Conservatives who worry about children being medically transitioned might spare a thought for what’s happening to teenage boys. Profit-minded manosphere influencers, many with pecuniary relationships with various laboratories and pharmacies, are now pushing testosterone replacement therapy (TRT) on young men who have no clinical need for it. New research says that these influencers are reaching millions on social media, and even a cursory glance at their accounts reveals how they promise today’s young men that the needle will transform them into the alpha males they were meant to be.

The trend has a name: “testosterone maxxing”, or “t-maxxing”. Last year, Dazed documented how young TikTokers including Kade Martinelli, who has been injecting for four years, tell followers that “alpha” and “high-level” men use TRT. James Manteit, 27, boasts to his 75,000 followers that women “can just smell the testosterone in the air”. Doctors report college-aged patients arriving at clinics having already started self-administering testosterone based on this influencer advice.

Part of the underlying premise of all this pharmaceutical scaremongering is regrettably true. Average testosterone levels in men have declined roughly 1% annually since 1987, with adolescents and young adults showing a 20% deficit compared to previous generations. The culprits are familiar: obesity, sedentary lifestyles, processed takeout meals, endocrine disruptors, and chronic stress. The manosphere frames this as evidence of civilizational feminization, a symptom of weakness that demands pharmaceutical correction.

Start injecting young, before you’ve finished developing, they tell their audience, and you’ll optimize yourself into the real man modernity tried to prevent you from becoming. What these influencers neglect to mention is that introducing exogenous testosterone signals your body to stop producing its own. The pituitary gland, sensing adequate hormone levels, ceases sending the chemical messages which stimulate natural production. For older men whose systems have already slowed, this tradeoff makes sense — as it does for some older women. For young men whose bodies still manufacture testosterone adequately, it’s a recipe for permanent dependence.

What influencers are selling to young men constitutes a reality that can be dominated by side effects. The risks for healthy young males include fertility problems, testicular atrophy, cardiovascular complications, mood disturbances and, most notably, permanently lowered testosterone should they discontinue treatment — often because they can’t afford to continue payment in a tight labor market. Far from becoming supermen, young men taking testosterone usually just accumulate side effects while their own systems atrophy.

Though the medical dimension matters a great deal, it obscures the deeper problem. These young men understandably think the needle offers escape from a culture that has failed them. They’re correct to recognize that something has gone wrong. Deindustrialization, dating apps and social atomization have all left young men with increasingly lower levels of institutional support, which was once the bedrock of masculine identity.

Stripped of all the other trappings of conventional masculinity, these men wind up pursuing a kind of auto-androphilia. It’s a performative hyper-masculinity where the body becomes a project of ideological transformation, a chance to be a “real man” in a world where that seems nearly impossible.

The overdiagnosis of SSRIs, the superfluity of steroids, and the legions of men killing themselves to look strong are all disordered responses to existential emptiness. These young men sense, rightly, that something is wrong with contemporary masculinity, but they’re being offered a costly pharmaceutical solution to a problem which is fundamentally social and political.

Structural forces driving testosterone decline require collective responses. Housing policy, industrial strategy, urban planning, regulatory reform of endocrine disruptors and bad food. Instead, much of the manosphere is pushing atomized pharmaceutical intervention.

There’s something grimly symmetrical about conservatives decrying the medicalization of gender dysphoria while manosphere influencers, many of whom style themselves as Right-wing, push hormones on young men whose bodies don’t need them. Each represents a variation on the same underlying logic: that identity problems rooted in social conditions can be solved through pharmaceutical intervention on dysgenic and poorly-developed individual bodies. Meanwhile, the culture that created an unhealthy population in need of such drastic transformation remains untouched.

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Oliver Bateman is a historian and journalist based in Pittsburgh. He blogs, vlogs, and podcasts at his Substack, Oliver Bateman Does the Work

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