What Does Testosterone Have To Do With Men?
From the Future of Masculinity weekly newsletter for people particularly passionate about engaging, educating, and empowering boys and men around gender and masculinity with news-you-can-use, tools, and events.
We all think we know what testosterone is, but where is the line between fact and fiction? Well, it’s complicated. Testosterone has become more than just a hormone — it’s also a commodity and a symbol. How did one hormone become so intertwined with what masculinity is supposed to mean?
To find out, let’s take a deep dive decline into the three sides of testosterone.
The Biochemical
Testosterone is a hormone, meaning it is a chemical messenger that relays information from one cell to another. It is often described as a “male hormone,” which is misleading because everyone has it; cisgender men just have more.
In men, testosterone plays a role in their physical body, like sperm production, development and maintenance of secondary sex characteristics (body and facial hair, enlargement of the Adam’s apple, and deepening of voice), and muscle growth promotion. Nutrition, social cues, age and health influence the pathway that is responsible for producing testosterone.
The jury is still out on how testosterone impacts our health and behaviour, but there are many myths surrounding its influence. Implicating a single hormone as responsible for such dynamic emotions as aggression, sexuality, and generosity is a big oversimplification of the complexity surrounding hormone pathways and human behaviour. To quote Brown's University Anthropology professor, Matthew Gutmann:
“If you believe that T says something meaningful about how men act and think, you’re fooling yourself. Men behave the way they do because culture allows it, not because biology requires it”
The Commodity
To understand how testosterone has become a commodity, we must first take a quick detour into the anti-aging business. Sex hormones have been heavily marketed as anti-aging since the 1960s, with estrogen supplements claiming to increase older women’s femininity by replacing estrogen that was lost in menopause. The aggressive marketing of a medical disorder in order to sell estrogen as a commodity was extremely successful, with an estrogen supplement becoming the fifth most prescribed drug in the United States in the mid seventies.
Unfortunately, what the campaigns failed to mention was the risks involved in estrogen therapy and by 2002 it was understood that for some women the risks outweigh the potential benefits. Even more concerning, the lesson has gone unlearned and synthetic testosterone is closely following in the steps of estrogen therapy.
As part of aging, men hit a point in their 30s or 40s where they begin to steadily produce less and less testosterone, to the tune of a 1.2 percent decrease each year. According to the UK’s National Health Service (NHS), this is a normal part of aging and is unlikely to cause any health problems by itself.
That hasn’t stopped pharmaceutical and commercial companies from coining the term “manopause” or male menopause. By branding it as a syndrome or deficiency, they are framing testosterone decline as a product to be fixed, with a commodity to be bought.
This pathologizing has caused a lot of stir over “male menopause”, even when there is little evidence about its existence and effects. Because of how much testosterone levels can fluctuate in the human body, it is actually very difficult to determine or define what is, or isn’t, a healthy or normal level of testosterone. It’s not clear whether testosterone therapy is an effective or safe way to treat age-related declines in testosterone, or even if the condition really exists. Nonetheless, the 10 years leading up to 2003 saw a 500 per cent increase in it being prescribed.
In part, this points to a success story for the pharmaceutical industry, whose marketers evidently found the right buttons to push, in terms of their audience’s insecurities. Just read this very real quote from one website: "We help you to be a better husband, lose that weight, focus on your business and look better!” Some medical resources, such as the Hormone Foundation’s Patient Guide, go as far as to explicitly list the “improving of men’s masculine traits” as the first goal of testosterone therapy. To them, this hormone is a commodity to sell, as the answer for how to be a better man.
For all its harmfulness, real or potential, the rise of testosterone therapy has had an immeasurably positive impact for people in the transgender community. Significant doses of the hormone can play an important role in the gender-affirming treatments needed by many transgender men. However, in many jurisdictions, these men must first be diagnosed with a gender identity disorder before receiving testosterone treatments, a process which can be both exhausting and stigmatizing for those in need.
The Symbol
In some ways, the symbol of testosterone is more real to people than the truth of testosterone.
Our society has built up testosterone to carry all kinds of meanings that aren’t, in fact, inherent to what it does. Strength, power, and speed? That’s testosterone. Aggression, irritability, violence? That’s testosterone. Health and heartiness, potency and prowess, manly vigour and sexual vitality — we’ve chalked it all up to testosterone. Sure testosterone plays a role in behaviour, but it is not the puppet master of these characteristics. The reasoning behind why we behave a certain way is complex; gender roles and expectations are so ingrained in us that it’s hard to separate what we have accepted as truth and the reality.
The symbolism and use of testosterone as a measure for masculinity is dangerous because it alienates us from the truth and ourselves. Men and boys will always fall short when comparing themselves to a symbol, which only opens the door for marketers to pray upon their feelings of inadequacy and sell them testosterone as masculinity in a bottle.
This testosterone-fuelled visage of what it means to be a man has been obscuring the uncomfortable truth that gender isn’t fully tangible but rather fluid and constructed. How you construct your gender identity, be it more masculine, more feminine, or somewhere inbetween, is real and valid.
And more importantly — it has little to do with your hormones.
Continue the conversation at our upcoming NGM Circle event where we untangle testosterone facts and myths, and the real-world impacts.