Opinion: Here’s what MAGA gets wrong about testosterone

I was observing a 9-year-old male baboon in the Serengeti of East Africa one day in 1983. Baboon troops are very hierarchical, and this baboon was a familiar type — a young macho bruiser on the way up, intent on toppling the alpha male.

But the alpha male, busy grooming a young female, paid little heed as his challenger threw threatening eyebrow flashes and bared his canines. It was only when the younger baboon got even closer, making guttural vocalizations and slapping the ground, that the alpha stopped and stared at his antagonist for a tension-filled moment. Then the alpha went back to grooming, paying no attention to the histrionics, leaving his challenger to stomp away in frustration.

My research on these baboons has shown that a well-entrenched, confident alpha male gets into very few fights — and typically has lower testosterone levels than a frenetic challenger.

In particularly prickly corners of MAGA world, a low-blow way of dissing the men you despise — often left-leaning guys with a fondness for empathy, equality, even democracy — is to charge them with having low levels of testosterone. Take Elon Musk, who a while back reposted a screed about how “low T” men can’t think freely because they “can’t defend themselves physically.” Or consider the “soy boy” insult popular a few years ago in the same circles, based on the false idea that chemical compounds in soy feminize men’s hormonal makeup.

Beyond my own research, decades of data show that testosterone does not ensure dominance, nor does it act as a straightforward trigger of aggression. This may come as a surprise. Males of endless species, including us, tend to have higher testosterone levels and to be more aggressive than females; aggression and testosterone levels rise in males at puberty; and males of species that compete for territories annually show increased aggression and testosterone levels at those times.

Note, however, that there’s some evidence that the causality could run in the other direction: Engaging in aggressive behaviors may trigger a spike in testosterone.

Then there’s the oldest experiment in endocrinology: castration. When you remove the source of testosterone, levels of aggression plummet across many species. But the levels don’t drop to zero. There’s some evidence that the more social experience the organism had with aggression before castration, the more aggression may persist.

We also know that within normal ranges, testosterone levels are not strongly predictive of aggression. In the amygdala, a brain region central to aggression, testosterone rarely causes peacefully snoozing amygdaloid neurons to abruptly activate circuits of aggressive behavior.

Scientists now believe that testosterone makes people and animals more sensitive to threats to their status — to the point of perceiving threats that are imagined and amplifying the aggressive response to such threats. For instance, a male impala with high testosterone may be more sensitized to challenges to his territory, attacking an interloper when it comes within 100 yards of him, instead of the usual 50.

Back on the playgrounds of my youth, if someone called you a dismissive name and you came back with the rapier-wit response of “I know you are, but what am I?” or “It takes one to know one,” you had dunked on your enemy and perhaps gained in status. If testosterone is as much about status as anything, this suggests an interesting insight. Presumably, these MAGA trolls flinging around “low T” accusations gain status by doing so, raising the scenario that in their subculture, testosterone fuels these primates to snipe inane pseudoscience about their adversaries.

One of my favorite experiments dates to 1977. In the study, groups of monkeys were formed. Soon, as per usual, a dominance hierarchy emerged in each group. At that point, a castrated male was administered large quantities of testosterone. Did such a male, emitting a Musk-like cloud of high testosterone vibes, take on and trounce higher-ranking individuals and rise to the top? Not at all. He just became a total jerk to his subordinates, acting as if their every gesture were a provocation. Testosterone did not create new patterns of aggression. Instead, it drove those males to reaffirm the status that they already held in that group, amplifying the aggressive behaviors they had learned they could get away with.

If you’re a Siamese fighting fish or a baboon, you respond to status challenges by fighting. But humans gain status in extraordinarily varied ways — by winning an election, being proclaimed the finest haiku writer of your generation, snagging that Nobel Prize, having Beyoncé’s phone number. Our primate status battles can be highly symbolic. A tennis or chess tournament, for example, provokes a status-protecting rise in testosterone secretion, even if the loser is not destined to be a corpse picked over by hyenas.

This raises an intriguing possibility: What would testosterone do in a situation where status comes from being kind? In pioneering work at the University of Zurich by Christoph Eisenegger, female volunteers played an economic game in which reputation with other players depended on making fair offers. Remarkably, fairness of game play was enhanced in subjects administered testosterone (without, of course, the subjects knowing whether they were receiving the hormone or a placebo). Other studies showed that testosterone even decreased lying in men in games in which their cheating was undetectable. This is probably because the temptation to lie in these settings constituted a challenge to the high moral status that subjects valued in themselves, with that valuation strengthened by testosterone.

What does this tell us? If society is riddled with aggression, don’t blame testosterone; blame us for being too prone to dole out status for aggression.

Robert Sapolsky is a professor of biology and neurological sciences at Stanford University. This article originally appeared in The New York Times.