Dear viewer, these subtitles were generated by a machine via the service Trint and therefore are (very) buggy. If you are capable, please help us to create good quality subtitles: https://c3subtitles.de/talk/904 Thanks!
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 and 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 and 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.
Hello. Hello.
Can everyone hear me
OK? 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 bio politics.
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 bio politics,
we must first ask, how did
we arrive at this blackbox 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 eighteen hundreds, there
is this concept of organo therapy,
this idea that if you inject the same
organs that as the one that you're trying
to cure, then,
yeah, you would you would cure that organ
by ingesting it.
So there's a scientist named Brown
Saccade that claim that if he
ate the testicles of dogs and
roosters and monkeys, that this would
rejuvenate him of old age
and regain their 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 is 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
bio assays.
So basically human and animal test
subjects where, for
example, I'll give you a
story about Eugene Steinback,
who was an Austrian scientist
and had his lab in Vienna
amusement park.
And what he would do is perform these
gonad transplants to 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 that 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 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,
um, is, uh,
organ concoctions
like, uh, 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
semantic 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,
isolated, 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 dramatic fictions were used to
to create diseases that would have
a hormonal cure.
Initially, they saw testicles and ovaries
from animals such as bulls, cows
and goats, and even marginalized
people like the poor disenfranchized
and the incarcerated, but soon
they moved on to urine because urine
came in larger quantities.
Thousands of women had had their urine
sourced from hospitals and gynecological
psychological clinics, not knowing
that they were contributing to big
pharmas research.
After women came horses
which have to be continuously impregnated
to produce their hormone rich urine.
These estrogen's isolated from Uran
are conjugated estrogen's 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,
recent research has shown that Premarin,
where you see on the slide, has
greatly increased breast and endometrial
cancer in its users.
Then they discovered Dichato, so
Pastorale or Deetz,
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
granddaughters.
So this left a really terrible legacy
in the US 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, you know, 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 overseas
next to their testicles, the media
decided, OK, 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 US in the agro industry.
And a lot of the
media.
Also called or even science is called
these frogs, transgender
frogs and the fish, also transgender
fish, which I have to say
is, uh, 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 nineteen
twenty nine economic collapse,
actually, Monsanto took over its
production.
So we think of Monsanto now as an agro
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 to 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
us they wanted to try it on women because
they knew that it had estrogenic
effects.
So since the 1930s,
the industry has known this as has
estrogenic effects.
Yet it's one of the most commonly used
plasticizers in the packaging
industry, 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 BAPS, which is just
another version
of BPA, which is just as
toxic, but the companies are not
legally obliged to label it containing
BP's.
So.
Despite all these warnings
about the toxic impacts of these and the
disrupters, all of these Zino Estrogen's
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 Karplus 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,
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
and marginalized, disenfranchized
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 and the Quran 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's 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 Estragon
about two and a half, three years ago,
and it's a collaborative investigative
project seeking to demonstrate
the various entrenched ways that
hormone's have colonized every aspect
of our being.
The project. It's open source in the
sense that the protocols generated
are shareable, hackable and
constantly improved on.
And another sense that it's open source
is the fact that the Xiuzhen 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, our 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 cyber feminist collective sub rosa
and this picture, their performance
hosting the world's first
woman friendly expo on Advanced
Reproductive Technologies A.R.T.
it was a way to perform science publicly
mimicking the language and rhetoric used
to capitalize and commodify
female marginalized bodies.
So open source Estragon,
we started with a really simple question,
which was what if it was possible to
make a decision 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 Estragon
and the DIY kitchen setting,
it's also presented as a practice of
decolonization, a way to
unravel how bodies can be managed,
disciplined and pathologies
and then say, well, here's a way
we can engineer our own form of
resistance. Sharing Xiuzhen recipes
in the kitchen.
This is a 10 minute film, Housewives
Making Drugs, starring two amazing
trans performers, Jade Phenix and Jade
Renegade.
Now, I want to switch gears
and tell you more about how I got
to these recipes in the first place
to get into a bit of biohacking
or what I like to call Estragon 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 Xiuzhen geeking
freak science is not something you can or
should do by yourself.
It's more fun with friends.
So with these E IV inserted
plasma, a plasma 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
zino molecules.
So this is biosensors,
they actually have amazingly high
sensitivity compared to traditional
laboratory machines like geochemists
or else CM's.
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 east 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 the
molecules are existing and very
dilute concentrations.
So you need a way to concentrate that.
And this process is using a peristaltic
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,
cigaret filters and methanol
kind of household, and
it also uses a glass bottle.
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
anticancer anti terror ambersons
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 workshop ology,
workshopping with the public and people
who have no idea what is biohacking
or what or whether Estrogen's 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 Sabratha to mean learning
and failing together in the public
as a way to learn without any hierarchies
of expert or layperson, and
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 tried which tries to
reveal the alien agents of anthropogenic
zino power, in other words,
these toxic estrogen's
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 tried to do is to take
all the effects of Anacreon disrupters
like obesity, autism, low
sperm count, and we asked
the participants to place them into one
of two categories is a biological
suffering or ideological
suffering, meaning like you actually
experience real pain
from these effects, these toxic effects,
or is it more a result
of society's binary
hetero normative system
that is disciplining you
or acting as a
form of bio surveillance on you, on
your body?
Another project that I've been working
on, this is where my my practice is
going into more performance territory is
called the Molecular Queering Agency,
which is a live, participatory,
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're as they're asked to offer
up their own urine for the hormones to be
extracted.
So in the picture there, they're
inhaling these hormones and then those
hormones are actually extracted from
previous participants.
So I've created this kind of like 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 zino
estrogens.
So, I mean, it's a
it's a super scary and paralyzing
topic, you know, 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 samosas.
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 hybridize 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
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 medicalise
to fit our notions of normal and natural
and hetero normative.
So like their bodies and also
trans bodies that aren't performing
socially sanctioned heroin or
heteronormativity, they live precarious
lives.
And at the same time, you could argue
that we we all have an endocrine
disrupted body.
I mean, if they find PCBs in the deepest
parts of the ocean, in the Marianas
Trench, they find PCBs.
So there's nobody out there that hasn't
been exposed by these toxic
molecules.
There is a study done in Sweden
linking the
exposure of plastics in pregnant women
to the distance between the anus and the
genitals and is actually getting smaller
and smaller.
And so you can see that
we're all being chemically altered,
physiologically altered.
But to me, this 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,
anogenital distance.
Maybe more transfer of bacteria,
but actually 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 molecules,
it's so easy to slip back
into transphobia, 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 say, well, I think there's a more
urgent reasons that you should be angry
that there's all these
pollutants in the water supply side
from turning Mangay.
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 plasticine.
And in a way, the plastic
molecules are our progeny.
They're like our children.
They're going to live long past,
you know, after we die, they're going to
exist and persist
and create this kind
of geologic indigestion
and the planet.
And so there's no way to
escape this all pervasive toxicity
and it's queering potential.
And so what does that mean for
people who identify as queer now?
I mean, are you are we saying that
our queer kin have no future
in this toxic landscape?
And I'd like to think about our bodies
as just, you know, we're all bodies in
flux. You know, we're defined
by our relations with molecules, with
matter in our shared semiotic
sphere. And when I say semiotic sphere,
the semillas sphere, I mean that all
these molecules that are communicating
to us, that 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?
What that rather than rather than
affirming the cultural panic
through eco conservationist,
eco hetero normative discourse,
can we shift from toxic 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 Karplus industrialization.
So I'm going to end here on a six
point plan written under the
Open Source Exclusion Project
that's actually modeled after the
transgenic cultural production plan
of critical art ensemble.
I'm not going to read all of this, but I
just want to emphasize the last point.
Number six considered
a micro performative of hormones
as an essential power of not only
molecular colonization, but of molecular
collaboration, because these molecules,
they they live with us, among
us and between us.
And they collaborate on
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 hetero normative
strictures.
Well, I think that's a good thing.
It's making us reevaluate
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&A.
So if you have questions, we have
microphones and the whole hall just
line up behind the mikes 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 that you made
helping with HRT, 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, folks
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
that this could help with for sure.
So the the
project exploring fungi,
it started really recently, actually, and
we just started exploring its
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 then and also prevents against
thrombosis, which is, you know, this
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 birth control pills
or some kind of HRT.
So a lot of these papers that are coming
from Korea and Japan, and they
it's basically like
they it's basically making tea,
you know. But then the way you describe
it in the paper is like really scientific
and boil it at this temperature, blah,
blah, blah.
But you're just you're just soaking it in
tea and hot water to extract these.
They're called bado
glands, something like that.
But these are the molecules that
that get extracted into the water and
they're actually preventing the
anticancer properties.
So one of the mushrooms is
called Gaitskell Phylum Comune, 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
schizo phylum Comune.
And another mushroom that we investigated
was the oyster mushroom.
Yeah. Mm hmm.
Oh, one, please.
Thank you for your talk.
I have two questions
once
I evaluate that, I know
in the discourse of
personal disrupter endocrine disruptors
and like plastics
and ecological type topics
overall, I've evaluated
highly. When someone gives out,
it's not only discussed, but also
options are given, like you have done in
your project, educating people about
it and empowering them to test
their environment for that.
But I have to say to me that
it would be challenging to to ensure
that 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 rather
than trying so that they can
care for themselves rather than
trying to disrupt this industrial
practice?
Mm hmm.
Well, I think that there I'm encouraging
both both things, both
practices, I mean, disrupting
the industrial.
OK, well, um,
I'm not going to to lie
and say it's easy to disrupt companies
like Monsanto. It's really difficult.
And so my practices is
hyper local, which means that, you know,
I, I try to affect change
in the in the people who join my
workshops.
And it's
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, you know, this can this can really
help to, um,
be to increase the amount of autonomy
you have in your own body and in your own
environment.
So, um, and thank
you for bringing up this this kind of
tension about the phrase toxic embrace,
because I also have a lot of,
um, I'm still trying to
to reconcile what that means because.
I think for a lot of people, it's it's
very, very paralyzing to realize
that how 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, you know, and and
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
and I guess when I say toxic, embrace
them actually I mean, like embrace the
queer, like embrace the other,
embrace bodies of difference because they
exist already and they're going to
continue to increase because
we see all these effects
of these enduring disruptors.
We're going to see a lot of weird
mutated beings, a lot of queer
beings.
So, yeah.
I had to I
was reminded of Paul Preciado,
and I'm interested, would you also do
this kind of project for testosterone and
do you think that awesome.
Yeah.
I've thought about it, I don't know, I'm
still a little bit estrogen obsessed
right now, but, um.
Yeah, because there's definitely
there aren't as many uses for
testosterone as they are for estrogen.
I mean, if we if we compare estrogen
and testosterone and what
kind of bio capital is made,
you know, estrogen is definitely in the
lead. I mean, estrogen and progestin
thrown.
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.
Mm hmm.
Microphone four, please.
Hello.
Are you also looking to
estrogen escalator's
the ways how to remove estrogen
from the environment?
He later, yes, OK,
well, yeah, that's what the fungus
project is kind of exploring, because
what's interesting is, you know, they
have they
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 this fungus can actually do
the same job.
And so that's the
An aside from Yanan, the extraction,
I mean, it's it's very difficult to
extract and purify all the
other 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 Anacreon, disrupting molecules, like,
please come talk to me.
Microphone three, please.
Hello. Um, do you perceive
any potential danger with this type of
biohacking, for example, a
person doing yourself 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.
Mhm.
That's definitely a
an issue that we thought about a lot
because when we were
researching all these protocols,
you know actually the first
protocol that I wanted 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.
Sorry, I forgot what the question was.
Oh, 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 used,
you know, what kind of dangers would
arise.
And I have
to say, I mean, I'm not a super expert
in in trans hormone therapy
or anything like that.
But from what I know,
its 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.
That's what that's what trans people like
when they go to a 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, um,
yeah, it's a huge risk.
It's it's an 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, that's a terminology question
and the Internet is asking, why
is referring to fish with sexual
orientation as transgender wrong?
How does that compare to the.
I got tons of definitions we use
for human species.
Well, I think it's because it's it's
creating this connotation that
trans bodies are somehow
chemically mutated, which is,
I think, kind of a derogatory
way to to look at it.
I mean, I think that maybe
the term intersex or
multi sex would be a
better term. But, you know, I
had this this feeling that scientists
just didn't have the the terminology
to 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 like 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, um, I don't
know that answers the question.
Um, and we just got a certain
question. And the second question
is, have you done any work to
map the estrogen's people have measured
with a home measurement technique.
What's the home measuring technique?
I don't know. Yeah, I just asked,
but that's kind of interesting.
I'd like to research more into that.
Make one, please.
Oh, by the way,
um, 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.
So 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 biological estrogens
without progesterone.
So they have these misconceptions.
Do you think that
sort of a lucky shot
was was to
have.
Flying often outweigh 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
bioidentical and I've
actually come across a lot of research
saying like that they're
much safer than the synthetic
estrogens 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,
you know, 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.
Um, 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, you know, 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 I 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 know.
Yeah, it's OK.
And, you know, that makes you think,
well, we shouldn't rely
too heavily on on medical practitioners.
I mean, we 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.
That's true. On the other hand, some of
this information is just really
straightforward. And every night,
every.
Microphone three, please.
I thank you for your excellent 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 adopt 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 U.S. and Europe, so basically
very Western perspectives working
on this project.
I've done workshops in Hong Kong
and Indonesia
and, um.
I mean, I definitely had to
tweak the narrative a bit,
I mean, I did the one
workshop I did in Hong Kong,
I I was collaborating
with an artist, a jazz 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 estrogen's and then let's
mix it into face cream
and we'll call it like
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, you know, and
in the East
Asian, South East Asian
parts of the world, maybe they're
feminisms are a little bit behind
compared to like Western feminisms.
But I'm just overgeneralizing
I know in some parts that's not true,
but, um, 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, I'm.
The question to us and we go talked about
gatekeeping 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 you're talking addressed a lot of
those points and trying to.
Erode those structures through your
performances, but
the question, I guess the question is
more about.
Your work about granting
individuals more formal agency,
do you think how do you think this would
this will interact
with?
With.
Institutional goals,
institutional gatekeeping for
towards trans bodies, do you think that?
Additional agency from the individual
noninstitutional level would would
it wouldn't contribute to eroding this
hegemony, or do you think it would
trigger a reaction that would
add an additional gatekeeping and
restrictions?
I think it's really hard to make a dent
in these pharmaceutical
industries.
I mean, the
artists who I mentioned collaborating
with Ryan Hammond,
they're actually going forward with this
yeast synthesis protocol, like
they've actually and they're they're
working on an artists like Shoestring
Budget. And I really commend them
for that. And.
I think.
As Ryan is creating
that organism, that transgenic used
to produce hormones,
they're also really consciously
aware of how those companies
could come in and basically ruin
what what they're doing,
you know, 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.
So it's interesting, right, like as an
artist in the bio hacker, you're also
like you're also talking with, like
lawyers and and trying
to get, like, free consultation on that.
Um.
You know, a lot of artists have done like
protest art or whatever against like
Monsanto and these big and these big like
giants, these Goliath's
and.
I think it's actually bad PR
for them if they go after artists,
but, um, I think
it's really hard to like, actually.
To to make a dent in these
companies, it has to happen at the policy
level.
I think like what we're doing as artists,
bio hackers, 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.
Uh, yeah.
So I was wondering if you have thought
about, um, uh,
more like mechanical aspects
of, uh, morphological freedom
or a body modification or gender
transition, uh, like surgery
or prosthetics and, uh, like
anything from a roadmap to totally
speculative fiction.
Well, that out I put it in that.
Mechanical, uh,
like augmentation, you mean, or
augmentation, but like anything from
surgery to
when you're talking about a gender
transition technology, of course, like
surgery, um,
to 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
and at some point in the future
or self organized or whatever.
I that's that sounds
really scary, I don't know.
I've never considered that.
No, you're talking I mean,
I I'm familiar with a couple
of. Yeah.
Like DIY abortion kits or like,
um, I've never heard of any like
DIY like top surgery, though,
but that sounds really, really neat.
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,
OK, and then Mike four, please,
hey, hello, I'm just the
last one.
Yeah.
Thank you for your
interesting talk.
I never had this topic connected to art.
And I say same connecting
like the Estragon and
the queer
topic. I connected to an
biotics and everything.
And that makes me a little bit
questioning
when we are talking about the
antibiotics. I mean,
these are hormones.
They work as hormones.
But this is only one part.
How they in fact, our body, they are
also that they change our
calcium and our bones,
the brain,
the hormone, not only the immune
system, everything.
So if we are just thinking about
the kind of positive connected
effects about estrogen and
these antibiotics,
how do we
secure that? We don't lose the
precaution, but we should have about
biotics 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.
Um, well, but
I mean, the companies can use this
a little bit like when we were thinking,
OK, our our body is always
changing, we are always influenced
change. It can be the same
the same thinking
companies can use to justify
what they are doing.
Yeah. Yeah, exactly.
Oh yeah. I actually, um,
I was asked this one time in the past
from the artist, um he asked me
like what if companies
take my discourse of like
toxic emancipation or whatever and
and basically use that as a marketing
ploy, which I think would be really
like that would be fucked up,
but.
Yeah, I mean, you you see it,
you see it with, like marine pollution,
they call it, or 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, um.
Yeah, it would be really fucked up if
they if they did that, um,
but again, I mean, these companies
have, uh,
all kinds of unlimited resources
at their disposal and,
uh.
Yeah, it's something to be cautious of.
Thank you.
So I think we're through
with Q&A,
thank you very much.
Thank you. Awesome talk.
And I hope you will really
impact the world with that.
Thanks.