Last night I was performing as part of the second Transgress Cabaret Fundraiser. I had a great time performing and loved watching the other acts.
But one stuck out to me for a very specific reason.
Jes Black of It Is She played a really fun set that included a cover of Survival Horror’s Millionaire Cannibal with a secret re-written final verse the lyrics of which I will not utter here, but more importantly she did an original song of it’s own titled Sip Bro, which provides important information on DIY HRT for trans fems.
As a queer folklorist I love this song.
Let me go on a tangent about folk medicine for a moment.
Folk Medicine has an incredibly broad variation in efficacy; from the genuinely effective, such as chewing on willow bark for headaches (the origin of aspirin), to the plausible, such as applying onion or garlic (both have anti fungal and anti bacterial properties) to open wounds on cattle to prevent infection, to the dubious, such as curing a burn by licking a lizard.
Folk Medicine is any form of medical treatment that is being communicated or developed outside of institutional practice and is most commonly instructed on and administered by non qualified lay people. Some folk medicine has a strong grounding in science, some does not.
DIY HRT is, by its very nature, a form of folk medicine with a strong grounding in science.
And this is a folk song about folk medicine following the fine tradition of teaching folk practices through song or story. This is great because entwining information like this into the oral tradition as well as the written tradition makes it more resilient and harder to destroy.
Books can last longer than humans, but they can't pretend not to know something and they can't run away from those who want to get rid the knowledge they hold.
And of course melody and rhythm make information easier to memorise.
For this reason I think this song is extremely important, in a time where the trans community and trans healthcare are under attack and in danger of being driven entirely underground it’s important that tools like this exist to help that knowledge survive being underground.
Jes has done something really important, I hope more artists follow her example.