Making “military science” an oxymoron…
The Secretary of the He-man Woman Hater’s Club announced yesterday that all soldiers age 30 and older must now submit to annual testosterone training:
[Defense Secretary Pete] Hegseth said the screening could lead to troops being offered testosterone replacement therapy aimed at “ensuring you have the right testosterone levels to operate at your absolute best.”
“Because it’s well-established science that as we age, testosterone levels often naturally drop,” he said in a video message.
The screening would become part of annual testing for troops aged 30 and above, and troops could voluntarily decide whether to accept any recommended hormone replacement treatment if they were diagnosed with low testosterone levels. Troops below the age of 30 could request to be tested [“Hegseth Announces Testosterone Screening for US Troops,” Thomson Reuters via KELO Radio, 2026.07.15].
Hegseth says maintaining high testosterone levels is about brains, not just balls:
“As we know, the modern battlefield is brutal and unrelenting,” he said. “It requires and demands maximum psychological and mental readiness. And by addressing these health markers early, we’re keeping you on the leading edge of lethality and giving you the same level of support that you give this nation — the absolute best” [Eve Sampson, “Forged by the T: Pentagon Launches Testosterone Screening Program for Troops,” Military Times, 2026.07.15].
Not well established by science is whether artificially boosting testosterone levels is a good idea:
Health experts questioned Hegseth’s new initiative.
“I used to do testosterone research — testing for T levels in troops doesn’t make sense without a medical reason,” public health scientist and epidemiologist Eric Feigl-Ding said in a post on X reacting to Hegseth’s announcement. “T level is not associated with higher cognitive function. T can drop because of stress or exhaustion — but TRT doesn’t always improve physical performance.”
The result of TRT is “mixed at best,” Feigl-Ding added [Chris Walker, “Hegseth Announces Testosterone Testing as Part of Push for ‘Lethal’ Military,” Truthout, 2026.07.15].
Science has established that taking testosterone supplements will shrink testicles and cause infertility:
Right, so if you are taking a testosterone supplement, your body actually shuts down its own testosterone production. There’s this neat little feedback loop that says, “Oh, if the testosterone’s high in the blood, we’re going to just kind of ramp it down.” And a side effect of that is, actually, because testosterone is involved in sperm production, your body will also stop producing sperm. So as more younger men turn to TRT, we are seeing that men who are interested in still having children are finding they’re losing their fertility. Oftentimes men are told, “Oh, you’ll recover it once you stop.” But that can actually be slow and complicated, so urologists in the field often see men who aren’t understanding why they’re not, you know, able to get their partner pregnant, and they may have tried for quite some time.
…Doctors will prescribe some medications that can help even out your levels and help encourage your body to start producing its own sperm again. That can take some time; it can be a little expensive. Urologists can help you, though. But they do say that they are concerned that men have a, often, too rosy picture of what that’s gonna look like. It can take up to two years to recover full fertility, there’s kind of an unknown as to whether sperm quality will be quite as high as it was beforehand. And as anyone who’s trying to have kids knows, two years can be quite a while when you’re dealing with fertility problems [Stephanie Pappas, interview with Rachel Feltman, “Testosterone Therapy Is Booming. But Is It Actually Safe?” Scientific American: Science Quickly, 2025.06.20].
Research has dismissed earlier concerns that testosterone replacement therapy might increase the risk of prostate cancer, strokes, and heart failure, but there are still lots of question marks about whether TRT is worth other risks:
Finally, although the TRAVERSE trial suggests that men trying TRT aren’t putting themselves at undue risk of prostate cancer or heart problems, there was a small but unexplained rise in bone fractures in men on the treatment. In addition, there are no studies looking at the impacts of TRT over several decades—and a man starting TRT in his 30s may well be committing to 40 or 50 years of treatment if he doesn’t want to go through the hormonal crash of quitting.
One concern from studies of heavy users of anabolic steroids is that natural testosterone production might not fully recover after long-term use, says Harrison Pope, a Harvard Medical School psychiatrist who has studied anabolic steroid use. A 2023 study in the Journal of Clinical Endocrinology and Metabolism looked at men who had used anabolic steroids illicitly. These people reported a lesser quality of life two years after quitting compared with men who had never used them. In the body, these steroid drugs have effects that are similar to testosterone supplements, so the study results raise worries about TRT.
“If you had interviewed me 20 years ago, I would have assured you that if you’d been taking testosterone for a long time, if you stop, the system will rebound and you will go back to normal,” Pope says. “In some cases, I would have been dead wrong” [Stephanie Pappas, “The Truth About Testosterone,” Scientific American, 2025.06.17].
Whatever benefits testosterone replacement may have, women who’ve served in the military and now serve in Congress see Hegseth’s failure to take a consistent and comprehensive look at the science of hormone replacement:
Sen. Tammy Duckworth, an Illinois Democrat and Iraq War veteran, said the announcement sounded “like gender-affirming care to me,” referencing Hegseth’s stance against transgender troops.
Rep. Chrissy Houlahan, a Pennsylvania Democrat and Air Force veteran, said it “proves that Secretary Hegseth takes direction from the far corners of the manosphere.”
Both lawmakers called on Hegseth to make hormone testing available for both men and women.
“Let’s extend hormone screenings for all of our brave servicemembers to help us identify fertility issues early — since studies show that both women and men in our military disproportionately face higher rates of infertility than the general population,” Duckworth, who is on the Senate Armed Services Committee, said in a statement.
Hegseth has previously said he does not believe women should hold combat roles and that those positions should be based on the “highest male standard.” He has blocked some military promotions for women or fired female leaders since becoming Pentagon leader [Konstantin Toropin and Matthew Perrone, “Hegseth Announces New Policy to Test Troops for Low Testosterone,” AP, 2026.07.15].
But this same Secretary of Defense told soldiers in April they didn’t have to take flu shots, only to have to reverse that boneheaded policy after a major flu outbreak at the Air Force boot camp in Texas. Hegseth is reading Reddit, not science, to inform the policies he puts in place for America’s armed forces.