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“You kill people and break things for a living.”- Secretary of War Pete Hegseth in Quantico, Virginia on September 30, 2025
The primary male sex hormone, testosterone, has been in the news of late. Students of social science may be familiar with the series of twentieth-century prison studies which had as their conclusion that high testosterone levels among incarcerated felons were associated with a propensity toward personal and violent crimes such as rape and murder. Correlation is not causation, but statistics are statistics all the same.
Sports enthusiasts will know that testosterone has often been at issue in cases of professional athlete doping, where contenders are said to have gained an unfair advantage by ingesting exogenous substances intended to improve their performance. Anabolic androgenic steroids such as testosterone have been documented to increase speed and physical strength through inducing the growth of muscle in the body by triggering the production of proteins. The doping controversy is a fascinating one, involving debates over what constitutes cheating. All other things being equal, is it fair for some athletes to use performance enhancement drugs when others do not?
Training and nutrition are one thing, but more artificial modifications, which go beyond what is considered a normal athlete’s behavior as he does everything within his power to excel at his chosen sport, are frowned upon and indeed prohibited by the World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA), et al. Such organizations monitor athletes before, during, and after competitions to ensure that no one is winning through doping rather than a combination of natural ability, talent, and discipline. When testing reveals that athletes who competed and prevailed in tournaments had suspiciously high levels of testosterone or other substances which were not produced by their own body, then they are stripped of their titles, medals and awards. They are effectively denounced as cheaters, and new winners are pronounced from among the athletes who followed the rules to which all of them agreed in order to be able to compete.
The institutional antidoping apparatus is claimed not only to be keeping sports fair and meaningful but also protecting athletes themselves, who in the twentieth century were often made to ingest “supplements” by overzealous coaches in complete disregard for the well being of the competitors themselves. (The USSR and East Germany were notorious for this.) Doping may afford athletes an advantage in the short term, but it is also known to induce negative health conditions, including heart problems and infertility, in the long term.
U.S. Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, who has posted many short videos of himself on social media working out with some of the troops under his command, regards testosterone deficiency as having reached the level of a crisis in the military. He recently touted the substance as an essential chemical in the body of the lethal warrior, invoking the agreement of Secretary of Health and Human Services (HHS) Robert F. Kennedy Jr., in support of this claim. Not long after increasing the admissible enlistment age of Army troops to forty-two, the secretary of war announced a novel testosterone testing policy. Under the new initiative, all troops over the age of thirty will be required by the Department of War to have their testosterone levels measured during their periodic health assessment, and they will be provided with the opportunity to undergo hormone replacement therapy, should they be diagnosed as low on the substance.
The range of testosterone in normal male human beings varies quite a lot, so it is unclear what metric will be used in diagnosing “deficiency.” One possibility would be to assess the current average level of troops and to establish a benchmark based on that data. However, in recent years, alarms have been sounded among some health-focused communities, including MAHA (Make America Healthy Again), Secretary Kennedy’s own initiative, that the level of testosterone in all males (not only soldiers) has diminished greatly as a result of a variety of possible factors, including plastics in the water, among other toxins said to be endocrine-disrupting chemicals. Of course, viewed from a purely evolutionary perspective, one would expect that a world in which people need be less and less physically involved with their surroundings in order to survive would not be one which would necessarily select for “high-T” individuals. Hardly any men today hunt for their means of sustenance, and much modern labor has become desk work requiring little in the way of muscle mass.
Secretary Hegseth’s many photo shoots of himself lifting weights or working out with troops suggest that his own view of the value of the importance of testosterone may be similar to that of “gym bros” or bodybuilders, who have long sought to increase their body mass and physical strength through the use of supplements ranging from protein powders to steroids such as testosterone, and other means as well. Subscribing apparently to the maxim “All’s fair in love and war,” Hegseth may even regard the doping controversies surrounding the ingestion of exogenously sourced testosterone by athletes as an argument in favor of providing it to troops. He has officially stated that “Our goal, as you know, is to never enter a fair fight.”
Testosterone, like its female hormone counterpart, estrogen, primarily controls the development of secondary sexual characteristics. As human beings grow older, and the optimum conditions for producing offspring no longer obtain, their relevant hormone levels naturally wane. That female soldiers will be included in the military’s new testing regimen strikes one as curious, given that women have always had much, much lower levels of testosterone than men. Female soldiers are soldiers, but they do not possess Y chromosomes, and their bodies do not naturally produce very much testosterone at all. This is one of the reasons why outspoken critics have decried, on grounds of unfairness, the inclusion of biological males in female sports. Were rationality to prevail, this dispute would be definitively settled by the very existence of the WADA’s prohibitions on doping, given the marked difference in testosterone levels between biological males and females throughout the years of their development into adults, and upon full maturation as well.
Skeptics about the military’s testosterone initiative, including a federal judge, have been pointing out how odd the proposed policy is on its face, and all the more coming from a Pentagon chief who upon assuming his office began immediately to purge the military of one class of persons well known for availing themselves of hormone therapy. Transwomen (who are biological males) and transmen (who are biological females) succeed in changing the outward appearance of their gender in part through ingesting large amounts of the primary sex hormone which what they regard as their confused body is said to be lacking. Transwomen and transmen tend also to dress the part which they wish to play, but that is merely cosmetic. Irreversible transformative measures such as genital surgery to remove the penis, undergo mastectomy, or create a pseudovagina or prosthetic penis, are sometimes also undertaken by individuals who have become convinced that they were born in the wrong body.
If what makes a female feminine is in part the predominance of estrogen over testosterone in her body, and if what makes a male masculine is the predominance of testosterone over estrogen, then reversing the concentrations of those two hormones will naturally have various secondary sexual effects on the body. Women who ingest large amounts of testosterone can increase their body mass, including musculature, and they may also grow facial hair, develop rougher skin, and overall begin to look more like a man than they did before. Men who ingest large amounts of estrogen can grow fatty breast tissue, develop softer skin, and begin to appear less manly and more feminine in other ways as well.
Secretary Hegseth famously announced early on in his tenure that the days of the “woke” military were over. No more DEI (Diversity, Equity, Inclusion) policies and, as he most colorfull
