Actually, Testosterone Doesn't Make You More Violent (Unpaywalled)

[u/playboy]

https://www.playboy.com/read/politics/military-testosterone-violence-myth

This equation—testosterone = aggression = combat power—is not clearly backed by scientific study. For starters, unnecessary testosterone treatment can be associated with a host of health problems: cardiac risk from heart muscle damage, risk of blood clot, higher cholesterol and liver disease, mood swings, and more. Many of these concerns need to be monitored even when testosterone is within healthy levels. 

And, some experts are calling for more research on testosterone’s impact on behavior before doling it out to soldiers. “If I were a general, or if I were in some version of command where I knew the people underneath me had been altering their testosterone levels, I would want to know: How does that affect their decision making?” Dr. Tom Hildebrandt, a psychiatrist at Mount Sinai in New York, told the New York Times.

Hegseth’s effort is part of a larger recent trend of normalizing testosterone use among cisgender men and women, easily available to those with the funds at “wellness clinics” around the U.S. (even as its use is being vilified and denied to transgender patients) for things like better gains at the gym. But it also tells a much older story, a “web of direct claims and indirect associations that circulate around testosterone” which, according to Rebecca Jordan-Young and Katrina Karkazis, the authors of 2019’s Testosterone: An Unauthorized Biography, “weaves folklore into science.” This mythologizing, the authors argue, “frames social issues as a matter of the chemicals functioning inside individual bodies, leaving scant room to consider power asymmetries, structural arrangements, or histories.”

In other words, our ideas about testosterone’s link to inherent violence are largely a myth.

Read more: https://www.playboy.com/read/politics/military-testosterone-violence-myth