Are you man enough? Republicans bet on ‘virile, brawny’ testosterone to juice the midterms

Two years after Donald Trump decisively won the vote of the American man, polls say male voters are increasingly disillusioned with an administration that has waged wars and enriched itself.

Ahead of the midterms, Trump’s strategy seems to be to find a way to get that masculine animus back, so the male populace will vote not with their heads or their hearts, but with their hogs. At least, that’s one way of understanding why, this summer, Trump’s secretaries of health and defense announced plans that could increase levels of testosterone, or simply “T”, in the civilian and military population.

In June, health secretary Robert F Kennedy Jr announced the FDA was removing a limitation on testosterone replacement therapy (TRT) which stated that its safety and effectiveness “have not been established”. This was part of a suite of FDA changes that could make it much easier for men to be prescribed testosterone, potentially accelerating a boom in the number of men on TRT; already nearly 12m prescriptions were dispensed in 2025, from fewer than 1m in 2000.

A few weeks later defense secretary Pete Hegseth announced he was making testosterone screening compulsory for military service members over the age of 30, and offering voluntary screening for all members – part of an effort to forge what he calls a “High-T department of war”. Service members who are deemed to have low T will be offered state-sponsored replacement therapy.

Trump acolytes don’t only want to give men more testosterone, they are keen to castigate those that they think don’t have enough of it. Ken Paxton, campaigning for a Texas senate seat that may decide the balance of power in Washington, has run ads casting his Democratic challenger James Talarico as “too low-T for Texas”. Trump’s most loyal adviser, Stephen Miller, called Talarico, a cisgendered heterosexual man, the “first transgender Senate candidate”.

Testosterone is a hormone that is found everywhere in the bodies of men and women – blood, saliva, organs, the brain. It plays an important role in everything from ovulation to bone density, but often a low amount of the hormone is all that is needed for normal function. It is just one of many hormones churning through the human endocrine system. Yet in 2026, its role feels outsized.

Republicans across the country are trying to criminalize providing testosterone for trans youth, describing it as “mutilation”, at the same time women are clamoring to revitalize their sex lives with off-brand testosterone – something Kennedy’s FDA wants to make easier. Republican congresswoman Anna Paulina Luna celebrated high T levels when she said anyone who “produces testosterone” would love the UFC fight on the White House lawn. Yet in Washington state, Republicans are pushing a ballot measure to test every school-age girl who plays sports to check their testosterone levels aren’t too high. Meanwhile, the advent of cheap home blood and saliva testing kits has put a number on men’s perceived masculinity, giving them a new sense of comparative deficiency.

How has the cultural story around T become so confused?

It’s true that testosterone meaningfully changes the appearance and libido of the people who take it. Men with clinical testosterone deficiencies experience real benefits in muscle growth and sexual function when testosterone levels are restored. But Maga world’s high-T politics ascribes more to testosterone – for it to be an elixir of masculinity that bestows aggression, athleticism, virility and risk-taking. This idea rests on a century of flawed science.

“I am seeing a lot of ‘sciencewashing’ of regressive beliefs,” said Jonathan Jarry, a science communicator working at McGill University’s office for science and society who co-hosts the award-winning medical podcast The Body of Evidence. “Everything has been politicized in the United States. Vaccines are liberal and TRT is Maga. The needle is apolitical but the content of the syringe is decided by who you vote for.”

No one is more excited to conflate electability, military capability and T than Pete Hegseth.

The testosterone dogwhistle

As the war in Iran threatens to derail Republicans’ midterms chances, it seems Hegseth has been tasked with rebranding the strategic failure as a show of machismo and relentless bloodlust. As head of the renamed “Department of War” (a name change that Hegseth has said reflects a shift in the mission from “defense” to “lethality, lethality, lethality”), he has promised to “untie the hands of our warfighters to intimidate, demoralize, hunt and kill”.

Yet, for the military to be a vehicle of pure violence, Hegseth believes it must demoralize not just enemies but also female service members. Since becoming secretary, Hegseth’s Pentagon has overseen a sharp decline in the promotion of high-ranking women, with such appointments at a 20-year low. Hegseth summed up his own views on gender in the military in his 2024 book, The War on Warriors: “Dads push us to take risks, moms put the training wheels on our bikes. We need moms. But not in the military, especially in combat units.”

On a recent campaign stop in Austin, he melded his messages on gender and violence, saying: “We’re reminding our warriors that their sole purpose is to be the most lethal fighting force on the planet. Full stop. We’re not here to do social engineering, or social justice, or gender-bending, or DEI, or dudes and dresses.”

Hegseth’s desire for a violent male-first military might appeal to his segment of the Maga base, but it alienates many veterans and active-duty personnel, including women and LGBTQ+ members. In his announcement video, he framed the mandatory testosterone screening policy as a health measure aimed at “restoring and optimizing your natural capabilities, protecting your longevity, and ensuring you have the biological foundation required to sustain the fight”. But on the US’s most popular cable news show, The Five, host Jesse Watters heard the dogwhistle and gleefully predicted what would happen when elite soldiers started juicing with T: “Women on base, you better be careful,” he grinned. “Port calls, women in Asia, you better be careful. Because these guys are going to be wild animals and you better watch out.”

Testosterone, wielded as Hegseth does, brings a sense of the sciencey to a rhetoric otherwise rooted in sexism. This is what the anthropologists of science Rebecca Jordan-Young and Katrina Karkazis refer to as “T-talk” in their 2019 book, Testosterone: An Unauthorised Biography. T-talk, they say, “weaves folklore into science, as scientific claims about T seemingly validate cultural beliefs about the structure of masculinity and the ‘natural’ relationship between women and men”.

This is common practice on the right. Charlie Kirk used to argue on his podcast that men with lower T levels are inherently subservient, quipping: “The lower your testosterone is, the more likely you are to be controlled to be [like] yes, I’ll take the ninth [Covid] booster shot. Please boost me harder, daddy government.” Elon Musk once reposted a 4chan image on X claiming that women and “low-T men” lack the capacity for independent thought, leaving only “high-T alpha” males to process information freely. None of this has much to do with how testosterone actually works.

There’s irony too that Hegseth has described near-identical interventions in testosterone levels as “incompatible with active duty”, but only when they are for trans service members. The military has paused all gender-affirming care for military personnel, including TRT, a policy which last month Hegseth summed up on the campaign route using a transphobic slur: “at the Department of War, we do training – not trannies”.

US district judge Ana Reyes, who is adjudicating a lawsuit against Trump’s ban on transgender troops, has highlighted the T-talk hypocrisy, calling on the Trump administration to address “the similarities and differences in administering TRT, both medically and logistically” to trans versus cis servicemen.

There are further hypocrisies. While Hegseth initially announced that his testosterone testing would apply to all service members, new Pentagon guidance now says only men will be tested, with no parallel program of hormone replacement therapy for female service members currently announced – despite VA studies showing that military women with PTSD have double the risk of early menopause than the civilian population.

In their book, Young and Karkazis describe how even the mention of testosterone “truthiness” to arguments that have no factual basis. This misunderstanding isn’t a modern invention but a century-old obsession with tying social hierarchy to bodily chemistry. It begins with the binary classification of testosterone and estrogen as strictly “male” and “female” sex hormones, a rigid division that dates back to the hormone’s discovery in the late 19th century by the French American physiologist Charles Édouard Brown-Sequard. Brown-Sequard, in a bid to feel less weak and old, conducted a series of wild experiments where he injected himself with testicular extracts from dogs and guinea pigs. He considered the experiments a huge success – his forearm was stronger, as was his “jet of urine”.

Despite being quickly debunked as non-scientific and unrepeatable, the idea of implanting testes – from younger men to older men, from boars and rams – took off. Some contemporaneous scientists posited such tests could counter senility or “cure” homosexuality. There was a potent eugenic strain in this early thinking about testosterone, too. In 1921 Louis Berman, a physician at Columbia University, claimed that “we are justified in putting down the white man’s predominance on the planet to a greater all-around concentration in his blood of the omnipotent hormones”.

By the 1930s, scientists were able to measure T levels and administer it to patients who had deficiencies. Yet in the decades that followed, science around testosterone barely became more rigorous, argue Young and Karkazis. Many researchers remained fixed on the idea that one hormone could be the source of all masculinity. They tended to be less interested in the essential role that testosterone plays in fertility and heart function in men and women, and ovulation in women. Instead they focused on its role in courtship, dominance, aggression and sex drive, exclusively in men.

This was particularly noticeable in moments when explanation was demanded for the violent behavior of men. When American soldiers in the Vietnam war were accused of horrific murders, rapes and mutilation, army psychiatrists began positing that high levels of male sex hormones could lead to uncontrollable aggression (foreshadowing, perhaps, Hegseth’s demands for more T in the army so that soldiers will be more “lethal”). This thinking was repeated in a 2013 House armed services committee hearing on rape and sexual assault in the military, where Republican senator Saxby Chambliss remarked: “Gee whiz, the hormone level created by nature sets in place the possibility for these types of things to occur.”

As Young and Karkazis examined some of the most prominent studies into testosterone over the past century, they realized that the hormone does not function in this way, whispering in the ear of men to act in ways they otherwise wouldn’t. In fact they found little meaningful association between testosterone and claims of widespread aggression, risk-taking or athletic prowess – whether because scientists measured testosterone inconsistently (via saliva, plasma or blood) or because the research focused on T levels rather than the complex way T interacts with other molecules in the body.

Much of the scientific belief in the association between testosterone and violence – the link Hegseth is most interested in – comes from a series of prison experiments done by Maj Leo Kreuz and Dr Robert Rose in the early 1970s which showed that more aggressive prisoners (measured by prison fights, threats made, property destroyed) had higher testosterone levels.

Yet Young and Karkazis found the study originally showed no effect at all – testosterone was a useless predictor of how violent a prisoner was. Kreuz and Rose, not wanting their experiments to be a failure, added in other data such as how violent a prisoner’s past offenses were, and still found no connection. It was only when they added a separate category for a prisoners’ adolescent offenses, and included attempted escape from prison as a “violent” act, that they found the connection they were looking for.

This was poor science, data manipulated multiple times until it could prove a hypothesis. But when it was cited in a Washington Post piece from 1994, the headline read “The American Way of Murder”, and said “young men, their bodies surging with testosterone, are far more violent than their elders”.

Some military doctors believe TRT can help veterans and active service members who are struggling with traumatic brain injuries and PTSD. Dr Ryan Ziegler, a special operatives specialist, told the Guardian he thinks Hegseth’s mandate is “a great first step” in gathering data about the association between testosterone levels and a variety of military medical issues.

But Hegseth’s idea that testosterone will put the military “on the leading edge of lethality” is a cultural story, not a scientific fact. “We are so far from the science, it’s scary,” said Jarry, the science communicator from McGill.

This is also true of a favored story Republicans like to tell about T, based on a piece of research done by a PhD student in 2011 that found a “red shift” among loosely Democratic swing voters, who were 45% more likely to have warm feelings for Republican candidates after they took testosterone than a control group who took a placebo.

This account has been repeated ad nauseum on rightwing podcasts to say that Republicans have higher T than Democrats. But in fact the research, which looked at 136 college-age men, found that strongly identified Democrat and Republican men showed near-identical testosterone levels. The small red shift in weakly affiliated Democrats came one day after a single dose of testosterone. The experiment has never been successfully repeated with larger groups over a longer period of time, nor has it ever been shown to actually change voting behavior. But it still sounds good in the story of T.

The ‘real risks’ of TRT

Perhaps it’s a sign of how successful T-talk has been in this election that Democrats are starting to glom on to ideas about masculinity. Though he didn’t specifically mention testosterone, Michigan Senate candidate Abdul El-Sayed accused Republican rival Mike Rogers of “beta energy” as they argued over their high school football credentials. Hasan Piker, the 35-year-old leftwing streamer, told Rolling Stone he works out because he’s worried about being at the age when “testosterone levels start declining”.

California’s governor, Gavin Newsom, has reveled in the language of toxic masculinity, posting about his rivals being “fascists cucks” and comparing his looks to American Psycho’s Patrick Bateman. In August, Newsom signed a bill that would automatically bring California’s classification of testosterone into line with any future federal move to loosen restrictions on the drug. This comes at the same time as Newsom, an inconsistent advocate for trans rights, vetoed a bill that would have required insurers to cover 12 months of hormone therapy, such as TRT, to transgender patients.

Not everything is T-talk. There is science that supports some of the FDA’s proposed changes to warnings about TRT. Two of the most serious fears about the treatment – that it might increase prostate cancer or have increased cardiovascular risk – seem to be rarer than previously reported according to a leading Traverse study commissioned by the FDA under Joe Biden, which found no increased risk compared with a placebo group among older men suffering from hypogonadism.

Dr Shalender Bhasin from Harvard medical school is one of the US’s leading practitioners of TRT. He co-authored the Endocrine Society’s clinical practice guidelines on testosterone, which recommend only offering TRT to men with serious symptoms and two blood test results confirming low T levels. Researchers found that just 12% of men getting a prescription in 2026 met that criteria. And in 2022 a study published in Jama Internal Medicine found that six out of seven telehealth providers offered TRT to a secret-shopper patient, even when their testosterone levels were shown to be in a healthy range.

Bhasin said there are some “real risks” for people with healthy levels of testosterone to go on TRT. “It’ll suppress their bodily testosterone production, suppress their testicular function and induce infertility,” he said. “And getting off is not that easy: it can take months and when people stop testosterone, their levels plummet.”

He is keen to distinguish this group from real hypogonadism (low-T) sufferers, “which is a bona fide condition that can be diagnosed and treated”. But even in those contexts, the treatment isn’t quite the fix-all that’s portrayed by Kennedy and others. A recent large NIH study that gave nearly 800 older men the hormone found it improved erectile dysfunction and libido, but had minimal effect on mood and no improvement on measures like memory, fatigue or overall wellbeing.

Despite all of this, the testosterone industry gets ready to take advantage of Kennedy’s policies. Telemedicine pharmacies Hims & Hers saw their stock price soar on the expectation that they’ll be able to offer TRT starting this year.

“This regime has divorced itself from evidence-based decision making,” said Jarry. “These announcements have nothing to do with science and everything to do with regressive ideas of what masculinity is: virile, brawny, and domineering.”

An administration genuinely invested in men’s health might start by looking elsewhere, suggests Bhasin, at the unglamorous statistics of young male mortality that have worsened over the last two decades.

But that would imply this was all about health, rather than what testosterone might be able to do for Trump’s flaccid poll numbers.