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Photo by Pawel Czerwinski on on Unsplash [detail]
Thursday 19 December 2024
CURRENT PROJECT - concluding November 2026
About
Hormone-related medical care typically relies on binary understandings of sex and gender, to the detriment of a wide range of patients, including menopausal women and non-binary and trans people. Controversies related to estrogen are socially divisive; they include the safety of hormone treatment for menopausal women and the ethics of prescribing estrogen-blockers to gender diverse young people.
Our Experimenting with Estrogen Working Group (EEWG) enhances health inclusion in Australia by bringing together researchers from the social sciences and humanities, health and medicine, neuroscience, and relevant communities (including those with lived experience of estrogen interventions) to discuss and shape research practices and policies around estrogen.
Aims
The EEWG aims to:
1. Stimulate innovative scientific research and health policy related to estrogen in order to access inclusive care;
2. Engage with diverse estrogen expertise from hormone research laboratories, general and specialist medical clinics, and the general community;
3. Design research questions and collaborations to promote health and well-being in a wide range of people, within and beyond binary understandings of sex/gender;
4. Amplify and articulate ways of experimenting with estrogen that better align with contemporary lived experiences of sex/gender in Australia; and
5. Inform ethical research involving people with diverse lived of experiences of sex/gender.
Project Team
ANU researchers: Celia Roberts (lead), Mary Lou Rasmussen, Helen Keane, Christine Phillips
ANU PhD candidates: Tate McAllister, Thy O’Donnell, Celeste Sandstrom
External Collaborators
Velissa Aplin, Canberra Health Services, Variations in Sex Characteristics Psychosocial Service Care Coordinator, Division of Women, Youth & Children, ACT Government
Vik Fraser, A Gender Agenda, ACT
Charlotte Kroløkke, Department of Culture and Language, University of Southern Denmark, Odense
Nayantara Appleton, School of Science in Society, Victoria University of Wellington
Gillian Einstein, Department of Psychology and Dalla Lana School of Public Health, University of Toronto
PROJECT UPDATES:
Congratulations to the leads of the ‘Experimenting with Estrogen’ Working Group, Celia Roberts, Mary Lou Rasmussen and Helen Keane (Sociology) on their success in winning an ARC Discovery Grant 2025!
The ‘Experimenting with Estrogen Working Group’ (EEWG) was sponsored by the Gender Institute in Round 1 this year. Its first meeting discussed:
- the multiplicity of estrogen and its various functions in human and non-human bodies, including its role in memory
- local support services for trans and gender diverse people and for the families of children with atypical sexual development
- cutting-edge neuroscientific and social scientific research in Canada, New Zealand and Denmark
- the ethics of working on estrogen and how best to proceed with co-designing research with relevant communities.
EEWG will gather again in 2025 for a longer in-person meeting and a public-facing workshop and support Roberts, Keane and Rasmussen’s new ARC DP25 on estrogen, shaping the direction of that research and its dissemination and impact strategies.
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