Housewives Making Drugs

What if it were possible to synthesize hormones in the kitchen? Imagine if this was as easy and simple as cooking a meal. “Housewives Making Drugs” is a fictional cooking show where the trans-femme stars, Maria and Maria, teach the audience at home how to cook their own hormones, step by step. They perform a simple “urine-hormone extraction recipe” while amusing the audience with their witty back-and-forth banter about body and gender politics, institutional access to hormones, and everything problematic with heteronormativity. Choosing the kitchen as the appropriate battleground for tackling body/gender politics and institutional access, the cooking show aims to challenge/subvert patriarchal society and speculate on a world with greater body sovereignty for all.

***I have been approached by numerous people asking me—is this real/safe? Can I perform this protocol at home and use it as HRT? The answer is no. In my experience researching as a biohacker and also consulting with other hackers and artists working in this field, we are very far away from any at-home synthesis of hormones for HRT, birth control, menopausal symptoms, etc. that are replicants and/or alternatives to pharmaceutical offerings. In addition, in no way does this film discount or disregard the already HUGE efforts of trans and women's rights organizations on setting up their own networks and resources for sharing and getting access to such hormones with institutional gatekeeping. ANY kind of self-medicating, self-dosing of hormones is at the individual's own risk, which can be alleviated with blood testing and gathering more information about oneself and one's own body.

Based on the project OPEN SOURCE ESTROGEN, a collaborative interdisciplinary project which seeks to subvert dominant patriarchal institutions of hormonal management, knowledge production, and anthropogenic toxicity, thereby emancipating the estrogen molecule and its molecular mystique.