Everyone Should Read Bob Ostertag's Book
In 2018, as I was beginning to research turning my New York Times op-ed into a book, a friend told me she had a must-read book for me: Robert Ostertag’s Sex, Science, Self: a Social History of Estrogen, Testosterone and Identity. It influenced me perhaps more than anything else I read about gender—although for several years I was too afraid to share some of what I’d learned in it.
Sex, Science, Self is about the history of ideas—ideas about masculine and feminine, male and female, and whether those can be contained in chemicals synthesized within, and eventually without, the body. And it was about what happens when those ideas mesh with capitalism, politics and identity. I interviewed Bob for my book, but Bob was kind enough to agree to an audio interview, all these years later, because the landscape and discussion (or debate, or war) has changed so much in the last couple of years since both of us wrote our books. I want as many people as possible to read Bob’s book and understand the history of these chemicals and the synthetic versions of them, as well as the story of the people who promoted them.
Here, Bob and I talk about where beliefs about gender, chemicals, and technology come from; the checkered past of doctors pushing hormones as miracle cures for many things other than gender dysphoria; and the early history of homophobia in trans activism.
Bio: Bob Ostertag has published more than twenty albums of music, six books, and a feature film. His writings on contemporary politics have been published on every continent and in many languages, beginning with his work as a journalist covering the civil war in El Salvador in the 1980s. His books cover a wide range of topics, from labor unions to migration to estrogen and testosterone. He has performed at music, film, and multimedia festivals around the globe. His musical collaborators include the Kronos Quartet, postmodernist John Zorn, heavy metal star Mike Patton, transgender cabaret icon Justin Vivian Bond, DJ Rrose, and many others. He currently hosts two podcasts, one of queer oral history and another on poverty in America.
Everyone Should Read Bob Ostertag's Book
Very good interview, thank you Lisa! I just finished reading "Normal at Any Cost: Tall Girls, Short Boys, and the Medical Industry's Quest to Manipulate Height", and was astounded that I've never heard about this, and also at seeing the almost exact parallels with the current "trans-medicine" situation. I haven't read Bob's book yet, I wonder if he also mentions the history of the use of estrogen and other hormones in manipulating height for cosmetic and social reasons. I can't remember where I came across that book recommendation, perhaps in your writing... In any case, I highly recommend that everyone also read "Normal at all cost".
Here's an example: P.329, a doctor critical of the prescribing of growth hormones to short kids says: "Doctors are not trained to be critical, they're trained to help. But just because somebody comes in and says, 'I need an antibiotic,' you don't prescribe one." Likewise, "when a parent is saying, 'My kid's not doing well-- he's unhappy,' it's usually many things together," not simply short stature. "I'm saying we need to evaluate, determine what the problem is.".
Sub in "gender dysphoria" or even worse "being trans" for "short stature" and you get exactly what's happening today.
Ah, Lisa, I would say to people not to read Bob’s chatty, gay-centric “history.” Read Deborah Rudacille’s “The Riddle of Gender” for a 20th century history of sex and gender.
He basically paints physicians and scientists as evil, promoting unknown potions and surgeries because of their god-like personalities. One example—Harry Benjamin was a godsend for many trans women in the 50s and 60s. The national trans medicine organization was initially named HBIGDA (Harry Benjamin International Gender Dysphoria Association) and then renamed WPATH when it clearly became international and the decades had passed so few knew Harry personally. It wasn’t because he was a flawed endocrinologist. He coined the term “transsexualism.”
Yes, male crossdressers could be homophobic, like male heterosexuals everywhere in the 90s, and Virginia Prince was trying to separate the biologically trans from the psychosocially trans hobbyist back then. The movement switched from transsexual to transgender to desexualize the term, just as homosexuals had desexualized to “gay.” Turns out, with the advent of queer theory and the erasure of sex that was a mistake, opening the door to today’s chaos, but that’s another story.
One story he conveniently left out—most gay men, beginning in the 70s, recognized trans women (few trans men were out then, since they could pass more easily) as extremely gay men who underwent vaginoplasty so as not to be anally penetrated. This was promulgated by one of the gay movement’s leaders, Jim Fouratt, who apologized to me seven years ago for his ignorance. It’s just as fair to say gay men were transphobic as trans women were homophobic.
Also—trans persons (not queer) make up 0.6% of the population. There’s no market there for medical profits (educated and interested physicians, therapists and surgeons have always been hard to come by), nor for Big Pharma profits. Androgen sales took off in the 90s (remember the GNC supplement stores in every American mall, and the baseball PED scandal?), and the market for estrogens was the tens of millions of post-menopausal women, not trans women. Those are fundamentalist talking points.
Unlike Bob, an outsider in SF looking in, I lived this and was there, playing a role in the appending of the T to LGB in 2004. That’s an interesting story in itself.
I’ve also done work on endocrine disruptors (EDCs) which he briefly mentioned, starting with DES (which causes transsexualism and homosexuality) in developing fetuses. The earlier comments go into greater detail about the complexity of sex and growth hormones than I can now.
Dana Beyer, M.D.