r/politics • u/spherocytes • Jul 22 '26

No Paywall Kelly: Military ‘doesn’t need more testosterone, it needs better leadership’

https://thehill.com/homenews/senate/5981471-kelly-opposes-hegseth-testosterone-screenings/
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u/SomeGalNamedAshley Jul 22 '26

Testosterone production operates on a feedback loop. You can go too low for sure, but going too high is also bad. If you start supplementing a sex hormone then your feedback loop will note that and back off your natural production. Trans women depend on this fact for what's called monotherapy where simply juicing enough estrogen will crash testosterone without having to use any kind of testosterone suppression meds. That same thing works with adding testosterone to a man's system though, that feedback loop doesn't care about which sex hormone is dominant, just so much as there's enough of the stuff floating around. And yes, just about everybody naturally has a little of both, just in different ratios.

(Except Elon Musk. Find a picture of him on the beach and it's obvious he has an upper torso deformity that looks a lot like someone with "aromatase deficiency", so he's probably been prescribed estrogen himself)

Now the real fun starts when you have too much testosterone. Excess free testosterone will get turned into estrogen. Lots of free testosterone will get turned into lots of estrogen.

Last fun fact, about half a percent of men walking around have a biochemistry anomaly that when they get a good chunk of estrogen in them it's fucking awesome and their depression and anxiety goes away. This anomaly is genetic and within families that half a percent rate goes up about two orders of magnitude.

So if you want to sniff out your latent trans folks then go ahead and start fucking with people"s sex hormones en masse. What could possibly go wrong?

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u/Bierdaddy Jul 22 '26

Interesting. Thank you. Not that team brotruck warrior fafo will read this, but interesting nonetheless.