Rebecca M. Jordan-Young - Testosterone: An Unauthorized Biography

1. Introduction
   T Talk
2. Conclusion
   The Social Molecule

I N EARLY 2017, the popular radio show and podcast This American Life rebroadcast an episode that host Ira Glass praised as one of our very favorite shows. About testosterone and just how much it determines of our fates and our personalities, the hour-long program holds within it a microcosm of testosterones cultural meaning and power. Through the eyes of these journalists and their guests, we see the world of assumptions, assurances, confidences, and complexities this molecule invokes. The episode is like a disco ball of testosterone lore, with each tiny mirrored panel representing a bit of knowledge from past to present about testosterone in its myriad physical and social forms.

Testosterone has a rich and varied biochemical life, and a busy but slightly more predictable social life. So familiar that it needs only a punchy nickname, T is summoned up in daily conversation and news reports in a way that most often reinforces its identity as the so-called male sex hormone, while the complexity and nuance of its many actions get short shrift. Think of the usual story about T as the authorized biography, and youll get an idea of where were going with this unauthorized biography. There are thousands of stories about T but surprisingly little variation. Here were going to dwell instead on the unexpected, the confounding, the messy and fun bits. Were not writing a textbook on what T does in bodies, and were not comprehensively reviewing research from the beginning of time or across every domain in which T has been studied.

It seemed as though every time we disclosed our book idea to someone, they automatically mentioned Glass and the This American Life episode. We found ourselves reacting not just to the segment but to the sense of wonder and excitement that it instilled in listeners. However eloquent and award-winning the stories, however many times the show is described as fresh and new, its disruptive strains are minor compared to the heavy thrum of T folklore that propels the narrative.

G LASS OPENS THE SHOW with a powerful anecdote from the episodes producer, Alex Blumberg. At the age of fifteen, Blumberg was rummaging for a book on his parents shelves and came across Marilyn Frenchs novel The Womens Room, which he recalls as focusing on a group of women who all suffer at the hands of the various men in their lives. And theres constantlywomen are slowly being driven crazy by their husbands incessant criticism, or theyre being called ugly after they get mastectomies, or theyre being stifled by their husbands emotional shallowness. The book deeply affected him, in no small part because of what else was going on in his life: puberty. Obsessed with one particular girl, he recalled seeing the barest sliver of her bra and experiencing an all-consuming desire that made him terrified that he might become like the horrible men in the novel.

From there, the episode takes a giant but seamless leap to T. My testosterone, and how it affects me, and how I react to it, I think about on a daily basis all the time, Blumberg muses. It often feels like theres something in my body giving me instructions that I probably shouldnt follow. A non sequitur, perhaps, but one that works because of the shopworn quality of T folklore. T is the thread that connects overwhelming desire with what we might now call toxic masculinity; T runs roughshod over Blumberg and other men, giving them instructions they ought not heed.

Following Blumberg, the episode turns to a man who chronicled changes to his ambition, interests, humor, the inflection of his voice, and even the quality of his speech when his body stopped making T. In his article for GQ, aptly titled The Beast in Me, he wrote that four months without the hormone taught me that testosterone is everything. Everything. Not just [a mans] motivation but his very epistemology. Without the want it creates, he undergoes a gentle dry rot of body and mind, losing resolution until he becomes as negligible as a ghost. When he was treated with copious amounts of T, he said, the monster took control.

Glass stages the episode as a tug-of-war between rational free agency and the power of T, asking, How much does testosterone determine? Another answer comes from a man who experienced high T for the first time as an adult. Griffin Hansbury, a psychoanalyst in New York City specializing in gender and sexuality, strongly identified as a woman when he began college, but by sophomore year he knew that I had to change my body. And the only way to do that was to take testosterone. Echoing both Blumberg and the GQ writer, Hansbury says, I felt like a monster a lot of the time. And it made me understand men. And I would really berate myself for it.

Hansbury describes experiencing an incredible increase in libido and change in the way that I perceived women and the way I thought about sex. Before T, he was interested in talking to women. After T, everything I looked at, everything I touched turned to sex, to the point where even machinery could arouse him: I would be standing at the Xerox machine, and this big, shuddering, warm, inanimate object would just drive me crazy.

Up to this point in the episode, the persona of T thats conveyed has mostly been about sex, but it takes a turn to encompass a certain kind of male intellect. Hansbury explains that after taking T, he became interested in science and understood physics in a way I never had before, a claim that Blumberg worries is setting us back a hundred years. Its not just intellect but also emotion that Hansbury describes as different and more masculine after T, pointing to his difficulty crying: Im still very much learning how to be a man in the world. Theres a lot to learn. For all he still doesnt get, he is often now called sir, and this is a victory: when he started taking testosterone, his hope was to pass as male, to be perceived by the world as a man.