A DIY Guide to Gender Hacking by Santi Sorrenti
Tallulah Stephens
On the 15th October 2025, Santi Sorrenti, the creative director, writer, maker, and style outreach educator, returned to Oxford to present a talk on their zine, A DIY Guide to Gender Hacking, an interactive Queer and Trans EPUB they created with Arts Council Funding. They are an alum of the MSt in Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies course here at Oxford, and they have since been incredibly active and influential in the London Queer creative scene. As well as being the creator of A DIY Guide to Gender Hacking, Santi is also the founder of G(end)er Swap, a Queer and Trans DIY-style outreach organisation that runs workshops, pop ups, and offers digital resources. As I was sitting in the seminar room at the top of a lofty building at St Anne’s College listening to Santi talk, feeling very far away from the London queer scene I know and love, I remembered how I found out about G(end)er Swap. I had acquired my first binder from their pickup point at what must have been a LUSH in London Paddington, if there ever was such a place, in the height of the pandemic. Needless to say, Santi’s work has made an impact. Myself and so many people I know have taken inspiration from their self-expression, held fast to their enjoyment of cringe culture, and adopted their attention to nostalgia, carrying it all forward into our own work.
In their talk, Santi spoke of how they are drawn to aesthetics, the ephemerality of trends, and how they impact cultural ideas of gender. Clothes, styling, and self-expression are modes of exploration to them; they are a way to experiment with and fashion identity without relying on mainstream inspiration. Santi asks: can you tell gender from clothes? By forging Queer and Trans-only creative spaces, Santi fosters an anti-mainstream environment where gender affirming wardrobes can be built in a liminal, informal, educational, and fun space.
They also drew attention to the difficulty of documenting Queer lives and suggested that ephemera, perhaps such as zines, social media posts, and fashion, can be a tool for Queer culture to impact wider institutions. One of my favourite aspects of their talk was their desire to embrace cringe culture, as a move to combat the idea of cringe—of someone or something being perceived as uncool or awkward (Donohue, 2025)—as a negative. I totally agreed with them when they said that cringe (derogatory) is so straight, so oppressive, so insecure. Reclaiming and reworking things that are used against gender diverse people is a big part of their work in A DIY Guide to Gender Hacking. It is a non-committal approach to gender, in which they revel in the mess of it all and learn to be ok with confusion. In an anecdotal move, Santi told us how much they enjoy it when someone is confused by their gender, when they are visibly and audibly unsure of their pronouns.
We question, as we read A DIY Guide to Gender Hacking, how we might make up our gender, do activism, and deconstruct gender through clothing and crafting. Gender hacking, Santi suggests, is fun, productive, helpful, silly, brilliant, and healing. Living in Queer time and Trans time, we can be playful, use childlike imagery, collage, and cartoons, and channel our voices through nostalgic and nonhuman elements. A DIY Guide to Gender Hacking is a delicious piece of ephemera in which Santi guides us through this state of play, helping us hack, make, and break our gender through fashion, word searches, DIY dicks, and Comic Sans.
References
Donohue, C. ( July 17, 2025) ‘Summer Fellows 2025: What Constitutes Cringe?’ Ursinus College. Retrieved January 27, 2026, from https://www.ursinus.edu/live/news/9180-summer-fellows-2025-what-constitutes-cringe
