Looking up from brewing my own hormones to discover that the UK government no longer considers me legally a woman

I've always found libertarians tedious, ill-informed and ideologically misguided, and yet the reality of being in a marginalized class and needing healthcare has driven me to something akin to libertarianism. Molon Labe to my bitch-ass government.

Here are my hormones. Come and take them

Last week Wesley Streeting our current national embarrassment and ideologue-du-jour in charge of the NHS published guidance telling GPs that they “must refuse” to provide care for young trans people who are getting hormones from any source other than NHS prescriptions, with explicit intentions to extend this to trans adults in 2025/26.

Streeting’s motives are not hard to discern. He has been observably far to the right of his peers since the beginning of political career in the NUS. He has called Labour members who support expanding the welfare state “traitors”. In his current position, he has proposed using AI in multiple NHS systems including in the detection of heart defects in unborn children. His crusade against the trans community has been apparent to anyone who is not determined to ignore what is happening. In every way, it is obvious that Streeting is ideologically aligned with the Trump-Musk technofascist project and wants to use his personal power to align Britain with the unfolding nightmare as much as possible.

Earlier this week I saw an American friend who had to rush to get her passport changed with Trump coming into office. Her name and gender changes were confirmed, she was told that the passport was printed on Inauguration Day, January 20th, but when she got the document over two times as long as she'd been told she'd have to wait, the gender marker said M. Clearly her altered passport had been stopped on the way to being sent out and the gender marker had been changed back. We talked about how things seem to be going in the UK. “Five years behind the US” we always say, “America is a season ahead”, these kind of things. I say to her and to my girlfriend that if we're really serious about that, that we have 5 years until it looks the same in the UK for trans people as it is in the US now, we have to be ready to get out before we're trapped, and we have to do more to fight.

Yesterday as I write this, the UK Supreme Court ruled that trans women are not legally women. It is completely unclear what this will mean for our lives in every sense except one: we are immediately less safe.

My girlfriend and I are both trans and we live pretty normal, full lives in many regards. We see friends, we exercise, we cook, we travel - but this ruling will embolden any bigot who wants to exclude us from normal parts of life. If we're using the changing room at the gym or a public bathroom, someone with a burning hatred and disgust towards trans women, whose head is filled with bigoted misinformation may now respond to seeing one or both of us by calling the police. If this happens, no matter what the technicalities of the law eventually work out to say, there is a real chance we or any women like us in this situation could be arrested and sent to a men's prison, and even supposing that surviving that were possible, given that trans women in men’s prisons are frequently raped, beaten, denied hormones and just put in solitary confinement to make the wardens’ jobs easier, a trans woman this happens to could be put on the sex offenders registry for the rest of her life. The effects of this decision are yet to become fully clear but the legal weaponry that has been placed in the hands of bigots is potentially life-ruining.

We see the news at about 10.30 and sit in horrified silence for several minutes. Everything I have detailed above - the implications of this news -is immediately clear to both of us, as it likely is to every trans woman in the country as they receive the headlines accompanied by pictures of beaming, grinning transphobes celebrating making our lives worse.

My girlfriend and I go to the local cafe to get out of the house. The owner, who I've known for most of a decade, asks how we're doing and when I tell her the news she is completely at a loss for words. She tells us it will change back again eventually, which makes me think of Section 28. She tells us that her cafe is a safe space, which I've never doubted.

I call with my brother. I don't think he likes to hear me getting angry, which makes it hard sometimes to explain the things they are doing to people like me. I want to tell him that a woman in Colombia was raped and then her arms and legs were broken and she was thrown into the river where passersby watched her drown and didn't help. We talk about America instead, about Hunter Schafer's passport being changed, about other women having their passports seized, about people I know who have loved ones in America can't travel to see them because they could get refused entry, interviewed by ICE, or even detained. I tell him a woman in Florida has been arrested for using the women's bathroom and is being sent to a men's prison. I want to tell him about V-coding, the practice by which prison wardens assign trans women to violent and aggressive male prisoners in a sort of forced marriage to pacify the male prisoner at the cost of the woman being repeatedly beaten and raped, sometimes to death. It won't help the situation to overwhelm my brother with the horrors. He's already asking what he can do. I say he can write to his MP and he can donate to the Good Law Project.

I have no idea how to feel. The people who have done this, the white, middle class women celebrating in the images accompanying the news that I am a second-class citizen, do not see women like me as people. They have never tried in earnest to understand our lives, our pain, our joy - they have never listened for the similarities they share with trans women, rather than the differences. It feels almost tritely naive to say, but I am in utter shock at the rabid, gleeful cruelty of these women. To many cis people a year or two ago, the pale lies that these women are “feminist campaigners” bringing their “legitimate concerns” forward in order to “keep women safe” may have worked, but I find it hard to believe that many people now see what is happening to trans people in America and fail to draw a straight line between Donald Trump and JK Rowling. I find it hard to believe that Rowling herself really thinks she has different politics in regard to trans people from Trump. The shock I feel is precisely because Trump’s inaugural speech declaring “a revolution of common sense” and For Women Scotland supporters’ claims that this is “a victory for biology” are too obviously similar to ignore. It can’t just be me. It can’t just be trans people who see this. They must know, and they must hate us so much that they just don’t care.

About two weeks ago, I made my own injectible estrogen. Estrogen is not a controlled substance, and legally speaking you can brew whatever you want and stick it in your veins if it’s just for you. Okay I’m not a lawyer and that isn’t legal advice, but as far as I can tell there is nothing illegal in making your own injectible estrogen. Besides, making your own injectible estrogen is incredibly simple, you just need the right amounts of powder-form estrogen, (estradiol valerate is the most commonly used, though there are strong arguments that estradiol enanthate is better for your levels and stability), a carrier oil, a preservative (benzyl alcohol) and, if the resultant mixture would come out too thick, then a solvent (benzyl benzoate) as well. There are detaileed instructions available in multiple places online with varying amounts of information for buying or brewing your own, but the most tried and tested is famously Lena from Kiev’s guide. If you’re using terminal sterilisation (heating it to get the germs off at the end) you can do it on your own stove. Injectible estrogen, which the NHS doesn’t provide, has a lower risk of blood clots than other forms of HRT and if you’re making your own the costs over a year of buying NHS prescriptions can be higher than the startup costs of homebrewing, and after the startup costs homebrewing is orders of magnitude cheaper.

Once you know how cheap, simple and easy it is, making your own HRT shifts something about how you understand trans healthcare. If you understand the trans healthcare system in the UK as broken and failing, I wouldn’t blame you. I used to think of it the same way. The services that a trans person has to access to transition are disparate and disconnected, slow, often obtuse and likely to send you to the back of years-long waiting lists for seemingly arbitrary reasons. Nonetheless in engaging with them, once you have gotten past your GP you will encounter a lot of professionals working in trans healthcare who really really care, who want to make things as good for trans people as they can and exist within something that doesn’t function to do that. It doesn’t function to help us, but that doesn’t mean it’s broken. The trouble is that the UK trans healthcare system isn’t trying to help us, it’s trying to control us.

First they used extremely strict diagnostic criteria to only let the good ones through. When people just kept lying to get through those, they eventually gave up and got more lax about who is and isn’t trans, and instead they slowed the system down to an infuriating glacial crawl. 7 years on a waiting list to get to a gender clinic where the spacious waiting rooms are empty for an appointment lasting less than an hour which gives you everything you want. Then their pretense at being over capacity was met by subversion - we went private or we went DIY. We grey-market purchased, bargained, pleaded, traded, paid, traveled and homebrewed our way around the waiting list hell. We have proven ourselves determined, canny, resourceful, and not going away.

Why am I talking about this? What relevance does DIY HRT have when the legal system is shifting to empower bigots to terrorise us out of public life? I’ve talked before about the need for trans assemblies and how direct democratic organising can put us in a stronger position, but I want to examine the struggle for trans people in the UK more holistically. Trans people are dependent on the state for healthcare, and this puts us in a uniquely scary position when it comes to fighting for greater liberation. By taking away blood testing for anyone not getting hormones through the NHS, Wes Streeting has shown not only that his mission is trans eradication, but that he understands this form of control and wants to tighten its grip on our lives.

To reiterate my points about trans assemblies briefly: we are very very few, but our allies are in the majority. This means we have a lot of cis people ready to do more to help if they are told what to do, but first we have to get together and figure out what to tell them. Furthermore, it is only revolution against the prevailing political order that is going to free us, and that requires that we form a pluralistic front of solidarity between trade unions, tenants unions, activist groups and those most at risk from this rising fascism: most prominently immigrant communities and trans people. Direct democracy enables us to speak as a community, to act as a community and to build solidarity with other organisations and communities that need our support the same way we need theirs.

The entire situation puts me in mind of a page I have seen circulating recently from Larry Mitchell’s excellent book, The Faggots and their Friends Between Revolutions: “The strong women told the faggots that there are two important things to remember about the coming revolution. The first is that we will get our asses kicked. The second is that we will win. The faggots knew the first. Faggot ass-kicking is a time-honoured sport of the men. But the faggots did not know about the second. They had never thought about winning before. They did not even know what winning meant. So they asked the strong women and the strong women said winning was like surviving, only better. As the strong women explained winning, the faggots were surprised and then excited. The faggots knew about surviving, for they always had and this was going to be just plain better. That made ass-kicking different. Getting your ass kicked and then winning elevated the entire enterprise of making revolution.”

Seeing Mr Streeting removing our access to safe blood level monitoring, I know I’m not the only tranny out here wondering how we just set up our own monitoring systems. Seeing the bigots cheering for their new legal powers to persecute and harm us, I think of all the places in my everyday life that I may now be in danger, which spaces I am safe in, and how we can find spaces to plan together what is to be done, and I know I am not the only one. Seeing the situation in America, I am making sure all my documents are in order to make sure that I can get out if I am in imminent danger. Looking up from brewing my own estrogen to discover that the UK government no longer considers me a woman, I know we are getting our asses kicked, and I know that we will win.