Trans people cannot join the U.S. military under an executive introduced by President Donald Trump last year. Existing trans services members can only continue thanks to a U.S. court of appeals ruling last month.
But as of this week, cis men in the forces are being encouraged to take testosterone replacement therapy in order to reach “maximum psychological and mental readiness.”
Men in the military will now be screened regularly for their testosterone levels and be encouraged to access testosterone replacement therapy as part of an initiative Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth called “The High-T Department of War” on social media.
In a video shared to social media Wednesday, Hegseth said the initiative is about ensuring that military members have the “right testosterone levels to operate at [their] absolute best.”
“As we know, the modern battlefield is brutal and unrelenting. It requires and demands maximum psychological and mental readiness,” Hegseth said.
There’s a lot to unpack here. Aside from the fact that most of these service members are unlikely to ever actually see a “modern battlefield,” this is all a remarkable bit of hypocrisy from an administration that has worked tirelessly to stamp out trans people’s basic rights, particularly to healthcare, at every turn. Even just today, news broke that Trump’s Department of Justice backed a private insurance company that a court found discriminated against trans patients.
Yet here we are, with Hegseth and the Trump administration not simply just giving men access to the testosterone they are stripping away from trans people across the country but encouraging it as a means to “maximum lethality.”
The right’s obsession with testosterone and masculinity is not new, but it has certainly escalated in the second Trump administration. Secretary of Health and Human Services Robert F. Kennedy Jr. boasted about his own personal use of the drug while insisting he’s not on anabolic steroids (though, to be clear, testosterone, while made naturally in the body, is technically an anabolic steroid). Kennedy also recently bragged about Trump’s own apparent levels, claiming that former TV quack Mehmet Oz had reviewed the president’s medical records and found that Trump had “the highest testosterone levels that he’s ever seen for an individual over 70.”
Until recently, the FDA has largely recommended that supplemental testosterone should only be prescribed for men with clear medical problems affecting testosterone production. However, the agency pivoted in April, announcing that it would broaden the criteria to include any men with low testosterone levels. Of note, a report from the American Urological Association recently found that upward of a third of men who are placed on testosterone therapy do not meet the criteria to be diagnosed as testosterone deficient.
In the video announcing the new policy, Hegseth assured service members that testosterone supplementation is not required for them—but he certainly gives the suggestion of encouraging it with all of that talk about “maximum psychological readiness.” And it’s all in service of this conservative push for masculinity—or more specifically, perceived masculinity—as something powerful and ideal in the fight against wokeness.
As has been said many times before, medical intervention like testosterone replacement therapy for cis men really is its own form of gender-affirming care—just in the way that a cis woman might get a breast enhancement or lip filler to feel better in her body. From facial hair to high heels, crash diets to those “mass gainer” supplements, since time immemorial, humans have tweaked and prodded our flesh prisons to feel a little more livable and aligned with how we want our presentation of gender to be perceived.
But this obsession with affirming masculinity for men like Hegseth, Trump and RFK Jr. only extends to cis men. Trans people scare men like Hegseth and Trump, because we have dared to break free from expectations and build our genders ourselves. We represent a sort of self-determination that, if extended to other aspects of life, directly threatens their entire political project. If you can change your gender, why can’t you change your social class? Then we must watch these men respond by utilizing many of the same tools to affirm their own genders—in this case, a little vial of testosterone cypionate—that we trans people do.
To be fair, the idea that cis people also access gender-affirming care has become cliché at this point within LGBTQ2S+ communities. Many trans folks rightfully bristle at it as a rhetorical device, because our access to life-saving healthcare shouldn’t have to be filtered through a cis lens in order to be our basic right. But cis men in the military will now be able to opt in to free gender-affirming care, and will be encouraged to access it. That is what is happening here, and we should describe it as such if only so we put into stark contrast how cruel it is when this administration neglects to offer the bare minimum to anyone else.
Hormones are fine if they are given to a cis man “warrior” in the aid of Hegseth’s quest for “maximum lethality.” But god forbid trans people access them to save their lives—or cis and intersex women be allowed to compete at the Olympics with their naturally occurring levels, for that matter. That would be too woke. That would be unnatural.
But juicing to stay on the “leading edge of lethality,” as Hegseth says? That’s gender they can get behind.
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