Reaching for T in the South African archives

This article proposes a methodology of reaching in historicity. It does so by tracing the technical object of synthetic testosterone as it has been used by trans people for gender affirming care. To show the usefulness of the method, this article employs it first in relation to mentions of synthetic testosterone in the South African Medical Journal as a primer to understanding its relationship to the state and the law in South Africa from 1963 to 2003, reaching an apex in the Cape Town Transsexual/Transgender Groups advocacy for self‐identification, much of which hinged on the role of synthetic testosterone.


INTRODUCTION
First produced in 1936, synthetic testosterone (T) is used today as a common part of gender-affirming care for many trans masculine people. 2 Yet T's use, circulation and regulation are often overlooked in studies of trans masculine lives.In overlooking T, we are also erasing parts of the everyday, the radical and the structural.In this article, I put these at the forefront by following the 'life of T' as it traverses global and South African history.I do so through the concept of 'reaching', a framework which emphasises the interaction between the historian, the technical object, and the trans masculine lives it touches.
In what follows, I begin by defining T as a technical object and explaining the methodology of reaching, which extends over two levels: first, trans masculine people reaching towards the technical object T through history; second, the archivists' desire to reach for these trans masculine people.I then turn to my two case studies in which I enact my methodology of reaching through a medical and legal lens using twentieth-century discussions of testosterone in South Africa.
In the first case study, I use the South African Medical Journal (SAMJ), looking for references to synthetic testosterone.While most of the references to synthetic testosterone do not discuss transness at all, it is within their silences that I am able to imagine, and critically fabulate, the trans lives left explicitly untold, reaching out to them when the journal refuses to.In the second case study, I use Estian Smit's testimony in front of the South African parliament in 2003, contextually backed by South Africans' shifting relationship to T, to understand what a reaching may look like when trans people can speak for themselves.

T AS A TECHNICAL OBJECT
A technical object, such as synthetic testosterone, is the meeting point between the body and the technological world. 3The technical object is 'the threshold between the human and the machine … it relates … through their enmeshed embodied processes while nevertheless maintaining their positive difference'. 4This builds on Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari's understanding of a body as an assemblage of systems which 'has only itself, in connection with other assemblages and in relation to other bodies without organs'. 5It is the meeting place between social habitats, it circulates through them and is continually transformed in the process.In the case of T, as Jules Gill-Peterson puts it: It circulates in the flesh of the human body, modulating the endocrine system; it circulates as a politicized and regulated medicine in an apparatus of institutional healthcare, access to which is severely unevenly distributed …; it circulates on markets both licit and illicit, commodified and trafficked; it circulates as a linguistic signifier, caught in the vocabulary of trans subjectivity and politics; and it circulates as a chemical index of environmental toxicity, one among countless drugs flushed through the industrial water system into rivers and oceans. 6 tracking the genealogy of a technical object, we are therefore also tracking these circulations and transformations.One such transformation, then, is how the object shifts through time.Sara Ahmed stipulates that all objects have temporal histories that are necessary to their perception. 7Rather than seeing time as an element that interacts with our perception of the object, she posits that an object is 'the transformation of time into form', their backgrounds baked into them as part of a temporal dimension that leads to their availability in the moment, creating 'intertwining histories of arrival'. 8n order to highlight the significance of the genealogy of the object, I am using Ahmed's formulation of time as the preceding essence to the form of the object.
While not every contact with the object is consciously informed by this history, it is embedded within the co-perception of the object and, when it intertwines with the body, that history is inscribed within the body as well.Understood, then, as a technical object, synthetic testosterone's history follows it, shapes it, and in fact gives it legible meaning.This makes it part of 'a cultural biography of things' in which its history, even if not known, lingers upon it. 9n one mode of thought, the trans body is one that is only created at the point where Western interventions on the body, such as synthetic testosterone, are invented.Under this lens, 'the very production of the transgender subject depends largely on Western medicine's investment in curing or correcting gender deviance through medical transition' and as such, medical transition is 'one method by which the state attempts to regulate movement of bodies and identities'. 10While it is important to recognise that, by looking specifically at a technology of gender affirming care, this research could lend itself to that imperialist lens, I reject this narrow formulation of the historicised trans subject.
I believe that following T is a useful endeavour, as it allows us to define how transness is read by society and the state and to move away from definitions of what being trans means to a persona question possibly too subjective and diverse to ever answer.Instead, the use of T as part of trans becoming can be read both as an individual choice as well as one mediated by state control of who is allowed to be trans and who is allowed to use T.

REACHING
As Ahmed writes in Queer Phenomenology, 'the history of bodies can be rewritten as the history of the reachable'. 11I use Ahmed's conceptualisation of reaching to thus formulate my own.To reach is an act of desire.A potentiality in which the subject is grabbing for something, often something which is just out of reach.In thinking through reaching, I am also thinking about those for whom T is out of reach -due to material conditions of access mediated through capital and control of modes of production.It is not about what one is able to grab, but rather about the act of extending one's body towards something. 12

Reaching towards the technical object
My first type of reaching -trans masculine people reaching out for T -examines life grabbing out towards itself, yearning to be touched, and therefore uses phenomenology as its theoretical underpinning.In phenomenology, 'bodies are the ultimate point of view'. 13Working with Ahmed's propositions on orientations, which suppose that life is mediated towards and against objects in the world, it is therefore not enough to only ask whose bodies are giving the point of view, but what are they orientated towards.As Gayle Salamon describes in her account of the phenomenological: In reaching, the arm itself tends to recede from view or disappear as both an object of consciousness and a phenomenological presence.The object of desire supplants the self as center.…When I reach for the other, I do not feel my arm but an intensification of both the proximity and the absence of the one for whom I am reaching. 14ing a methodology of reaching, I intend to grab towards both trans masculine people and the structures and technical objects which shape them and permit their lives.This will allow me to trace T as it moves through the South African state and medical society, becoming both an agent and object of desire for trans people in South Africa.

The archivists' desire to reach
My second form of reaching is a reaching back into the archive in search of trans masculine people who in turn reached out for T.This reaching is both my own and that of others involved in similar projects.Both academically and personally, I have spent the last few years reaching for T.This project of 'reaching' began in 2019, when a national shortage of T in South Africa meant that, just one year after beginning to use T myself, I was suddenly unsure of my ability to access it.At the same time, I was beginning my journey as an academic in earnest, trying to understand what it means to contribute to scholarship. 15In this way I believe I have been quite lucky, because as much as I have reached out in search of an archive, I have also felt the archive reach out to me -sharpening my hunger to tell the stories of the lives held within it and the lives withheld from it. 16Here I believe it is important to note my own positionality as a white person.Living in South Africa my whole life, the ways I interact with T is not representative of most South Africans who reach for T. Similarly, both my archives are focused on white people.The people considered patients rather than test subjects in the SAMJ are white, and Smit -the focus of the second case study -is also white.This is not tangential to the story, but an essential part of it.As B Camminga notes, sexology and eugenics were twin fields that together grew in prominence with their promise for a more 'developed' human race.It is through this dual development of race and sex as scientific categories 'visibly demarcated on the body' that we can see the colonial underpinnings of both. 17For example, in 1923, the Pasteur Institute proposed the construction of an 'immense park in Africa' to harvest testosterone, making 'the elixir of youth within the reach of everyone' showing early sexological connections between Black masculinity and virility. 18Within South Africa, where extractive exploitation of Black men, Black bodies and Black labour, with the express purpose of aiding the white nation through settler colonialism is enmeshed in the very imagination of apartheid, the early extractive nature of testosterone as a raw material takes on even further meaning.
While much of the history of synthetic testosterone as a technical object can be known, there are instances -as is especially common for queer objects -where this history has become unknowable.This is where the archivist's desire to reach becomes complicated.This article is interested in a particular subset of trans people, that is trans masculine people who use T.However, for numerous reasons -some arising from individual choices not to disclose, some from active erasure by the state, some through a lack of care, and some for reasons we may never know -these stories remain out of our grasp.It is at these points, then, that I utilise critical fabulations to imagine and bring back how some of these stories could be.These critical fabulations will be italicised and placed as quotations throughout the article.
The question of how to study T and those who used it therefore sits within a broader debate within trans, queer and LGBTQIA+ studies on historical reclamation and naming.There is a danger in this kind of work of doing 'salvage anthropology', or a search-and-rescue model, which 'travels to the past to know what it knew before it went there'. 19Here, 'the lost histories of the past [are reinstated and recuperated] within more liberatory histories of the present'. 20This is particularly harmful when the archives being mined are almost always by their nature colonial, and as such reify western imperial understandings of sex, sexuality and gender.Along with notions of critical fabulation, then, I also approach the archive with caution, with Keguro Macharia's question in mind: Is it possible to recognise the ideological and material violence enacted in colonial-era archives -the missing names, the indifference to African desires, the production of populations as opposed to individuals (Vaughan, 1991) -even as we mine those sources for whatever information they might provide? 21eorists of critical fabulation -Saidiya Hartman in particular -give us an idea of what to do with these absences.Hartman's theorisation of critical fabulations as articulated in 'Venus in Two Acts' is key for the ways I understand my own search for trans historicities.Hartman chronicles her experience of finding Venus, archived as 'as a dead girl named in a legal indictment against a slave ship captain tried for the murder of two Negro girls'. 22Through following Venus, 'we stumble upon her in exorbitant circumstances that yield no picture of the everyday life, no pathway to her thoughts, no glimpse of the vulnerability of her face or of what looking at such a face might demand'. 23Hartman is therefore searching for a way to tell Venus' story, which in a sense is truly unknowable, and to give her the story she deserves through a critical fabulation.It is through fabulations of T's journey and an awareness of the archive as an apparatus of the state that a methodology of reaching allows space for that which is unknowable.
Where, then, can one search for appropriate places to fill in these absences of marginalised people within the archive?It is exactly in the places where the lack is most palpable that we begin.Evelyn Hammonds, in her discussion of black (w)holes and Black female sexuality links many silences to a strategy of silence 'as a way for Black women to "protect the sanctity of inner aspects of their lives"'. 24y actively choosing silence so as to not be studied, black holes of articulation are created.Similarly, many trans people live their life in stealth for various reasons. 25Just as a cis person does not owe the world an explanation of their cisness, so too does a trans person have the right to live in a way that does not centre their transness to the outside world.This does mean, however, that often when trying to study trans life we must look into the unsaid and unknown -the black (w)hole. 26hile the archives at times track T and at times track formations of trans genealogies, they rarely, if ever, do both.Rather, it is the darkness that pulls me in as a researcher and consumes me in my search for the unobservable.There is a beauty in these absences, they allow us to sit with the unknown and the unknowable.They force us to sit with the discomfort of an inaccessible empirical truth of the past.They also allow space for slippages in which I place my own hopes of what the past may have been.This reaching, a search for the narrative, the subjective, and the genealogical is both the theoretical and the methodological underpinning of this article.

SAMJ
The SAMJ is a peer-reviewed medical journal that publishes articles on research, education and clinical practice in the field of medicine, including original research articles, review articles, case reports and letters to the editor.The SAMJ is the official journal of the South African Medical Association and has been in publication since 1884.The journal has a wide readership both within South Africa and internationally, and its articles are frequently cited in other medical journals and research publications.As Camminga and I have noted elsewhere, the SAMJ is a key instrument in the study of medical thinking and of political perceptions of medicine in South Africa, and, particularly during apartheid, the journal was part of a colonial project of knowledge production with eugenicist and nationalistic aims. 27n this section, I follow synthetic testosterone through the SAMJ as an almost mystical and often feared substance as it encountered bodies coded as female.In conjunction, I track some global conversations around trans identities and the South African state's ideology around trans people.I have therefore entered this archive, as Tavia Nyong'o encourages all his students to do, 'phenomenologically, to move and be moved by the past as [I] encountered its sensuous fragments, and to build narrative, speculative, and creative accounts accordingly'. 28On this journey, there is a frustration and an anxiety around who this substance works for, how it works, and who it seemingly leaves behind.In this archive, there is a persistent myth of masculinised virility that cannot disappear regardless of how often it is called quackery, accompanied by an unspeakable magical power for people assigned female -specifically those unhappy with such an assignment. 29eading the SAMJ is the work of imagining an archive.While not explicitly mentioned, it is likely that all of the ostensibly trans subjects interviewed psychosocially in the SAMJ were white, as the lives of Black and brown people who, while used as test subjects, were viewed as too disposable for their humanity to be adequately reported.This article therefore includes within it a failure as while searching through the archive I was unable to find even the traces of a non-white life to fabulate.It is through fabulations of T's journey and an awareness of the archive as an apparatus of the state that a methodology of absence allows space for that which is unknown and now is unknowable.To create fabulations is, as Hartman reminds us, 'to imagine what cannot be verified' through stories told 'by a failed witness'. 30Here, the SAMJ is undoubtedly a failed witness.T appears as a technical object, reached for by people for whom I myself reach in turn through the aid of the archive and critical fabulation.
Kadji Amin's work on the 'Biopolitical Genealogy of Transsexuality' shows investment in hormones in the early twentieth century as: the moment in which medicine was crediting the glands with the ability to control sex, gender, sexuality, development, vitality, intelligence, and even character, [at the same time] sexologists were identifying the testes and ovaries as the necessary seat of "disorders" of gender and sexuality. 31at follows is a push and pull between synthetic testosterone as a miracle drug and as part of a fake science.We begin our journey into the SAMJ in 1920.Here, the first mention of 'extraction of the testes', the first attempt at hormone therapy, was discussed at the Sixteenth South African Medical Congress.Presenting 'Medicine, Past and Present', fourteen years before synthesisation was even possible, President of the Medical Congress James Bruce Bays saw the coming tide of gonadal therapy as truly 'in vogue', threatening to become the largest opportunity for quackery in the coming years. 32Used for 'rejuvenescence' and 'various nervous disorders', he was sure that testicular extracts were nothing more than an incredibly popular fad which would soon fall to the wayside of history. 33n the same decade in France, Serge Voronoff, an early sexologist, declared testosterone as 'the source of the life of the individual and that of the species … confirmed by the fact that the emasculated male loses both powers [of strength and virility] at the same time'. 34Thought to be as powerful a technology for moving humanity forward as airplanes or submarines, 'hormones were believed to have the power to revive lost masculinity, to restore heteronormativity by "curing" gender ambiguity, queerness, and disability, as well as to rejuvenate and eventually even to cheat death'. 35The conflation of masculinity obtained through the hormone with the needs of a strong nation state shows the eugenicist underpinnings of early endocrinology, via the notion that cis men using synthetic testosterone may have increased virility.Testosterone therefore sustained both individual and national aspirations for a direct line to a eugenicist ideal of man.
Yet this was in direct tension with many theorists at the time who still saw endocrinology overall as a fake science.Lancelot Hogben, a left wing zoologist and polymath working in South Africa at the time, spent the totality of his 1929 Centenary Lecture debunking the claims of endocrinology, decrying endocrinologists as 'glandlords' whose field 'might better be described as endocriminology'. 36He claimed endocrinology to be 'the nucleus of some of the wildest, most undisciplined and discreditable speculations that could be extracted from medical science'. 37He did pause, however, to add that there was a strong possibility that the study of hormonal glands would lead to discoveries on 'the regulation of human life on a much more drastic scale', showing that even the detractors of the coming hormonal tide saw in it the potential to change how we think of life itself. 38e national party has just won an outright majority for a second consecutive term, beginning to lay the groundworks for sovereignty and Apartheid.In the final stages of fortifying the nation, the medico-legal notions of sex and race have been fortified as well.But just as categories were solidified, the endocriminals and gender criminals were gathering.
By 1934, German-born Israeli gynaecologist Bernard Zondek, amongst others, had discovered the presence of testosterone in females and oestrogen in males. 39A new 'hermaphroditic' model of sex was accepted globally. 40This model had as its underlying logic that men and women are latently intersex by nature, and deviations from the norm, in terms of sex, sexuality and gender were treatable through a correction in hormones. 41This represented a monumental shift in the way both hormones and sex were understood -first as mutable and importantly as controllable and governable.
Already imbued with potentials for virility and having a pre-existing relationship with inversion, then, synthetic testosterone reached South Africa in 1937. 42The idea of synthetic testosterone was being discussed and debated within the medical field in South Africa for seventeen years before it was ever used.From then and onwards synthetic testosterone was frequently prescribed in the hopes of attaining greater virility for cis men, complementing its original goal of assuaging anxious masculinity. 43It did however have much stronger, if at times unwanted, results for a different population.
By 1949, the powers of synthetic testosterone in reducing attributes related to femininity -such as a high voice -were thought to be so great as to be a treatment for breast cancer. 44In under a month, androgen therapy was believed to make 'a marked relief of pain and a striking improvement of general well-being' for people with breast cancer. 45The thought was that, as testosterone therapy could function as a form of chemical castration or defeminisation, it may have the power to kill cancer along with femininity.Testosterone was thus recommended as 'supplementary or palliative' care. 46ere, synthetic testosterone was seen as a force as powerful as surgery in divorcing someone from their womanhood.
B Lee-Harrison Aultman speaks about the ways in which breast cancer enabled their parent, Barb, to live a freer gendered experience. 47Faced with the tragedy of cancer, perhaps some men saw T and top surgery as the silver lining of this diagnosis, as the cancer ate away at a part of their body they did not want, and brought them closer to T and all it promised.
The 1950s finally represented a shift as hormones became more directly linked with a medical understanding of trans identities -often partially attributed to the media attention around American actress and singer Christine Jorgensen. 48Jorgensen was in many ways the first 'transsexual' celebrity, having received gender affirming surgery in 1951. 49It is through the work of doctors Harry Benjamin and David Cauldwell that, along with the press around Jorgensen, 'modern transsexuality as defined through requests for bodily transformation via surgery and hormones' was both coined and popularised. 50A similar public fascination represented itself in South Africa through articles in Drum, 'the first magazine for black writing in English' published in apartheid South Africa, and its sister publication Golden City Post which used stories, predominantly of people of colour, who were 'masquerading as a different gender' through the 1950s and 1960s 'as particular avenues of titillation for their readership'. 51n part as a response to this 'avalanche of publicity about sex change through surgery and hormones', 'transsexualism' was first discussed as a curable condition in the SAMJ in 1954. 52In 'Possibilities of Sex Reversal', Dr R. Singer warned against the 'sex sensationalism' which had gripped the South African public imagination and 'so far misled as to believe that anyone can be "changed" into the opposite sex at any time if he or she so desires'. 53It is at this time that 'medical, biological, and political discourses were confronted with an infinite variability of bodies and desires'. 54T, at this marker, is hinted at as a possible element of gender affirming care in the SAMJ, though it is framed as a warning rather than an innovation.
In 1956, an editorial in the SAMJ noted, 'it is only within recent years that endocrinology has become a respectable branch of medicine, freed from the witchcraft and mumbo-jumbo of organotherapy, rejuvenation and the like'. 55Within the endocrinological field, this represented a move away from views of testosterone as a miracle drug.One article by E. M. Sandler, also in 1954, found promising results for the use of synthetic testosterone in relieving pain related to menstruation.The author, however, swiftly discourages such treatment as it not only heightened the libido of the test group but also caused masculinisation effects visible in the 'growth of hair on the upper lip' and 'development of the male type voice', deemed dangerous by Sandler. 56eve walks into Dr Sandler's office.He's hated his period all his life, but then again who wouldn't?His doctor puts him on an 'experimental' new treatment called Testoviron to alleviate his pain.For some reason Steve can't quite put his hands on, the idea of trying this new treatment scares him at first, but soon after his second shot he feels hooked.He feels like his body is becoming ever more his.He takes 600 mg a month, double the recommended maximum dosage.One  Nine years later in 1963, the SAMJ had its first description of a person requesting synthetic testosterone as part of gender affirming care.Four 'transsexuals' came to Tara Psychiatric Hospital requesting gender affirming care.Out of the four, only one was a man.He was denied treatment due to ableist assumptions around his intelligence, but testosterone, along with top surgery, were recommended for future cases as primary forms of treatment.A psychological need for 'rebirth at an extremely primitive level' is noted in this request. 57In searching for historical and cultural precedents, Dr Alexander Don, who wrote the article, makes a sideways reference to reaching into a trans archive.In a section on 'Historical and Cultural Aspects' which discusses a longer history of trans people, Don offhandedly mentions Dr James Barry, 'Inspector-General of the English Army Medical Department'. 58Barry was a medical doctor in Cape Town in the 1820s who -despite explicitly asking for his body not to be examined at the time of his death -was noted to not be a cis man at the time of his exhumation. 59In 1824, Barry had been tried for having a homosexual relationship with the Governor of Cape Town, Lord Charles Somerset, further showing that Barry lived his life in South Africa not only as a man but as a suspected queer man. 60In citing Barry's story, Don links this first request for T in the SAMJ to a longer history of men who existed outside gender/sex norms even before the technical object itself did.
Also in 1963, the Births, Marriages, and Deaths Act 81 was ratified.While not speaking directly to gender, the Births, Marriages, and Deaths Act 81 of 1963 allowed trans people to change the gender on their birth certificate under the provision that 'any omission, defect, or inaccuracy' in the birth certificate could be altered.Revisions to ID documents and birth registers were then decided on a case-by-case basis. 61The vagueness of the 1963 act which stipulated that 'any omission, defect, or inaccuracy' in the birth certificate could be altered gave the state ultimate control in deciding for each individual whether they were eligible for legal gender recognition without set guidelines of who would be eligible.This created some space for people who wanted legal gender recognition to argue their case.As noted by Camminga in their work documenting citizenship and trans rights in South Africa, this was in accordance with the idea that 'sex was not immutable-that the body was malleable'. 62

Adam, at the age of 18, walked into Tara Psychiatric Hospital in blue jeans and an oversized shirt. Since its founding 15 years prior, Tara was a renowned mental health hospital where students of the University of Witwatersrand could come and train. Diagnosed as 'retarded', depressed, and anxious, Adam was no stranger to his mind being prodded and evaluated by medical professionals. Today was different though. Today it wasn't his teacher or his parents that brought him to Tara. Adam was an adult and, after hearing about other 'transsexuals', he knew he was one too.
By the 47th South African Medical Congress in 1969, more than ten of the approximately forty talks were dedicated to endocrinology and trans healthcare. 63Synthetic testosterone and its users were everywhere, and for the first time the technical object was being stared at directly.Talks on 'Legal Aspects of Transsexualism', 'Chromosomes and the Gynaecologist', 'Transsexualism -Pre-operative Assessment', 'The Problem of Transsexualism' and 'A Review of the Male Factor in 107 cases of Infertility' were planned for the conference. 64Dr Wayde Van Niekerk, best known for his work on 'hermaphrodism', was the key presenter for 'Chromosomes and the Gynaecologist' and 'Transsexualism -Pre-operative Assessment'. 65Van Niekerk served as Colonial governor of South West Africa and was later appointed as the Minister of Health under P. W. Botha from 1985 to 1989.By appointing a gynaecologist with some specialisation in trans care, the administration showed an interest in gender and gender regulation.That same year, the Immorality Act of 1969 prohibited the use of dildos, tacitly acknowledging the dangers of gender fuckery from assigned female bodies in the law, perhaps for the first time. 66Before, women were seen as subjects to be protected from testosterone.Now, focus on female capacity for lust and on female masculinity enabled a discourse on how broader society had to be protected from those who might choose to use T.
That being said, the South African state showed general sympathy towards 'transsexuals', supporting the view that they could be treated.In this way, medically diagnosable 'transsexuals' were separated from the deviancy of homosexuality and transvestism. 67Part of early sexology and endocrinology was a belief that 'abnormally' high or low oestrogen and/or testosterone can be a determining factor in one's sexuality.While thoroughly debunked by the 1950s, this belief underpinned the apartheid military's understanding of queer people as also possibly fixable. 68As a result, in the 1970s a programme began to force gay and lesbian South African Military conscripts to take hormones, with the belief that correcting a hormone imbalance would also 'cure' their homosexuality. 69ost of our information on forced sex reassignment surgeries comes from two articles written by Robert Kaplan and from a research project done by the Gay and Lesbian Archive. 70Military conscription occurred for white citizens in South Africa between 1960 and 1991. 71During this time, conscripts found to be gay or lesbian were placed in a military psychiatric ward with 'drug abusers, conscientious objectors, the politically unreliable, and the seriously mentally ill'. 72In this ward, gay and lesbian recruits were subjected to multiple forms of conversion therapy, from electroshock therapy and narcoanalysis to hypothalamotomy. 73In 1969, having little to no success with 'traditional' therapies for converting people to heterosexuality, the military project escalated its torture to the forced sex reassignment of conscripts, believing that if they could not stop the homosexual men and women from being attracted to their own gender, they could change the conscripts' gender to make them heterosexual.Between 1969 and 1987, then, approximately 900 people underwent forced sex reassignment surgeries through this project. 74Key to this project's success was the issuing of new identities to people once surgery had taken place, ensuring there was no link to their assigned gender at birth thus creating another black hole of queer experience.
The 1969-87 project also included giving cis gay men testosterone in the belief that homosexuality was caused by hormonal imbalances. 75Once again, synthetic testosterone is being seen as an aid to make cis men more heterosexual and more virile.Since there was no protocol for what 'treatment' was given and when, the military project used synthetic testosterone in two ways.First, it formed part of the ongoing 'treatment' of women who had been mutilated through forced sex reassignment surgery. 76econdly, it was a means to treat gay men's 'effeminacy' by increasing their androgen levels.
Moving again to people actively reaching out for T, in the 1978 SAMJ article 'Sex and Drugs', D. C. Renshaw describes T in the search for a love potion in Grecian times which 'persists today in our fervent search for aphrodisiacs'. 77While most frequently sold to 'impotent or anxious men', at times 'they were also sought for a desired maiden so that she might be irresistibly drawn to a desirous lover'. 78Amongst the list of dangerous drugs used as aphrodisiacs -alcohol, strychnine, hypnotics, cocaine -we also find synthetic testosterone.Though there is only limited evidence due to 'real medical concern … regarding the adverse side effects of … beard growth and voice deepening', gynaecologists who dared to prescribe it all found 'frightening virilisation signs' in their patients. 79s Paul B. Preciado notes, 'for women, whether they're athletic or not, taking testosterone is a form of doping'. 80Here, T is seen as dangerous in its capacity to enact queer desires for gender fluidity and must therefore be controlled. 81he methodology of reaching emphasises finding ways to catch a glimpse into trans lifeworlds.I use lifeworlds here to mean 'not only the field where individuals' existence unfolds in practice but also where they exercise existence-that is, live their lives out and confront the very forms of their death'. 82Understanding trans lifeworlds also means being 'aware of how these relations are situated across temporalized activities that reproduce themselves as scenes of living' in ways that meld the individual experience with the external structures mediating that experience. 83Focusing on T enables me to think through these different lifeworlds in the ways they are not told, in the way they are hidden and repressed, and to fabulate the lives that may have existed in the people who were granted as well as refused treatment.Such a perspective adds a more human element, as well as one that can account for the structures surrounding trans becoming.
Through shifting the conversation to focussing on the object T, we are able to tell this history through a new angle, one which takes the limitations created by structural transphobia and moulds the language used by those very structures to get a new lens of understanding for trans lives.We are therefore able to critically fabulate the lives of trans masculine people through the stories untold but hinted at in the archives, the stories of trans masculine people reaching and in turn the story of the archivist reaching in to find them.

REACHING OUT FOR CHANGE
Most existing writing about trans lives in South Africa has focused on human rights, such as Nadzeya Husakouskaya's analysis of mobility and healthcare for trans and intersex South Africans. 84Thamar Klein, Amanda Lock Swarr and Camminga have furthered the field through interrogations of the relationship between the apartheid state and transgender rights in the shift to democracy, medicolegal relationships to gender binaries through South African history, and its effects on trans lives. 85amminga further delves into the complexities of migration, gender identity and how these intersect within the South African social and political landscape through an excellent history of citizenry in relation to gender and place. 86These authors have shown that medical and legal discourses around trans life often converge in attempts to make trans people easily erased and fixable.
In this final section, we see what happens when trans people speak directly to the legislature, rather than being spoken about or around.Using Smit's testimony in front of parliament, I showcase a trans person using the technical object to advocate for his rights and the rights of South African trans people as a whole.In this way, it is a reversal.Rather than reaching backwards and inwards to find trans masculinity, Smit -a white trans masculine person -uses T to reach outwards and towards a future with freer legal gender recognition for trans people.A close reading of his statement reveals not only a trans voice speaking out and speaking back, but also a radical repositioning of T within the state's recognition of trans masculinity, beyond the fear it garnered in the SAMJ.
When speaking on trans citizenship, most case law in South Africa deals specifically with the legitimacy of a trans person's marriage.The key case is W v W, which in 1976 ruled that regardless of any amendments to birth certificates or medical intervention, in the case of marriage people remain the sex they were assigned at birth. 87In 1994, arguments for the right to marriage in relation to legal gender recognition were also made by the South African Legal Centre, stating that if trans women were unable to get married they would resort to sex work as 'there is no greater confirmation of femininity than that of having normal heterosexual men again and again accept [a trans woman] as a woman'. 88he question of trans citizenship is therefore one of trans respectability and legibility, of how intimate lives are regulated.
In 1992, a change to the Births and Deaths Registration Act 51 meant it was no longer legally possible to change one's sex in any legal documents.In the parliamentary discussion that followed, trans men were mentioned in parliament for the first time: Eugene Lowe [Minister of Home Affairs]: the good old days when a man could become a woman after a sex change operation, and a woman a man, no longer exist. 89is 1992 replacement of the 1963 act created a legal aporia for trans people.Lock Swarr links the parliamentary discussion above to Achille Mbembe's notion of 'anxious virility', suggesting a link between the state's patriarchal anxieties about losing power to the limiting of rights for gender non-conforming people. 90This 'anxious virility', of the state and cisgender masculinity, connotes the approved usage of synthetic testosterone as a tool of 'corrective' masculinity for cisgender men -ensuring their strength and virility -against the unspoken background of its 'perverse' usage by trans people.It is therefore unsurprising that, as the South African state grappled with a shift in racial relations, so too were gendered relations being questioned.What resulted was 11 years of legislative confusion in which trans people navigated legal and medical terrains without clear grounding.
This lack of clarity also deeply affected intersex people.As Sally Gross, a white intersex activist, recounts: 'In 1997, as a direct result of medical evidence that I am intersexed, I ceased to be a human being in South African law despite the Bill of Rights'. 91n 9 September 2003, Gross, Simone Heradien and Smit appeared in front of a now democratic South African Parliament to advocate for full autonomy in terms of legal gender recognition.Gross spoke to the implications of a trans specific act for intersex people.Heradien, a Black trans woman, spoke directly to her own experience coming out at the dawn of democracy saying: 'during 1994 when the political term reconstruction and development was the buzz word.I decided to follow suit'. 92inally, Smit spoke to his experiences as a trans masculine person, arguing surgery was an overly restrictive bar for a gender marker change.From the appearance of wording similar to Smit's recommendations in the final legislation, it seems likely that Smit's account, given on behalf of the Cape Town Transsexual/Transgender Support Group, of the accessibility and uses of T directly impacted that final legislation.
The Cape Town Transsexual/Transgender Support Group, led by Heradien and Smit, was founded for the sole purpose of advocating for better legislation around legal gender markers.They proposed three alternatives to the restrictive wording of the Bill.Proposal 1, 'Our Heartfelt Wish for a Humane Bill', called for full autonomy in self-identification of gender.Proposal 2, 'Significant Amendments', called for there to be no medical requirement for legal gender recognition, favouring instead evidence of 'socially transitioning' for at least a year.Finally, Proposal 3, 'Minor Amendments Now, Major Revisions to Follow', focussed specifically on the replacement of the term 'sex organs' with 'sexual characteristics and medical treatment'. 93he first proposal made by the Cape Town Transsexual/Transgender support group and presented by Smit is by far the shortest both because the request was simple: that legal gender recognition be decided purely by the self-identification of the applicant, and because the group knew how unlikely it was for this proposal to be taken seriously by parliament granted that such an institution: clings to absolutes that do not exist and feels extremely threatened by those of us who cross those artificially imposed boundaries.It seeks to regulate us, track us and require our bodies to fully fit one of the two tiny boxes it constructed before allowing us the legal and social existence we yearn for. 94 this proposal, the group asked for an act which is more in line with the spirit of the Bill of Rights in a move to link trans rights to a broader language of nation building, particularly pride in the new constitution. 95Pointing to a queer futurity imbued with potentiality, the group ended this proposal with the 'hope of a future in which each of us will be able to freely live out our identities and develop our bodies in ways that fulfil our greatest potential as human beings'. 96n the second best option -Proposal 2: Significant Amendments -temporality remained deeply entrenched in the validation of transness, requiring that 'the applicant' had 'lived as a member of the sex corresponding to the sex description under which she or he seeks to be registered throughout a period of one year' as well as confirmation from a mental health professional that they live socially as their true gender.This proposal was supported by the fact that by the time someone is ready and able to spend a full year in society as their gender, they have already spent 'many months or even years', 'gradually … accommodat[ing] family, friends and colleagues', as well as taking other practical steps like changing clothes, body language and 'taking hormones to bring about changes in sexual characteristics'. 97The proposal rejects any medical diagnosis, refusing the need for trans people to conform to the medicalised narrative of them being mentally ill.However, it still lists hormones as a possible step towards social trans becoming.
Rather than calling for self-determination as in the first proposal or identification based on social presentation as in the second proposal, Proposal 3: Minor Amendments Now, Major Revisions to Follow called for an expansion of the type of intervention and authority required for a change in legal gender recognition.The changes recommended for people seeking legal gender recognition outside of intersex identities are as follows: 1(1) Any person whose sexual characteristics have been altered by surgical or medical treatment or by evolvement through natural development [as opposed to: 'resulting in a sex change', as was suggested in the original bill], or any person who is intersexed may apply to the Director-General of the National Department of Home Affairs for the alteration of the sex description on her or his birth register.And 1(2) (b) in the case of a person whose sexual characteristics have been altered by surgical or medical treatment, be accompanied by a report by a medical practitioner stating the nature and results of any procedures carried out and any treatment applied or prepared; [as opposed to: 'by the medical practitioners who carried out the procedures and applied the treatment', as was suggested in the original bill] (c) in the case of a person whose sexual characteristics have been altered by surgical or medical treatment, be accompanied by a report stating the present sexual characteristics of the applicant prepared by a medical practitioner other than one contemplated in paragraph (b) who has medically examined the applicant in order to establish his or her sexual characteristics. 98 noted by the group, this already excluded significant parts of the trans population who do not undergo medical transition, either because of personal preference or financial limitations.
There were two key arguments for Proposal 3. First, that requiring an invasive surgery that can result in extreme complications is a human rights violation.It could easily be argued that requiring any medical intervention amounts to a human rights violation under the same principle of bodily autonomy.The second prong of the argument is that T does more than enough in 'altering both primary and secondary sexual characteristics'.
Smit, who was enacting his own trans becoming through T, made it clear multiple times that a 'single moment of sex change is impossible', stating that 'a degree of visible similarity is the most that can be achieved'.As such, their third proposal, Minor Amendments Now, Major Revisions to Follow, clearly positioned hormone replacement therapy as a lower barrier of access to legal gender recognition giving the following reason: Taking hormones is the most accessible kind of medical treatment for trans people.It significantly alters a person's secondary sexual characteristics and is often all that is required to enable a person to live successfully as a member of the sex with [which] s/he identifies. 99it further speaks about hormones in the following ways: Hormones significantly assist us in passing as our true sex and in making us feel more comfortable with our bodies.Most of us start living full time as our true sex while merely being on hormones and without having had any surgery. 100ollowing the third recommendation, the Alteration of Sex Description, Act 49 of 2003 allowed for a change in legal gender recognition by 'any person whose sexual characteristics have been altered by surgical or medical treatment or by evolvement through natural development resulting in gender reassignment, or any person who is intersex'.As the Cape Town Transsexual/Transgender Support Group were the only group to speak directly to the requirement of gender affirming surgery, it is highly probable that the testimonies of Smit and Heradien directly impacted this wording.Particularly significant is Smit's account of the power of T, and its relative accessibility compared with gender affirming surgery.Here, we have our first archive where, not only is a trans masculine person speaking about T, he is using T as a tool to sway the state.The technical object is reproducing itself -becoming even more entrenched within the cultural history of trans becoming in South Africa.In being named as more accessible to trans masculine people than surgery, T is becoming the object of trans legibility to the state.
One other group presenting to parliament was The Lesbian and Gay Equality Project.Pivotal in securing gay marriage in South Africa just two years later in 2005, the Equality Project saw the bill as a continuation of the apartheid logic that allowed gay and lesbian recruits to undergo forced sex reassignment surgery.They therefore advocated for even harsher restrictions around legal gender recognition.Camminga has demonstrated how the Cape Town Transsexual/Transgender Support Group 'represented, perhaps, the first moment of transgender as a visible political manifestation in South Africa' and was created 'in part agitated by The Equality Project's "transphobic Parliamentary submission" regarding the Bill'. 101Klein identifies this as an important step in trans advocacy in South Africa. 102We also know that the Support Group's insistence that 'invasive, expensive, and dangerous surgery not be required to have one's sex description changed' directly influenced the final wording of the bill. 103By focussing on T we see a different narrative emerge, one in which the state in some way acknowledges a life touching itself through the technical object. 104Unlike the first case study where professionals writing in the SAMJ were cautioning against the use of T for fear of what it may mean for gender variability, T is now being used as the marker of legibility for trans masculine life in South Africa.We see Smit being able to use medicalised assumptions about what is needed to be trans to his advantage, using T as a compromise between self-determination and the heavily restrictive requirement of surgery.

CONCLUSION
The story of synthetic testosterone is one of reaching, searching for vitality.It is inextricably linked to an endocrinological history of eugenics which was determined to formalise a gender binary and use hormones as a fountain of youth. 105Born of cisgender male anxiety, it has been transformed by a population who were never meant to touch it, creating euphoria from an object designed through colonial fear.
Figure 1 is an artwork created by South African artist Khanya the Designer, a self-described man of the transgender experience.The artwork was created during a national shortage of Depo-Testosterone in South Africa in 2018 which left approximately 28,000 South Africans without access to T. While not the only kind of T available in South Africa, Depo-Testosterone was the cheapest and most accessible, as well as the only one approved by public hospitals for gender affirming care.Since then, there have been other shortages of between one and twelve months, the longest of which is still ongoing at the time of writing this article in 2023. 106 shortages happen throughout the world, most acutely in Australia, Italy, Venezuela and South Africa. 107My interest in studying this technical object arose when my own supply of testosterone was suspended due to one such shortage in 2018-19.It was a rupture in time, one in which it felt as though my progress was stunted or that I was now stuck.The hand in the image, ostensibly Khanya's, is reaching for the vial which at that time was inaccessible to both him as an individual, as well as more generally.In Khanya's arm reaching out, we see his desire, the object of his desire -T -, and his desperation as the centre of desire is just out of reach.As Camminga and I have explored elsewhere, 'Reminiscent of puppet strings @khanyathedesigner is straining against control, bodily, gendered and otherwise'. 108As Cameron Awkward-Rich notes, 'although desire always exceeds the object, although the wound remains open, we remain attached both because the promise of closure is not broken, merely and perpetually deferred, but also and most importantly because something usable is produced by the attachment'. 109Khanya made this art piece before having ever touched T in response to a hope and a promise of what testosterone may one day do for him should the structures that control access to it allow.
Being stuck without T can be understood 'as both a spatial metaphor and a temporal one, deferring to notions of being stuck in the past or stuck in a gendered timeline, and ultimately "out of time"'. 110his places trans subjectivities in conversation with other identities -disabled people in particular -whose level of debilitation are more and more so decided by global flows of goods and capital under neoliberalism.This has been particularly affected by the interruption in supply chains during the initial waves of the COVID-19 pandemic and the consequent focus on vaccine production by major pharmaceuticals.
While synthetic testosterone as a subjectivity in and of itself may be understood as radical, the interplay between testosterone and trans becoming is not always a radical act.Often, taking testosterone is an act of survival by trans people, or even more mundanely, an act of little significance -possibly a stepping stone in their becoming.It is not only a thing deployed, but carries a kinetic force of relation to bodies that can itself be traced and tracked over this genealogy.
Due to the often-hidden nature of this genealogy, telling trans stories in a way that feels 'true' in many ways feels impossible.After all, much of the information we have on trans life comes from publicity that exoticizes and fetishises the trans subject, 'usually attended by a loss of agency and authority, narrative and other wise'. 111he throughline through these various stories and archives however is not the subjects themselves, but the mediation of these subjects through the technical object T. In tracing T, we trace the flows of capital and power as it relates to the people who use it.It is through reaching for T that I was better able to understand the structural intimacies surrounding these lives and the inequality of access that has mediated them through time.
According to Jordy Rosenberg 'the past awakens only under the pressure of the political present', its history gaining meaning through its interactions with bodies and structures. 112Many of the bodies this article deals with may not have self-identified as trans, and certainly not as queer, and due to the nature of the archive it is often impossible to know how they would identify at all.It is only through the pressure of the political present that the desire to find 'carnal knowledge of trans-subjectivity to reach back into larger political, historical, and cultural currents' presents itself. 113his desire often presents itself more acutely on the African continent, where finding historical figures who we can read as queer is seen as a rebuttal to questions of 'unafricanness'. 114To do so, however, is to deny the complex and varying identities that existed in the past outside of imperialist definitions and categorisations. 115To be trans, therefore, is not something that can be understood outside of its relationality to the structural and intersectional history of gender.
In this article, I have explored T and the corollary experience of trans becoming through its synthetic consciousness, through the people who reach for T in their desire for trans becoming.From the medico-legal regulations of it in the SAMJ, to trans people today reaching for a better state in South Africa, both internally and as a nation -T as a force for trans becoming has existed for as long as T itself has.
I would like to argue the second kind of reaching -that of the archivist -is impossible without the first, that only through my own searching for T was I able to in turn reach out into the lives of those who searched before me.This methodology of reaching asks the researcher to place at the forefront their own particular positionality, to interrogate what it is that draws them to the archive and what connections they are reaching for.This proposed methodology is therefore one which enables a more genuine understanding of what the gaps in knowledge are and how we as researchers fabulate with those holes.

F I G U R E 1
Illustration by Khanya the Designer features in On Scene Magazine for 'So_Close_Yet_So_Far', January/February 2021 Issue.Accessed via https://www.onscenemagazine.com/home/magazine-covers/issue-2/so-far-yet-so-close.[Colour figure can be viewed at wileyonlinelibrary.com] day, he sees the hair above his lips darken, and thinks finally that this is what he is supposed to look like.Steve confides in his best friend about the new treatment after he sees them staring at his face one night at their local whites only tavern.While they've never spoken about it, Steve knows the same desire that lives in him lives in his friend.He tells them what to say to the doctor to get this magical vial of Testoviron.Steve never speaks to Dr Sandler about how happy he now feels, he has no idea if Dr. Sandler saw something more in him than menstrual discomfort.But surely he must have, right?I mean, why would he prescribe it otherwise?At least, that's what Steve thinks until his follow up appointment with Dr Sandler who, after seeing Steve's face and hearing his voice, looked horrified and vowed to never prescribe Testoviron again.