The testosterone theory of politics

Vox

2 days ago

is an essayist and critic based out of New York. He's written about the intersection of technology & culture for Wired, Polygon, Mother Jones, and others.
Robert F. Kennedy Jr., who oversees the US Department of Health and Human Services, has supported the debunked ideas that vaccines cause autism and that organizations like the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention have helped cover up the link. He's skeptical of the chemicals in our foods and skies, and worries that we've veered too far from all that is good and natural. Yet for all this, he admits to taking testosterone regularly as part of his 'anti-aging protocol from my doctor.' In April, in an interview with Fox News' Jesse Watters, the septuagenarian began to lament the testosterone levels of our youth. 'A teenager today, an American teenager, has less testosterone than a 68-year-old man,' he claimed. When Watters expressed disbelief, he doubled down, saying that testosterone levels have dropped as much as 50 percent from 'historic levels.'
It's not clear exactly what 'historic levels' he was referencing— or, for that matter, what, if any, research he was citing. It's possible that he was misinterpreting the results of a 2007 study that analyzed data gathered from adult men from the 1980s onward and observed a 1 percent decline in average testosterone levels per year (meaning that a 68-year-old man in 1997 would have had 10 percent more testosterone than a 68-year-old man in 2007). The study, however, said nothing about how teenage or young adult testosterone compared. Still, the Fox News clip made its rounds online. On platforms like X, users reshared the video and parroted Kennedy's unsubstantiated claim, voicing suspicions of an intentional campaign to weaken the nation and sounding well-worn dog whistles. 'Mass poisoning mass murder mass replacement,' read one post responding to the video. Questions of scientific literacy aside, it was clear that Kennedy had struck a chord.
Testosterone is having a moment. Within the sweaty halls of the gym bro internet, the trend of testmaxxing has gathered steam, with countless videos dedicated to how someone might 'naturally' (and not so naturally) increase their testosterone levels by, say, eating nearly a dozen eggs a day or simply getting on testosterone replacement therapy. The supplements hawked by alt-right podcasters like Alex Jones are often studded with possibilities of '[supporting] normal testosterone levels in men.' Famously, in 2016, Trump paraded his testosterone levels in his presidential bid against Hillary Clinton. And lest we think obsession with testosterone is restricted to the echo chambers of the manosphere, we should bear in mind that the physique idealized in mainstream Hollywood wouldn't be possible without artificially elevated levels of it, as Alex Abad-Santos previously observed for Vox.
The same move that supposedly identified the chemical makeup of masculinity revealed just how unstable it was.
We live in strange times, surrounded by positions that can seem like contradictions: Our HHS secretary doesn't believe in vaccines, but takes a hormone regularly; the Republican Party works tirelessly to limit access to the substance for people seeking gender-affirming care while simultaneously gutting the federal agency responsible for regulating testosterone in our farming industries (which employs it to increase the 'efficiency by which [the animals] convert the feed they eat into meat'). Meanwhile, evangelical leaders condemn trans people for existing, while also platforming doctors telling post-menopausal women to take testosterone so they might get back their curves.
In many ways, testosterone sits at the crossroads of the tensions cutting through our culture today. By paying close attention to the history of the hormone and the often paradoxical roles it is made to play, we can better understand the forces shaping modern life.
The road to testosterone
Ask most people what testosterone is, and you'll probably hear that it's the 'male hormone.' In fact, type that very phrase into Google and all search roads will tend to lead back to T. The two are considered so interchangeably that they often function as synonyms: testosterone as the chemical essence of masculinity, masculinity as the product of testosterone.
Online, this line of reasoning gets pushed to its limits. In one TikTok with more than half a million views as of this writing, a user boldly claims that 'Low testosterone is the cause of 99 percent of all male problems. When a transgender woman wants to feel like a man, she takes testosterone. Why? Because testosterone is what makes you feel like a man.' With testosterone comes all the characteristics and advantages ascribed to men: strength, mental acuity, competitiveness. Just last year, Elon Musk responded to a post on X featuring a 4Chan screenshot that argued that 'women and low T men' weren't fit for leadership because they would naturally defer to consensus beliefs, compared to 'high T alphamales' who were capable of objectively assessing a situation. 'Interesting observation,' replied the world's richest man.
Despite the ubiquity and weight testosterone holds today, it's a relatively new entrant in our understanding of the body. In Testo Junkie, Spanish philosopher Paul B. Preciado explains that for most of Western history before the 17th century, sex was understood by a logic of similarity and inferiority.
'Female sexual anatomy was set up as a weak, internalized, degenerate variation of the only sex that possessed an ontological existence, the male,' he writes, citing the scholar Thomas Laqueur. You might call this the Eve-as-Adam's-rib model of sex. Women weren't seen as a distinct category, separate from men in their own right, as much as they were considered a 'worse' version of men.
Then, at the dawn of the modern era, a new approach began to emerge. We started to create discrete categories that we might fit the world into, purifying it of ambiguity and hybridity: nature versus culture, animal versus human. Sex was no exception, and an oppositional, binary understanding of man versus woman emerged. Women and men were placed in entirely separate categories, overturning the previous understanding of women as imperfect men.
Sex assignment became hyper-focused not so much on the complex web of social roles, anatomy, temperament, and reproductive capacities that organized identity previously, but on easily observable, 'mechanical' features like the shape and size of one's genitals. As Laqueur points out, organs like the ovary, which didn't even have a 'name of its own' for millennia (since it was often referred to by the same word used for male testes), became no less than a 'syn­ecdoche for woman' during this time.
These categories were 'not only natural but even transcendental,' in Preciado's words. Or as Ben Shapiro likes to phrase it, 'facts don't care about your feelings.' Today, you can still see this system hard at work whenever a troll uses a hashtag like #WeCanAlwaysTell to discredit someone's gender identity. Of course, the supposed facts didn't always line up quite so neatly with reality itself — as was the case with intersex people who challenge this paradigm — but doctors conveniently solved for this by creating sub-classifications like 'female pseudo-hermaphrodites' that still preserved the 'truly male,' 'truly female' binary.
Testosterone didn't properly enter the scene until 1935. That was the year that three independent teams of researchers, each backed by a different pharmaceutical company, identified and synthesized it.
There was only one catch: The long-awaited 'male hormone' didn't fit quite so neatly into the binaries that organized our understanding of the body. Research uncovered that hormones weren't exclusive to one sex. Everyone had testosterone, even if average rates tended to differ between traditional sex lines. It turns out that before menopause, women produce three times as much testosterone as estrogen. In fact, contrary to popular opinion, testosterone isn't the 'opposite' of estrogen, it's the precursor — men and women convert testosterone into estrogen using the enzyme aromatase, and higher levels of testosterone in men can actually result in higher levels of estrogen.
The same move that supposedly identified the chemical makeup of masculinity revealed just how unstable it was. It was born as a paradox, the double-edged essence of manhood that never was.
Maximizing masculinity
These tensions haunt testosterone today. On the one hand, we still largely think about sex in terms of binaries, and of testosterone as the chemical distillate of a natural and inviolable maleness. At the very extremes, testosterone has been used to violently enforce old hierarchies. In the '40s, Nazis transplanted testosterone glands into gay men's penises in a brutal attempt at conversion therapy.
On the other hand, it doesn't take much to sense the unease that the fluidity of testosterone has opened us up to. If maleness or femaleness were once something you unassailably possessed at birth based on unchanging physical markers and roles, then the presence of testosterone across sexes — alongside the development of other chemical interventions that disrupted traditionally sexed functions like the Pill — contributed to the growing awareness that these categories aren't given as much as they are produced.
Critically, these scientific developments happened against the backdrop of broader social movements that sought to challenge the core ideas underpinning patriarchy. As second-wave feminists critiqued the idea of a 'natural' order where men ruled, and women were integrated into more spheres of economic and social life, traditional notions of masculinity began to lose their grip.
Testosterone lives between these two slowly colliding cultural tectonic plates. The desire to compare T-levels — whether it's between 'low T men' and 'high T alphamales' or teenagers and 68-year-olds — ultimately boils down to the desire to lament the state of masculinity today while simultaneously legitimizing the reality of 'maleness' by pinning it on some objective and measurable metric.
In short, testosterone has become a way that men can not only ground their masculinity in a moment when our ideas of gender are more fluid than ever, but even quantify it — all while borrowing the veneer of scientific legitimacy to feel assured in their manliness.
It's this tension that lets conservative mouthpieces insist on the 'immutable biological reality of sex,' as one Trumpian executive order phrased it, while simultaneously making a profit by selling supplements that claim to enhance testosterone levels (and by extension your manhood). This doublethink is on full display whenever a product like Force Factor's Test X180 Legend advertises itself with lines like, 'Let's be honest: being a man is relatively straightforward. … Biologically, to achieve this goal you want more testosterone and less estrogen – maximizing your masculinity.'
Major pharmaceutical companies are competing over the growing testosterone replacement therapy market, which is set to break $2 billion in the next few years. In the same ways that marketers for Listerine generated demand for mouthwash in the 1920s by popularizing 'halitosis' (or bad breath) as a medical and treatable condition, testosterone has become positioned as a salve for the supposed crisis of masculinity today. Masculinity is now both something straightforwardly given at birth, but also always needing to be maximized through consumable supplements, a commodified 'biotech industrial artifact' as Preciado provocatively calls it.
Of course, this commodity isn't available to everyone. The desire to preserve traditional boundaries also helps us understand the restrictions that have been historically applied to the hormone. One of the reasons that testosterone therapy failed to gain larger traction in the 1940s after its synthesis was that physicians were worried about its effects on women, including vocal change and hair growth.
Even today, although the Food and Drug Administration has approved 31 different testosterone products for men (not to mention the many products it has approved for livestock), it hasn't greenlit a single product for women out of this fear, despite studies that indicate that testosterone could offer women a range of benefits from breast protection to osteoporosis prevention. The hormone's male bias has impeded the kind of expansive testing needed for regulatory approval and created a host of misconceptions around its effects on women, even as interest in testosterone for women appears to have grown organically in recent years. It's not hard to imagine the commercial motivation to keep it this way either. Though women might represent an untapped market, offering testosterone to women could also result in what advertisers call 'brand dilution,' or overextending a product to the point of undermining its value.
Natural and unnatural
In his conversation with Jesse Watters, Kennedy attributed the decline in teenage testosterone levels to the quality of food being consumed today. 'The food our kids are eating today is not really food, it's food-like substances,' he claims. He's not wrong. A recent study found that over half the calories consumed at home in the US come from ultra-processed foods, or 'industrial formulations containing no or minimal whole foods and made entirely or mostly from substances extracted from foods.'
Like any medicine, it is both a poison and a cure depending on how it's used.
Our renewed interest in testosterone isn't just about the erosion of borders between gender classifications, but about the slowly crumbling walls separating us from the world we inhabit.
Around a century ago, hormones like testosterone upended our ideas about how the body communicates with itself — allowing us to see how organs could speak to each other using our bloodstreams. Now, as we discover that the world has worked its way into our bloodstreams in the form of microplastics and the 'food-like substances' we ingest daily, it makes sense that this hormone would be caught up in these broader anxieties. As one user commented in the r/Testosterone subreddit, 'hormones given to animals we eat, pollutants in the air and water, blue light from devices etc all contribute to lowering of hormone production.' High testosterone is seen as a sign of a healthy and self-regulating body, and concerns about declining hormone levels stand in for a broader concern that the natural balance in us has been disrupted by our environment.
At the heart of our fascinations and fears lies the growing awareness that our bodies are far more malleable and open to the world than we once thought, that our identities are far more unstable and fluid than assumed.
What remains to be seen is where we'll go from here. There are those that want to lean into this radically chemicalized body. Sports leagues like the Enhanced Games, endorsed by transhumanist types like Bryan Johnson, are experimenting with steroids and testosterone regimens in an attempt to 'redefine superhumanity.' Meanwhile, Kennedy's use of testosterone despite his vaccine skepticism comes from the desire to preserve some delineation between what is natural and synthetic — to let in what is real (testosterone) and do away with what is artificial (vaccines). Many like Kennedy are unsettled by the idea that the borders of our bodies and identities are highly permeable, and taking testosterone is a way to try to get the body back to a 'natural' state, before it was disrupted by the unnatural forces outside of us. This desire to use testosterone to protect the 'natural' also runs through evangelicals who see it as a way for women to retain their femininity as they get older, as well as industrial farmers who use it to reinforce a natural order in which animals are treated chiefly as meat for human consumption.