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On July 15, 2026, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth announced in a video titled “The High-T Department of War” a plan to check the testosterone levels of United States service members, offering hormone therapy treatment to anyone whose levels are low. The plan, he claimed, is twofold.
“Our most decisive tactical advantage will always be the individual warfighter,” Hegseth said in the video. “Which is why we must always look for ways to optimize your performance, your resilience, and your long term health.”
This optimization for health, he said, will keep American soldiers “on the leading edge of lethality.” Last week, new guidelines were published and then immediately removed.
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.
Amethysta Herrick, PhD, who has a background in genetics and chemistry and both writes and podcasts about the origins of gender identity, points to decades of research that complicates and contradicts this narrative, including a 2016 experiment in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences in which men injected with testosterone played an economic bargaining game. The men given the hormone punished unfair offers more readily—but they were also more generous when treated fairly, behaving in whatever way raised their standing in the moment rather than lashing out indiscriminately. The researchers concluded their findings “flatly contradict a simple link between testosterone and male aggression.”
As a genderqueer transmasculine person who has been taking topical testosterone for six years, with my levels in the “healthy range” for men, I’m exceedingly familiar with the social misunderstandings around the hormone. In fact, for many transmasculine people, cultural myths about testosterone colored how we approached our transitions..
Dylan Thomas Cotter, a publicist and activist in California who has been on testosterone for more than a decade, tells me that, for him, the hormone did the opposite of what the mythology predicts. Before he started, he was mired in a depression fueled by dysphoria. Testosterone, he says, “leveled out” his temperament. It relieved his depression and “centered [his] mind, body, and soul.”
Of course, Cotter went into his transition with thorough research-backed knowledge from medical professionals and fellow trans men, which may have had an impact on how testosterone affected him. In a 2010 study led by the neuroscientist Christoph Eisenegger, women given testosterone before a bargaining game actually made fairer, more generous offers. On the other hand, those who received a placebo but believed themselves to have received testosterone acted more aggressively in their bargaining. It seems that if the Secretary of War wants aggression, he might be better off giving service members saline shots labeled T.
For many of the transmasculine people I’ve spoken to, for this article and otherwise, it seems that the myth of testosterone aggression has often had a greater impact on them than any actual hormone-caused anger. Chris Rehs-Dupin, a trans man in Ohio who has been on testosterone for a decade, says his only reference point going into his medical transition came from a single television character, Max on The L Word in the late 2000s. “There was so much narrative about aggression and sex drive and the changing of someone’s personality,” Rehs-Dupin tells me. “I was afraid that was gonna happen [to me].”
Jordan Tate, a nonbinary transmasculine person in California who has been on testosterone for four years, had similar fears. “I have a lot of really personal feelings about the myth of T aggression, and it definitely impacted my decision-making around taking testosterone,” they tell me via email. They explained their concerns stemmed from “a fear of repeating generational patterns.”
Tate noted that their father often rewarded them for communicating through anger, creating patterns of behavior they knew they would have to address with clarity and self-awareness when they transitioned. “I am quicker to get frustrated, [but] I don’t think I’ve exploded on anyone since I started taking testosterone,” they say. “Testosterone doesn’t make you incapable of shutting up.”
All of the transmasculine people I spoke with for this story had a similar experience, a sense that as testosterone masculinized their bodies, they somehow gained even more responsibility for how they expressed anger to others. “There’s a difference,” Rehs-Dupin tells me, “between saying this hormone changed an emotion in my body and this hormone caused my behaviors to be different.” His anger and anxiety got bigger, he says, but what he did with them stayed his choice: “I refused to become a man that I didn’t want to be.”
Cotter agreed: “Aggression is not based on hormones. It’s absolutely based on agendas and personalities.”