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So many mentions of testosterone as the male sex hormone related to Caster Semenya's case. It's inaccurate to call T the "male sex hormone." Here's why.
Calling T the male sex hormone signals that T is restricted to men and is a foreign--and potentially dangerous--substance in women’s bodies. But women also produce T and require it for healthy functioning.
It also signals that T’s functions are restricted to sex and sex differences though T is required for a broad range of functions regardless of sex and going beyond reproductive structures and physiology.
That the hallmarks of T have been yoked exclusively to men, and that the hormone’s effects credited as the primary drivers of sexual development and sex differences, are less a function of science than of ideology.
T’s story begins decades before biochemistry enabled its chemical isolation in 1935, with scientists who were on a quest to explain sex differences using ingenious, yet crude, manipulations of nonhuman animals.
Searching for ways to remove and then replace the “essence of masculinity,” they castrated animals in their labs, recorded the effects, and looked for ways to restore the tissues and functions that were affected.
For example, they implanted bits of testicular tissue, which they thought contained the substance responsible for strength, virility, and masculinity itself.
They put the testicular tissue in new places, like inside the abdomen, to test the idea that the key factor was a chemical that could affect distant tissues without direct attachment.
It didn’t always work, but often enough, the cock’s comb, the bull’s aggressiveness, and the rat’s erection were restored, so scientists felt confident they had found the “male sex hormone.”
Their quest to explain sex was rounded out with parallel experiments with estrogen, thought to be “the female sex hormone.” Their research was a closed loop, both grounded on and apparently justifying an understanding of the new chemicals as fundamentally about sex dualism,
including expectations that “sex hormones” would be exclusive to one sex or the other, that their physiological roles would be restricted to sexual development & functions, and that they would be antagonistic. If T caused the cock’s comb to swell, estrogen would make it shrivel.
As early as 1920, though, scientists reported data they described as “surprising,” “paradoxical,” & “disquieting”: the hormones were not sex-exclusive, and their actions were complementary not antagonistic.
By the 1930s, researchers knew that the effects of so-called sex hormones went well beyond sex to influence processes such as bone development, heart function, and liver metabolism.
Findings that contradicted the dualistic paradigm were easy enough to find: the showy feathers of the rooster were not restored by testicular implants or even by injecting T; instead, it seemed that “female hormones” were responsible for their masculine appearance.
But instead of rethinking the hormone theory, endocrine researchers reclassified the physical features themselves as “neutral” rather than male- or female-typical.
We ought to be grateful to the researchers like Nelly Oudshoorn, Marianne van den Wijngaard, @Fausto_Sterling, and Celia Roberts (among others!) who have done this work. Despite their devastating critiques the sex hormone concept is alive and well.
