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Comment by toomchsauce | Hacker News Reader

Summary: Testosterone doesn’t have well-understood effects because they are complex and affect individuals differently. It’s more like a placebo and symbol of artificial expectations society has about what is “masculine”. The demand for T is a sign that society is sick.

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Something I think should pointed out in the article is that the author tries to understand testosterone (I don't know why, since it's effects through maturation are actually quite a bit studied, there are medical textbooks on it) through it's effects on trans people and/or people abusing it or using it for rejuventaion.

If so, the picture is far more complicated.

This actually makes about as much sense as trying to understand Fourier transform based on how stupid instagramming is.

Testosterone levels in the West have declined by about a factor of two over the past few decades (https://academic.oup.com/jcem/article/92/1/196/2598434). Maybe society is indeed sick.

Or maybe it was always sick and is getting better? There’s no war in Europe. No war in the Western Hemisphere. Violent crime in the US is at a multi-decade low. There has been a human in space for the entirety of the 21st century. Most of the world carries a supercomputer with instant access to the sum total of human knowledge in their pocket.

We live in an age of marvels.

If society is indeed sick then the cure probably isn’t worth it.

It'd be a nice theory but we actually know that as men get their testosterone levels lower they get to be at higher and higher risk of certain diseases. For example, testosterone is often cited as carrying risk of CVD and for many years we were confused why men with below low cutoff testosterone are at even higher risk of CVD than men just above high cutoff. As it turns out, estrogen, another sex hormone, pretty important for CV health is made through aromatisation from testosterone in the walls of blood vessels. Thus, surprisingly being low on testosterone actually increases risk of CVD through estrogen insufficiency. Yes, human endocrine system is complicated like that, and no, testosterone is not a fashion or something we can improve because we're smarter. We're studying AAS for about 70 years now and we still know pretty little. Testosterone and estrogen are "kinda" understood as they're mainly endocrine hormones. As for those secreted in para- and autocrine fashion (e.g. DHT) we still know not enough.

I mean, who probably has more testosterone: the guy sitting at a desk typing for 8 hours a day, or the guy who just impaled an enemy with a spear and savagely roars

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