yeast, I've inserted a plasmid containing human estrogen receptor, and this allows the yeast to produce a yellow molecule when it comes in contact with any kind of estrogenic molecule, so any molecule that binds to the estrogen receptor. And keep in mind, this is a receptor that's highly conserved among all animal taxa, and it has a super long ancient evolutionary history, this estrogen receptor. And so that's why we have the frogs and the fish and the microbes and everything's being affected by these xenomolecules. So these yeast biosensors, they actually have amazingly high sensitivity compared to traditional laboratory machines like GCMS or LCMS. However, these are machines that no citizen really has like any access to because they're huge and they cost tens of thousands of dollars. And more importantly, the yeast biosensors are able to detect compounds that we don't even know are estrogenic yet. The next protocol is a DIY solid phase extraction. So this is a method I like to use for large bodies of water like rivers or oceans or even tap water. And I've also used, I've tested holy water from churches. And so basically the molecules are existing in very dilute concentrations. So you need a way to concentrate that. And this process is using a parasaltic pump system. And when you combine this system with the yeast biosensors, then it's a process I like to call river gynecology because you're basically diagnosing the river for any pollutants or toxic compounds the same way that you would diagnose your own body. The next one is a protocol I like to use for urine. So this is for extracting the estrogens that we pee out. And keep in mind, these estrogens are, they're conjugated, which means that they're in an inactive form. And so it's not something I would recommend for any kind of gender transition therapy. But if you go back to the story of premarin and the pregnant horses, it is a compound that they used to use for menopausal symptoms. So the protocol is using household materials like silica gel, cigarette filters, and methanol kind of household. And it also uses a glass bottle hack, so you cut the glass bottle and that substitutes for the expensive laboratory columns. And lastly, I've been exploring a new trajectory with artist Ryan Hammond on a species of white rot fungus, which are able to break down toxicities as a form of bioremediation. The fungus also has incredible medicinal, anti-cancer, anti-dormosus properties, which if you're a person on HRT or birth control pills, the fungus would really help with that. So it's pretty interesting. So much of my practice is based in workshopology, workshopping with the public, and people who have no idea what is biohacking or what are estrogens or any of this stuff. And I do it as a form of public amateurism, which is a phrase I'm borrowing from Critical Art Ensemble and Subrosa to mean learning and failing together in the public as a way to learn without any hierarchies of expert or lay person and to also most importantly demystify these scientific protocols and rhetoric. I also collaborate with a collective called the Aliens in Green, which is an investigative laboratory and tactical theater group, which tries to reveal the alien agents of anthropogenic xenopower, in other words, these toxic xenoestrogens. We use media communication, open science philosophy and speculative fiction in order to generate critical discourse and interventions in the public sphere. Our workshops tend to last six hours long because they're so intensive and highly orchestrated. We actually abduct the participants into a performance without them even knowing it. One of the discursive exercises we try to do is to take all the effects of endocrine disruptors like obesity, autism, low sperm count, and we ask the participants to place them into one of two categories. Is it biological suffering or ideological suffering? Meaning like, do you actually experience real pain from these effects, these toxic effects? Or is it more a result of society's binary heteronormative system that is disciplining you or acting as a form of biosurveillance on you, on your body? Another project that I've been working on, this is where my practice is going into more performance territory, is called the Molecular Queering Agency, which is a live participatory performance involving worshiping urine and using these oxygen masks that are filled with hormones for you to inhale and also an audio-visual projection. This is a fictional service offered by unknown and known molecular agents that have colonized the planet. The agency gently guides participants through the process of queering as they are asked to offer up their own urine for the hormones to be extracted. So in the picture, they're inhaling these hormones and then those hormones are actually extracted from previous participants. So I've created this kind of hormone colonizing cycle each time I do this performance. And we worship the urine because it's a symbol of this disobedient liquid. It contains not just the natural estrogens that we make in our bodies, but it also tells us how much exposure we've had to Xenoestrogens. So I mean, it's a super scary and paralyzing topic, this idea that we're all basically mutating, but then this agency is trying to encourage that this is a collective mutagenesis, that we're doing this all together and we can embrace the horror together. So this is a three-step process for living in an increasingly queer world. So the first step is toxicities. You live in an alien landscape filled with polluted by petrochemical, agricultural, and pharmaceutical industries. Step two, semiosis, you're already alien with plastics in your urine, in your blood, in your children. And step three, subjectivities. You want to be more alien than you already are. Because what does it actually mean to be alien or to be queer or to be outside what is socially or medically accepted? So I found this paper, it's actually a scientific publication, where they hybridized two species of fish and the result was a hermaphrodite, which they called a hopeful monster, which is really interesting terminology for a scientific paper, but it also made me think, well, why can't we also be considered hopeful monsters? Because without a doubt, like not only are our physical bodies being disrupted, but also our binary notions of male and female, of binary genders. And so when we talk about difference and disruption and disobedience, let's not also forget those bodies that are social, that society already calls disobedient, like hermaphrodite bodies, intersex bodies, and their bodies are often medicalized to fit our notions of normal and natural and heteronormative. So like their bodies and also trans bodies that aren't performing socially sanctioned heteronormativity, they live precarious lives. And at the same time, you could argue that we all have an endocrine disrupted body. I mean, they find PCBs in the deepest parts of the ocean, in the Mariana's trench, they find PCBs. So there's no body out there that hasn't been exposed by these toxic xenomolecules. There is a study done in Sweden linking the exposure of plastics and pregnant women to the distance between the anus and the genitals and it's actually getting smaller and smaller. And so you can see that we're all being chemically altered, physiologically altered, but to me, I'm bringing this up because it's kind of an interesting case where it seems to be more of a cosmetic alteration because there is no negative health effect of having a shorter anal genital distance, maybe more transfer of bacteria, but actually it has a really beautiful symbolism because like the genitals, which are the most gendered part of the body, it's like they're trying to reach the most non-gendered universal part of the body, which is the anus, like everyone has an anus. But anyway, I think there's way too much emphasis being put on the genitals to determine sex and gender, right? We know so much from evidence that this chart that you see on the screen is a social somatic fiction that discriminates against non-binary bodies. And we also have to pay attention when we talk about endocrine disruption or these toxic xenomolecules, it's so easy to slip back into transphobic, homophobic, even xenophobic discourse. I came across this blog post that said, well, I don't think it's right that the government is putting birth control pills in the water supply, it's making all the men gay, and we need both male and females to reproduce the human species. And it's like, well, I think there's more urgent reasons that you should be angry that there's all these pollutants in the water supply aside from turning men gay. So I just want to return back to plastics and tease apart the irony a bit. There's a really great writer named Heather Davies, and she writes about how we're living in this plastic sphere, this plastic scene, and in a way, the plastic molecules are progeny, they're like our children. They're going to live long past, after we die, they're going to exist and persist and create this kind of geologic indigestion in the planet. And so there's no way to escape this all-pervasive toxicity and its queering potential. And so what does that mean for people who identify as queer now? I mean, are we saying that our queer can have no future in this toxic landscape? And I'd like to think about our bodies as just, we're all bodies in flux. We're defined by our relations with molecules, with matter and our shared semiotic sphere. And when I say semiotic sphere, the semiosphere, I mean that all these molecules that are communicating to us, they communicate to all other living beings on the planet as well. And so we're all glitching each other and we're glitching together. The question we have to ask ourselves is, can we reframe toxicity without reinforcing a standard of purity? Rather than affirming the cultural panic through eco-conservationist, eco-heteronormative discourse, can we shift from toxic shame to toxic embrace? Can we create a discourse that can emancipate us? Because what's at stake now more than ever is the issue of body sovereignty. How bodies can be stolen through hormonal technologies and residues of capitalist industrialization. So I'm going to end here on a six-point plan written under the open source estrogen project. It's actually modeled after the Transgenic Cultural Production Plan of Critical Art Ensemble. I'm not gonna read all of this, but I just wanna emphasize the last point, number six. Consider the micro-performativity of hormones as an agential power of not only molecular colonization, but of molecular collaboration. Because these molecules, they live with us, among us, in us, between us, and they collaborate with us to produce who we are. And we have to consider the word disruption as well, like disruption to what exactly? Disruption to our heteronormative strictures. Well, I think that's a good thing. It's making us re-evaluate our notions of male and female categories. So, yeah, that's it. Thank you very much. Great talk. So we have a lot of time left. We'll do some Q and A. So if you have questions, we have microphones in the whole hall. Just line up behind the mics and you'll go through. We will just start with two. Hi, thank you for your talk. I was wondering if you could give more details on this topic of the fungi that you made helping with HOT, because I think this is very relevant to many trans people. And, yeah, I was wondering in general, like the whole project that you explained seemed to focus more on, like, the global kind of effects. But I was wondering a bit more about, you know, like the personal issue that this could help with. For sure. So the project exploring fungi, it started really recently, actually. And we just started exploring its properties. And we found out, we found all these scientific papers that it was using the fungus to make tea and then to combine that with cervical cancer therapy, like chemotherapy, and also prevents against thrombosis, which is, you know, this blood clot that happens very frequently, and it could be very serious to your health. And we realized that these are also symptoms that are common, you know, if you're taking, like, breath control pills, you're on some kind of HRT. So a lot of these papers, like, they're coming from Korea and Japan, and they, it's basically like, it's basically making tea, you know, but then the way they describe it in the paper is like really scientific and boil it at this temperature, blah, blah, blah, but you're just soaking it in tea and hot water to extract these, they're called beta glycans, something like that. But these are the molecules that get extracted into the water and they're actually preventing, like they have anti-cancer properties. So one of the mushrooms is called schizophilum commune. I don't know if you can remember that, but it's one of the most common mushrooms in the world. That's why it's called schizophilum commune. And another mushroom that we investigated was the oyster mushroom. One, please. Thank you for your talk. I have two questions. Once, I value that. I know in the discourse of bison disruptors, endocrine disruptors, and plastics, and ecological topics overall evaluated highly when someone gives, or it's not only discussed, but also options are given, like you have done in your project, educating people about it, empowering them to test their environment for that. But I have to say to me that it would be challenging to, in your term of toxic embrace, it is new to me. And I have to say, I'm not sure yet how I would stand to that. And I would ask, why do you prefer, why do you choose to educate people about it? And then trying so that they can care for themselves rather than trying to disrupt this industrial practice? Well, I think that I'm encouraging both things, both practices. I mean, disrupting the industrial, okay, well, I'm not going to lie and say it's easy to disrupt companies like Bonsanto. It's really difficult. And so my practice is hyper-local, which means that I try to affect change in the people who join my workshops. And I think that having awareness or having a consciousness about all the pollutants in the water supply, and I mean, even if that ends up just affecting your consumer choices, but this can really help to be, to increase the amount of autonomy that you have in your own body and in your own environment. So, and thank you for bringing up this kind of tension about the phrase toxic embrace because I also have a lot of, I'm still trying to reconcile what that means because I think for a lot of people it's very, very paralyzing to realize that how polluted our environment is and how we can't escape this. And so where do we go from here? Like how do we move beyond now knowing these scandalous levels of estrogen in the water supply? I mean, and I'm exploring different kinds of discourses and one of them is like, well, why don't we look at these molecules like our progeny, like our children and be responsible for them like they are our children. And I guess when I say toxic embrace, I'm actually, I mean like embrace the queer, like embrace the other, embrace bodies of difference because they exist already and they're gonna continue to increase because we see all these effects of these endocrine disruptors. We're gonna see a lot of weird mutated beings, a lot of queer beings, yeah. And a second question. I had to, I was reminded of Paul Presciato and I'm interested, would you also do this kind of project for testosterone and do you think that also, yeah. I've thought about it. I don't know. I'm still a little bit estrogen obsessed right now but yeah, because there's definitely, there aren't as many uses for testosterone as there are for estrogen. I mean, if we compare estrogen and testosterone and what kind of biocapital is made, estrogen is definitely in the lead. I mean, estrogen and progesterone, they are the most highly manufactured synthetic compounds in the world actually. That's how much money and profit these companies are making. But yeah, testosterone is definitely an interest. Yeah. Thank you. Microphone four please. Hello. Are you also looking to estrogen collators, the ways how to remove estrogen from the environment? Helators. Yes. Okay. Well yeah, that's what the fungus project is kind of exploring because what's interesting is they have, they're naturally occurring enzymes that the mushrooms are producing because they produce the same enzymes to basically eat trees that are rotting and dying. So these same enzymes are breaking down these plastic molecules because they have these similar, basically like these multi carbon chains. So these fungus can actually do the same job. And so that's the, and aside from, yeah, and then the extraction, I mean, it's very difficult to extract to like and purify all the water that exists. It's more of a way to combine that with the yeast biosensors. I would say the fungus trajectory is the closest to this kind of bioremediation. And if anyone is working with like detecting, extracting bioremediation of, endocrine disrupting molecules, like please come talk to me. Microphone three please. Hello. Do you perceive any potential danger with this type of biohacking? For example, a person doing a self experiment gone wrong or perhaps they try something like this instead of traditional medicine and end up hurting themselves somehow. And then especially in the position of a teacher, how do you mitigate this risk if you perceive it? That's definitely an issue that we thought about a lot because when we were researching all these protocols, actually the first protocol that I wanted to do was to modify yeast to basically produce estrogen, to be these like estrogen synthesis factories. And I was consulting with scientists for three months or so and they're all telling me like, Mary, this project is impossible. You need like a team of scientists and, because basically if you look at the metabolic pathway of producing estrogen from cholesterol, you have to knock in five or six genes into the yeast to get it to produce estrogen, which is really, really difficult genetic engineering. And so, I'm sorry, I forgot what the question was. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, sorry. And so, but then, you know, but we definitely thought about, well, if we did create this protocol and if we did like, if we did distribute these yeast, you know, what kind of dangers would arise? And I have to say, I mean, I'm not a super expert in trans hormone therapy or anything like that, but from what I know, it's hormones are so potent and so sensitive to every individual. And so, you really need to have a lot of knowledge about your own blood work and, you know, like about your own body chemistry to know like, what kind of dosage to give yourself. You know, that's what trans people, like when they go to doctor, they have to do all these tests to figure out the right dosage. And even the doctors still get it wrong, you know, because a lot of doctors are not actually knowledgeable in transition therapy. So, yeah, it's a huge risk. It's an ethical risk. And I definitely know people who would take that risk to live in the body that they want. So the internet has a question. Yes, it's a terminology question. And the internet is asking, why is referring to fish with sexual organ mutation as transgender wrong? How does it compare to the definitions we use for human species? Well, I think it's because it's creating this connotation that trans bodies are somehow chemically mutated, which is I think kind of a derogatory way to look at it. I mean, I think that maybe the term intersex or multisex would be a better term. But, you know, I had this feeling that scientists just didn't have the terminology to know what to call these frogs and fish when they saw like, you know, they would open up these frogs and find like five ovaries next to six testicles. And they just had no idea what was going on. They're like, oh, they're trans. And, you know, we have to be aware the terminology that we're using is, you know, there's a really thin line between like how we perceive non-human species to how we perceive our own people that live among us, you know. So I don't know if that answers the question. And we just got a second question. And the second question is, have you done any work to map the astrogens people have measured with a home measuring technique? What's the home measuring technique? I don't know. Like I just asked. But that's kind of interesting. I'd like to research more into that. Mike, one, please. Oh, by the way. So one of the major obstacles that the trans community faces is medical gatekeeping. So doctors often misunderstanding the possible side effects and failing to prescribe. And that often is due to misconceptions that sort of about the effects of different types of estrogen, for example, that are not supported by medical evidence. So I'll give you a specific example. Many doctors think that prescribing estrogen will increase the risk of breast cancer for people who have a family history of breast cancer. There is actually no evidence of that for bioadaptical astrogens without progesterone. So they have these misconceptions. Do you think that sort of, I love you to talk was sort of playing up in a way that the risks when in fact the problem that trans people have is that the perception of risk is too high. I see. Well, what you're describing are these bioidenticals and I've actually come across a lot of research saying like that they're much safer than the synthetic astrogens and progesterones that are being prescribed. Those are the ones that, yeah, we're causing a lot of health effects. And what people say like, oh, but our grandmother's generation when they were taking the pills, it was like three times the dosage and that's why all these effects were happening. And now it's like much lower in concentration. But I mean, again, it depends on your body. Like we don't know, I guess the point I'm trying to make is that we don't know whose bodies were in the clinical trials when they were testing each compound or each drug or whatever. Like I remember when I was in high school, my mom told me to go on birth control pills. And then one day she went to the doctor because she was getting hot flashes and the doctor gave her the same exact pills that I was taking for birth control. And so it made me think like these doctors like do they know what they're prescribing to people? Maybe they're- Off a note. Yeah, it's like, and that makes you think, well, we shouldn't rely too heavily on medical practitioners. I mean, we should be able to have our own autonomy to know our bodies and to know what's right for our bodies. I mean, but it's, yeah, it's everyone's own preference. But that's true. On the other hand, some of this information is just really straightforward and every GP should know it, every PCP. Microphone three please. I thank you for your extraordinary work. It's really amazing. I was wondering when you talk about the collaboration in which areas of the world you are collaborating with people and friends, you said, and maybe also if you could tell a bit about your experience and the cultural differences maybe and the willingness to adapt your methods or to collaborate with you and change the mindset and how we think about the topic and all the issues related to that. Most of my collaborators are coming from the US and Europe. So basically very Western perspectives working on this project. I've done workshops in Hong Kong and in Indonesia and I mean, I definitely had to tweak the narrative a bit. I mean, the one workshop I did in Hong Kong, I was collaborating with an artist, a Jess fan and we actually tried to frame it as like a satire on beauty culture in Hong Kong because it's, I mean, they're really big on cosmetics and facial creams and things like that. And so we decided like, let's extract the hormones from our mutual friend who used to be a beauty pageant. Let's take her urine, let's take her hormones, her estrogens and then let's mix it into face cream and we'll call it like a beauty spa treatment to beautify yourself to become more feminine. So we did it as a kind of satire but I would say that in the East Asian, Southeast Asian parts of the world, maybe their feminisms are a little bit behind compared to like Western feminisms but I'm just over generalizing. I know in some parts that's not true but I would like to actually get out of this like Eurocentric or Western-centric perspective on hormones and yeah, if anyone wants to collaborate, let me know. Microphone four please. Hello. The question two of us in the ago talked about gatekeeping and for trans individuals as a matter of misconception but there's obviously another element which has to do with latent bigotry and the powers that be having vested interests in colonizing our genders and certainly some of your talk addressed a lot of those points in trying to erode those structures through your performances but I guess the question is more about your work about granting individuals a more hormonal agency. Do you think, how do you think this will interact with institutional goals, institutional gatekeeping for, towards trans bodies? Do you think that additional agency over on the individual, non-institutional level would contribute to eroding this hegemony or do you think it would trigger a reaction that would add additional gatekeepers and restrictions? I think it's really hard to make a dent in these pharmaceutical industries. I mean, the artists who I mentioned that I'm collaborating with, Ryan Hammond, they're actually going forward with this yeast synthesis protocol like Dave actually and they're working on an artist's like shoestring budget and I really commend them for that. And I think as Ryan is creating that organism, that transgenic yeast to produce hormones, they're also really consciously aware of how those companies could come in and basically ruin what they're doing because we're talking about like, yeah, it's a David and Goliath situation. I think the companies have much more power to come in and say, you can't be doing that research, we have a patent on that. So it's interesting, right? Like as an artist and a biohacker, you're also talking with like lawyers and trying to get like free consultation on that. A lot of artists have done like protest art or whatever against like Monsanto and these big like giants, these Goliaths. And I think it's actually bad PR for them if they go after artists, but I think it's really hard to like actually, to make a dent in these companies, it has to happen at the policy level. I think like what we're doing as artists, biohackers, performance artists is not, well, who knows, right? Who knows? Maybe I'm underestimating what we can do. So I believe you do. I think you freak him out a lot. Microphone one, please. Yeah, hi. So I was wondering if you have thought about more like mechanical aspects of morphological freedom or body modification or gender transition, like surgery or prosthetics and like anything from a roadmap to totally speculative fiction, how will that play out? I'd be interested in that. Mechanical, like augmentation, you mean? Not as augmentation, but like anything from surgery to, when you're talking about gender transition technology, of course, like surgery to make your body as you want it to be, because you tend to focus on hormones, which is awesome. But I was also thinking about whether you have also considered whether you could maybe do surgery at home in some way into the future or self-organized or whatever. That sounds really scary. I don't know. I've never considered that. No, you're talking, I mean, I'm familiar with a couple of DIY abortion kits or like, I've never heard of any DIY top surgery, though, but that sounds really, really, but maybe it might happen someday. I don't know anyone that's working on that. Does the internet have a question? Oh, it was just yawning. Okay, then mic for please. Okay, hello, I'm just the last one. Yeah, thank you for your interesting talk. I never had this topic connected to art and the same connecting, like the estrogen and the queer or topic connected to xenopiotics and everything. And this makes me a little bit questioning. When we're talking about xenopiotics, I mean, these are hormones. They work as hormones, but this is only one part how they infect our body. There is also that they change our calcium and our bones, the brain, the hormone, not only the immune system, everything. So if we're just thinking about the kind of positive connected effects about estrogen and these xenopiotics, how do we be secure that we don't lose the precaution what we should have about xenopiotics and actually also don't think that actually it's good that we have these compounds in our environment. Well, I'm not saying that it's good that the toxicities are in the environment. But I mean, the companies can use this a little bit when we're thinking, okay, our body is always changing. We are always influenced about change. It can be the same thinking companies can use to justify what they are doing. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Oh, yeah, I actually, I was asked this one time in the past from the artist. He asked me what if companies take my discourse of toxic emancipation or whatever, and I'm basically use that as a marketing ploy, which I think would be really like, that would be fucked up. But yeah, I mean, you see it with like marine pollution. They call it oceanic pollution. They call it marine debris, like all the plastics in the ocean, it's marine debris. It's not anything toxic. But yeah, I am kind of, yeah, I am aware of that and yeah, it would be really fucked up if they did that. But again, I mean, these companies have all kinds of unlimited resources at their disposal and yeah, it's something to be cautious of. Thank you. So I think we're through with Q&A. Thank you very much, Medeck. Thank you. Awesome talk. And I hope you will really impact the world with that. Thanks. Thanks.