Harm Reduction? But Who is Getting Hurt?
HRT Mom is all about harm reduction. Is it a good idea for you, an untrained rando, to create injectable preparations in your kitchen? No. The answer is no. This is a bad idea. However, we as a trans community have come to collectively understand that having access to lower quality hormones is far preferable to the alternative of having no access to hormones.
It is in this place of using lower quality hormones (than what is available from Pfizer, for example) that we can start to ask, āif people are going to do this anyways, then how do we help make sure that no one gets hurt?ā
A Look at Current Methods
The prevailing methodology for homebrewing estradiol has the following characteristics:
- 10mL vials
- 40mg/mL concentration
- Improper and likely ineffective sterilization technique
Theoretically this results in vials that have bacteria in them that get used for 80 weeks, causing the amount of bacteria in the vial to steadily grow over that period of time each time a needle is introduced to draw from it.
āBut No One Is Getting Hurtā
Despite these poor practices, anecdotal evidence suggests that no harm is coming from people injecting homebrew made these ways. This appears to be true, at least in the short term. We are, however, unable to track long term outcomes of using vials made using techniques that are not up to certain standards. The only way to do so would be to perform long term clinical trials, which is out of scope for the DIY community.
āSo Why Go Through All This Extra Trouble?ā
The reason we go through all this extra trouble is because there are dozens of questions about DIY that we do not have the answers to. Some of these questions might be:
- What are the long term effects of injecting small amounts of bacteria?
- What types of bacteria and viruses tend to survive insufficient sterilization?
- What can those bacteria and viruses do to a person who injects them?
- What are the outcomes for injecting dust or small particles on a routine basis?
- What are the extreme edge cases for if something goes wrong with a batch?
Given that these are questions that I have, that I propose are valid questions about DIY, I suggest the following logic:
Prevailing logic: I donāt know the answers to these questions, but I assume that the answers are not relevant as I have no information to suggest otherwise.
Mom logic: I donāt know the answers to these questions, and I acknowledge that the answers could have serious implications. Iām unwilling to leave this grey area up to chance, especially considering weāre testing our methods directly on humans.
We go through all this extra trouble to make the safest, cleanest brew possible because these are real humans with real human lives who are trusting us to make something they will inject. Thereās no room for cutting corners unless there is actual empirical evidence suggesting otherwise.