“Bodily Desires and Epistemological Struggles: Navigating (de)medicalization through the lens of hormone therapy.”

Using a combination of ethnographic fieldwork in medical conferences and seminars, and qualitative interview data, I use this paper to extend Drew Halfmann’s (2011) call to pay further attention to the multiple dimensions of medicalization: discourses, practices, and identities; and to the multiple levels of analysis that pertain to my research: meso and micro. I argue that when it comes to the use of hormone replacement therapy (HRT) for menopause and gender transition, there are co-occuring engines of medicalization and demedicalization. While menopause is thought to be an entirely medicalized event, it is clear that this is not the case when attention is paid to the people seeking medication for menopause, and the clinicians treating this event. People seeking HRT for menopause draw on medical scripts to undergird the necessity for further medicalize menopause and the transition to menopause, known as perimenopause. They use the language of desire to speak to the need of a medicalized response to menopause.

People seeking HRT for gender transition tactfully draw on both medicalized scripts and also non-medicalized and do-it-yourself knowledge to make sense of medical transitions and hormone treatment. Doing this allows access to medicine from certain providers but also allows them a sense of self-determination through the language of desire and futurity.

I have presented an early version of this paper at the American Sociological Association’s 2025 Annual Meeting in Chicago, as part of the Sex and Gender section’s paper session on hormones. Manuscript is available upon request.