In "Doctors Who?: Radical lessons from the history of DIY transition" Jules Gill-Peterson writes: "In a 1971 column for the newsletter New Trends, Sally Ann Douglas, a trans woman embedded in an especially well-connected social network, remarked that “everywhere I go these days, I bump into gals who seem to be getting hormones from somewhere” - somewhere other than a doctor’s office, that is. Calling it a trend, she wrote that “most of them seem to be pursuing a ‘do-it-yourself’ program of experimentation with various formulations” of estrogen on the market. Trans women often wrote into such newsletters looking for advice on this subject, but Douglas, like many of her peers, dismissed DIY approaches as reflecting a lack of courage - being too “shy” to go to a doctor - rather than problems of finances and gatekeeping."
"Birth control pills, which were flooding the U.S. market by the end of the 1960s, became an attractive alternative because of their availability—even though their hormonal composition proved mostly ineffective for trans women and came with a high risk of blood clots (as they did for non-trans women) because the dosage was quite high. In the newsletter Empathy Forum, columnist Jessie Collins summed up the risks in 1975: “There’s not any reason to take more chances than necessary, so stick to ‘nature’s own’ estrogens!” by which she meant hormones like Premarin, the most common estrogen then prescribed, which was derived from horse urine. In 1978, when Douglas was serving as an editor of All the Social Femmes, she replied to a letter from a reader asking about the pill: “I don’t have access to un-prescribed hormones myself, and I wouldn’t put you in touch with the underground, even if I knew who the girls were . . . because they all cheat.” By “cheat,” Douglas may have meant that the “underground” stood to profit off desperate trans women—but that was the central worry about most legitimate doctors, too."
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