Code:
PMID: 38418336
DOI: 10.1016/j.socscimed.2024.116681
Some notable excerpts from what you'd expect of a political screed wrapped in an academic article. The abstract can be shortened to "cutting off your balls in the middle of the woods is the new American Revolution":
Although DIY HRT is often framed as highly risky, we analyzed in-depth interviews with 36 U.S. DIYers to understand how they themselves perceived their goals, challenges, and risk mitigation using the Liberatory Harm Reduction and lay expertise frameworks. Participants emphasized experiences of transphobia within medical spaces. In contrast, participants characterized DIY HRT as a community-driven, accessible, and empowering practice. Through self-organized online forums and mutual aid, DIYers constructed adaptive health-promoting practices that challenge biomedical conceptualizations of risk and affirm trans agency.
Translation: injecting yourself with random substances of unknown quality is certainly risky but three dozen Redditors told us they read some wiki articles and have not yet developed deadly infections. It makes them feel good to pass misinformation among themselves instead of seeking professional medical advice that takes up to 15 years of rigorous practical education to acquire.
Barriers to accessing gender-affirming care have existed for decades (shuster stef, 2021), but escalating political attacks on transgender (“trans”)1 medicine and lives have created additional challenges for trans people in the United States (MAP. Movement Advancement Project, 2023) and world-wide (Evdokimova, 2023). Despite assaults on healthcare and human rights, trans people continue to live authentic and vibrant lives.
Translation: most are barely employable, let alone to the extent that their health insurance will cover cosmetic procedures of exorbitant cost to indulge a vanity project of reconstruction into an idealized self that will never materialize because hormone pills can't negate 300+ million years of mammal evolution.
Drawing on semi-structured interviews with 36 trans people who have practiced DIY HRT, we argue that transphobia, in intersection with racism, classism, and other forms of oppression embedded within professionalized medicine (Metzl and Hansen, 2014), is the root cause of harms enacted upon trans people in medicine.
Translation: we're fucking idiots who have no idea what we're doing. We basically emailed some random Redditors and took their words at face value.
During the preparation of this work the authors used ChatGPT 3.5 to revise for conciseness and eliminate redundancies from the literature review and discussion sections.
Translation: we asked a computer program to generate most of the article for us.
The authors gratefully acknowledge Sonia R. Ivancic and Marleah Dean Kruzel for their valuable contributions to the conceptualization of the research project this manuscript is based upon.
Translation: (((them)))
I'd link the full text but it's so irrelevant and obviously political propaganda that nobody has even bothered to archive it on Sci-Hub, which usually hosts science articles. Somewhat interestingly, some of the authors' ideas of "harm reduction" come directly from studies of heroin addicts, as seen in the bibliography.
It's also published in the journal
Social Science & Medicine, which has a piddling impact factor of 5.4, making it one of the many containment zones for this kind of garbage "research." I know that impact factor is a bullshit metric, but it's one reason why articles in
Science are more likely to be valid.
Also, to powerlevel just a bit, I must say the
Hook: long and boring sinker format of titling articles should have died 20 years ago. I did that shit in freshmen year of college and by the time I graduated, my capstone thesis had the most concise and descriptive title possible.
