I'm in my mid 40s, and I've been on and off Testosterone Replacement Therapy for 10 years now. I have fought so hard to get to where I am, to do the things I do. I have endured a ton of overtraining, injury, fatigue, metabolic disturbance, and just sheer misery because I have dared to want to be an athlete while possessing an anomalously shitty pair of balls.
People have a lot of misconceptions about TRT, and some of them are downright ugly and bigoted. The most prominent being the stigmatized way TRT is treated by the UFC. Fighters who NEED TRT to function as well as their compatriots end up having to give up on a medically necessary medicine just to stay "legal" and to preserve their public image.
To be fair, part of the problem is that the medicalization of T levels may kind of obscure the testing process for the illegal stuff being used in illegal amounts. A guy can cycle 500mg of street test for a year and then back off it to normal "TRT levels" like 600-1100 ng/dl and it will be much harder to detect him as an illegal user than if going off it were to plummet him to the frank hypogonadal and agonadal range of say 25ng/dl.
But here's the problem--a lot of people DO need TRT for very real HEALTH reasons. ESPECIALLY combat athletes. Primary hypogonadism can occur genetically, or it can just occur as a result of a single hard trauma. I don't think all the causes are currently understood, but the fact is that by age 30 or so, a goodly percentage of guys balls have stopped working almost entirely. So if they come in at 200 ng/dl and they are expected to train and recover like someone else who has naturally 1200 ng/dl, they have it effectively 6 times harder than that person, if their free testosterone reflects the total testosterone differential!
Eugenics became really unpopular during the third reich, because of the way the Nazis used experimentation to exploit people. The ways they abused it. It scared us all away from it for a long time, but some aspects of our society still reflect its preference. Given how there is a sort of stigma toward eugenics, it does seem weird to me that a lot of people still equate "fairness" in athletics with a type of "lottery" mentality, which amounts to accidental eugenics.
What do I mean? If someone is born with 1200 ng/dl of T naturally, they weren't "bred" to have that, but they do have a [correctable] advantage they DID NOT earn. So it would be more fair to set a baseline standard of 800 ng/dl and then bring ALL competitors up to that range. If testosterone is SO important to performance that it is the most well known performance enhancing drug, then since it's a natural chemical that is controllable, actual competitive "fairness" would involve making sure ALL combatants had roughly the same fucking amount of it!
Duh! It's not "fair" for one person to have 6x (for the sake of argument) the recovery capacity of another contender. "Fair" is when you level the playing field in every way within your control, such that each competitor has an equal opportunity to leverage his actually unique and cultivated attributes--his practice and his mindset--so he can WIN. TRT just levels the testosterone field.
It blows my mind that thousands of doctors and medical researchers can call something like hypogonadism an illness; that hundreds of studies have been conducted on its risks and disadvantages over the past few decades; that it has been documented to confer a clear HANDICAP in competitive sports, but that we continue to regard people using it to "get well" as cheating!
Testosterone is so stigmatized by the Barry Bonds and Lyle Alzados of the world that cycling's innocent cousin, TRT, gets lumped in with it. But anyone who knows anything about T will tell you that not only is 1000 ng/dl a natural level for a competitive athlete, but that there is NO COMPARISON between the performance "boosting" attributes of 1000 compared to 5000.
"Getting well" is not roiding. The closer you get to agonadalism, the more severe and potentially life threatening the symptoms become. Most non-athletes can function on 300 ng/dl, but they will probably be lower energy, tired, more irritable, and less sexual. They will have a harder life than the average guy. Then you take a guy who regularly beats his body up and recovers from it because that's his passion in life, and you want him to have the same amount of recovery capacity as a couch potato?
Can you imagine what it would be like to go for a 5 mile tempo run with your other male friends of your same age, and to be unable to participate in the next run 2 days later because your body still hasn't healed from the first run like theirs? All because you got a bum set of balls. And there are people who think you should be happy with that. Can you believe the ignorance? What if we took that attitude toward polio or allergies? "I know you have rhinitis 100% of the time, but antihistamines are cheating, sorry, sniffle away!"
There are so many anti-male assholes in this world. I wouldn't want to get anywhere near an MRA soapbox here, but testosterone is NOT evil. It is the hormone that makes men into men--whether they are macho men, or soft spoken and gentle men. Straight men, or gay men. It is a health stabilizer.
People so often associate it with rage, anger, and machismo, but the truth is that LOW testosterone makes men angry, not normal levels. The rage we associate with roiders comes from them cycling improperly--the rage comes from abnormally high estradiol or ESTROGEN levels, not the testosterone. The right amount of testosterone has a CALMING influence on men, similar to an SSRI in a serotonin deficient human of either sex.
People have been saying this stuff forever, but those who smugly disregard men's issues continue to ignore the truth, and continue to see the world through whichever lens they wish. Even in an era where we have relatively effective transgender transformations, where female to male transgenders NEED testosterone to become and stay healthy, people still act like testosterone is a poison chemical that ruins the world.
The truth is that as much as we like to bend gender, the human body does better by being firmly placed into one hormonal camp or another. Again, transgenderism has shown us this. Be hormonally male, or be hormonally female, but the middle ground is not safe for our health.
Hypogonadal men and athletes are expected to dutifully inhabit that dangerous middle ground because there is simply no valid social excuse for a "cis" man wanting to become more male. If a woman wants to become male it's progressive, but if a deficient man wants to become fully male, well he is "up to something," trying to cheat, trying to exploit someone or something. Granted, not everyone views it this way, and I don't want to come across as angry or bitter like an MRA douche, but then again, I have too little of the mellowing hormone testosterone in my blood, so it could be related.
This funny bias is even inherent in the browser I am using. As I type this, the Chrome spell checker underlines the word hypogonadism in red (a word which has been in the medical and public lexicon for both sexes, for decades) as if it's a non-word. If you right click on it, it suggests "hypothyroidism."
Hypothyroidism is an interesting comparison because it is something with which a lot of women are diagnosed. Its diagnosis is as a result of a direct correlation to an under-functioning thyroid. There is almost never any secondary cause, just as with primary hypogonadism. Plain and simple--your thyroid doesn't work well, it's a hazard to your health and metabolism, so we supplement you with synthetic thyroid hormone. Cut and dry: "Thyroid's busted. Here's a better quality of life, you are welcome."
Everyone recognizes this as a real thing--and yet, the impetus for treating it in a lot of women is a desire for a "normal" basal metabolic rate. Now you can't TELL me that when a hypothyroid woman finds out her body burns fat more SLOWLY than a normal woman, that the aesthetic and potentially "vain" aspects of the health issue don't factor into her decision to supplement. Women chase leanness the same way men chase muscularity--it's just how our culture largely works. Low thyroid is not only a health threat to women, but a threat to their opportunity to subscribe to the [contentious but real] female "beauty standard" of being thin, which a lot of women submit to willingly.
So why is that any more valid than a guy wanting to supplement testosterone in order to pick up a bit more muscle or strength than his sick self would ordinarily have? Not only will he have less of a risk of heart disease, diabetes, and other comorbidities by going on TRT, but he will be able to have a fair shot at being as "MANLY" as a normal man can. Both men and women deserve a fair shot at the kinds of bodies and lives enjoyed by other normal men and women, if they are medically possible, the same way any biped deserves a shot at knee surgery so he can get back to walking like a normal person.
In conclusion, in Chrome, I right clicked that unrighteously underlined word and chose "Add to Dictionary." Every anti-TRT ignoramus on the planet needs to add hypogonadism to their dictionary.
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