893: Testosterone

This American Life

This American Life revisits a 2002 episode exploring testosterone’s impact on personality, behavior, and identity through personal stories, including a workplace test experiment and transgender experiences. The podcast r

Key takeaways

• Testosterone significantly alters libido, mood, and cognition.

Transcript preview

Speaker 4 (0:00) I'm WBZ Chicago. It's This American Life. I'm Eric Glass. Okay, so maybe you saw on the news that Defense Secretary Pete Heggseth has ordered everybody in the armed services, over 30 years old, to have their testosterone levels tested. That's men and women both. And then anybody who wants to get special shots to get its testosterone boost, they can get them. The goal here, Higgs says social media post about this was titled, the high-tastosterone, Department of War. and maybe you saw people had all kinds of reactions to this, including lots of people joking about how Hegzeth was suddenly embracing gender-affirming care. I personally had a strong reaction to the idea of testing everybody's testosterone levels in a workplace, which was, I've lived through that. Here, at my job, at this American life, we did that. Back in 2002, we did a show where we talked about testosterone and the personality traits that supposedly go along with higher testosterone. levels, and as part of that show, all of us on staff got our testosterone levels tested to see who had the highest. And then before the results came back, we all sat down and discussed who we thought might have the highest, and then we revealed the results. Anyway, today, as a cautionary tale to the men and women of the armed services about what it's like for an entire workplace to test their testosterone, we are rerunning that old show. Our staff experiment, you'll hear it comes up a little ways into the show. It's Act 2. But the original episode started with one of our producers at the time. Alex Bloomberg, joining me in studio to explain why we took up the subject in the first place back in 2002. Hello, Ira. Alex, yes. Speaker 5 (1:39) What's the reason for this week's show? Well, I've been thinking about that. And for me, the reason for today's program goes back to a book I read when I was 15 called The Women's Room. Maybe people listening will remember the Women's Room. It was a sort of a seminal feminist novel from the 70s. And I first came across the women's room when I was digging through my parents' bookshelves looking for porn. You know, books with naughty parts in them, you know, like Fear of Flying. And so I picked it up and I read it. Because the word women was in the title. In lipstick, probably. Or maybe not. Yes. It's incredibly polemical. Like it describes basically a group of women sort of going from the 50s through the 60s. And they sort of all suffer at the hands of the various men in their lives. And, you know, there's constantly, you know, there's like, you know, women are slowly being driven crazy by their husband's incessant criticism or they're being called ugly after they get mastectomies or they're being stifled by their husband's emotional shallowness. And I noticed you happen to have. Speaker 4 (2:55) brought into the studio with you today a copy of the women's room. Speaker 5 (2:58) Yeah, well, I recently re-read it just to see. For example, I sort of bookmarked a couple of these things. You know, page 198, the narrator comes in and she says, you know, you think I hate men. I guess I do. And then a little bit further down, she says, my feelings about men are the result of my experience. I have little sympathy for them. Like a Jew, just released from DACAW, I watched the handsome young Nazi soldier fall writhing to the ground with a bullet in his stomach. And I look briefly and walk on. I don't even need to shrug. I simply don't care. And then a little bit later, my hatred is learned from experience. That is not prejudice. I wish it were a prejudice. Then, perhaps, I could unlearn it. It's not very much pornographic about that. It's incredibly strange thing to read this book at that age, because at that age, I felt like, you know, there's one other woman who sort of comes into play at this point, and that's, I probably shouldn't say her name, let's just call her, you know, let's just call her Kelly. And she was, like, in eighth grade with me, and she sat two rows away from me. and I remember one time sitting in homeroom with her and seeing like her button-down shirt was open a little bit and I could catch the bare sliver of her little training bra and it was like perhaps the most desire I've ever felt in my life, maybe. I mean it was just it was like all-consuming and I couldn't, I mean I couldn't concentrate for the rest of the day. I remember it to this day. And so at the time I was reading this book, I felt like, oh my God, this is what, this is, like I could see myself becoming the people that she was describing, the men she was describing. And it was really terrifying. My testosterone and how it affects me and how I react to it, I think about on a daily basis all the time. it often feels like there's a there's a there's something in my body giving me instructions that I probably shouldn't follow Speaker 4 (5:25) okay which brings us to today's program a while back Alex tried to convince all of us who work on the radio show that we should do an entire program about testosterone And I have to say none of us were really buying it, especially the women, who found the subject dull, even though, as Alex tried to point out to them, women have testosterone, and it affects them pretty much exactly the same way that it affects man. I think all of us were fearing a kind of men are from Mars, women are from Venus sort of thing, how hormones make men be all aggressive and women all non-aggressive in very stereotyped ways, which all seem kind of reductionistic and dumbheaded. And then Alex started reading and calling people. And one of the people that he called was this guy who wrote an article for GQ magazine about what happened to him when, because of medical reasons, he stopped producing testosterone. And for four months he lived without testosterone before they caught the problem. And the way he described living without testosterone was really incredible. Speaker 6 (6:33) Everything that I identify as being me, my ambition, my interest in things, my sense of humor, the inflection in my voice. I mean, the quality of my speech even changed in the time that I was without a lot of the hormone. So, yes, the introduction of testosterone returned everything. There were things that I find offensive about my own personality. that were disconnected then, you know, and it was nice to be without them. Envy. The desire to judge itself, you know. I approached people with a humility that I had never displayed before. I grew up in a culture like all of us. that divides the soul from the body, and that that is your singleness, that is your uniqueness. And then I go through this experience where I have small amounts of a bodily chemical removed and then reintroduced, and it changes everything I know as myself. And it violates the sanctity of that understanding, you know? And that's humbling. and it's terrifying. Speaker 4 (8:21) I think when it comes to this stuff, most of us do not know what to believe. We're caught between thinking that our hormones and body chemistry can determine so much about our personalities and wanting to believe that they don't. And so today on our program, we bring you four stories exploring that question. How much does testosterone determine? Like one of our show, Infinite Gent. Someone gets pumped up with several times the amount of testosterone that most men have and describe some surprising changes. Act two, contest, osterone. In that act, add Alex's suggestion. All of us on the staff of this radio program decide to find out who has the most and who has the least testosterone with lab tests to see how the levels match with our personality traits. An exercise, I have to say most of us at this point, would not recommend that you try at your workplace. or with your friends. Act 3, life at zero, in which we hear about what it means to lose all your testosterone. Act 4, learning to shut up in that act. A mother asked her teenage son all her questions about what it means to be a boy, which is, of course, exactly the sort of thing. You do not want your mother asking you on tape at 15. Stay with us. It's this American life. Act one. Infinite gent. So what exactly is an injection of testosterone do to you? What kind of changes do you feel? Back in 2002, when we first broadcast today's show, our producer Alex Bloomberg talked with Griffin Hansberry about that experience. Griffin got massive testosterone shots as part of transitioning from female to male, which Griffin did after he got out of college. I should say that because it's been over 20 years since this interview happened, you might notice some ideas about gender and some language that are of its time. Also, a quick heads up to listeners, that the interview acknowledges, the existence of sex and sexual desire. Speaker 10 (10:24) I went to Bryn Maw College, which is a women's college, and chose a women's college because I strongly identified as a woman at the time, as a feminist, and as a dyke. I had my leather biker jacket and my big leather belt and my black t-shirts and my Doc Martin boots, you know, my combat boots. And that felt pretty comfortable for a while. And then my sophomore year in college, I was lying in bed with my girlfriend. I don't know if we were talking or what it was. And it just sort of hit me like a bolt of lightning, as they say. And I just knew that I had to change my... change my body. And so I started doing the research on it. And the only way to do that was to take testosterone. My first injection was a pretty large one of two cc's of 200 milligram strength depot testosterone, which is a fairly high amount. Just to give you a sense of how much that is. the average amount of testosterone in an average male body is between 300 and 1,000 nanograms per deciliter of blood. After that shot, and after an average shot, my testosterone levels go up to over 2,000 nanograms per deciliter, so that I have the testosterone of two high testosterone men in my body at once. You have the testosterone of two linebackers. Exactly. Yeah. Exactly. That's a lot. It's a lot of tea. And what's amazing about it is how instantaneous it is, that it happens within a few days, really. The world just, you know, changes. Speaker 5 (12:18) What were some of the changes that you didn't expect? Speaker 10 (12:22) The most overwhelming feeling is the incredible increase in libido and change in the way that I perceived women and the way I thought about sex. before testosterone I would be riding the subway which is the traditional hotbed of lust in the city and I would see a woman on the subway and I would think she's attractive I'd like to meet her what's that book she's reading I could talk to her this is what I would say there would be a narrative there would be this stream of language it would be very verbal after testosterone there was no narrative There was no language whatsoever. It was just I would see a woman who was attractive or not attractive. She might have an attractive quality, you know, nice ankles or something, and the rest of her would be fairly unappealing to me. But that was enough to basically just flood my mind with aggressive pornographic images, just one after another. It was like being in a pornographic movie house, you know, in my mind. And I couldn't turn it off. I mean, I could not turn it off. everything I looked at, everything I touched turned to sex. I was an editorial assistant, and I would be standing at the Xerox machine, and this big, shuddering, warm, inanimate object would just drive me crazy. It was very, very erotic to me. Speaker 5 (13:49) The Xerox machine. Speaker 10 (13:50) The Xerox machine, you know, or a car. I remember walking up Fifth Avenue one day, and this red convertible went by. It was a Mustang, and I remember just getting this jolt in my pants, It's a very physical, visceral, sexual reaction to seeing a red convertible. Speaker 5 (14:08) What did you do with that? I mean, what did you think? Speaker 10 (14:11) Well, I felt like a monster a lot of the time. And it made me understand men. It made me understand adolescent boys a lot. You know, suddenly, you know, hair is sprouting, and I'm turning into this beast. And I would kind of, I would really kind of berate myself for it. I remember walking up Fifth Avenue and there was a woman walking in front of me and she was wearing this little skirt and this little top and I was looking at her ass and I kept saying myself don't look at it, don't look at it, and I kept looking at it and I walked past her and this voice in my head kept saying turn around to look at her breasts, turn around, turn around, turn around. And my feminist female background kept saying you know don't you dare you pig, don't turn around. and you know I I fought myself for a whole block and then I I turned around and checked her out and before it was cool I when I would do a poetry reading I would get up and I would read these poems about you know women on the street and I was a butch dyke and that was very very cutting edge and that was very sexy and raw and now I'm just a jerk you know so I do feel like I've lost this edge, you know, this nice sort of avant-garde kind of. And I've gotten into a lot of arguments with women friends, co-workers who did not know about my past as a female. You know, I call myself a post-feminist, and I had a woman say, you're not a post-feminist, you're a misogynist. And I