When the Enhanced Games were first announced in 2023, the reaction was derision. Travis Tygart, CEO of the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) called them a “dangerous clown show that puts profit over principle”. The World Anti-Doping Agency (WADA) condemned the concept as “dangerous and irresponsible”. Lord Sebastian Coe, head of World Athletics, offered the bluntest verdict: “Well, it’s bollocks, isn’t it?”

The early coverage reinforced the freak-show narrative. Australian swimmer James Magnussen, the 2011 and 2013 100-meter freestyle world champion, promised to “juice to the gills” and break the 50-meter freestyle world record. He gained 50 pounds of muscle and became so large that it took four people 30 minutes to squeeze him into his racing suit.

Two years later, it doesn’t look like bollocks. Athletes are signing contracts and cashing checks — the most money many have ever earned, given the modest pay available to amateur competitors.

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At an Enhanced Games-sponsored event in February 2025, Magnussen lost a $1 million prize to a leaner Greek swimmer, Kristian Gkolomeev, who had been on performance-enhancing drugs for only eight weeks and swam 20.89 seconds: 0.02 seconds faster than the existing world record. Gkolomeev’s wife had written that he earned “as little as $5,000 a year” as one of the world’s top swimmers competing by the rules. In those 20.89 seconds, Gkolomeev changed his life.

The Enhanced Games debut on 24 May 2026. What began as a laughing stock is becoming something harder to dismiss. The organization now has around 50 to 60 athletes on its payroll across swimming, track and field, and weightlifting — including Hafþór Björnsson, the Icelandic strongman who played The Mountain in Game of Thrones, who will attempt to exceed his own 510kg deadlift record while competing against longtime rival Mitchell Hooper — with 40 participating in supervised clinical trials. Athletes who choose to enhance will travel to the UAE for four months of supervised training starting in late January, with protocols managed by a global clinical trials organization for health, safety, and performance reasons. The permitted substances include testosterone replacement therapy, approved steroids, estrogen, peptides, and sleep aids. Cocaine and heroin remain prohibited.

It helps that there’s serious money behind the venture. Don Jr announced his backing in February 2025, declaring that the Enhanced Games represent “the future — real competition, real freedom, and real records being smashed”. He linked the venture explicitly to the administration’s broader agenda: “This is about excellence, innovation and American dominance on the world stage — something the MAGA movement is all about.”

The Trump family’s involvement raises uncomfortable questions. Michael Duff, a labor law professor at Saint Louis University and former trial attorney with the National Labor Relations Board, told me the arrangement “meshes all-too-well with transhumanism, which is what these games seem to represent”. He drew a comparison to other instances of presidential relatives shrewdly monetizing proximity to power: “To me there is not a whit of difference between the Hunter-Joe Biden and the two-Donalds pairings. It is a form of dynastic aristocracy that goes back a long, long way.”

The timing is notable. The US government has been withholding $3.6 million from WADA over a Chinese doping scandal involving dozens of swimmers. Enhanced Games founder Aron D’Souza has publicly welcomed what he calls an “age of disruptors” in the White House, and has framed the event as a populist challenge to corrupt international bureaucracies. “The IOC president flies around the world in a private jet. He lives in a palace,” D’Souza has said. “The IOC system is designed to benefit bureaucrats, not the athletes.” WADA’s Witold Bańka has called on American authorities to prevent the event from happening. The Trump administration — skeptical of international bodies and with the President’s son heavily involved financially — almost certainly will not comply. A Truth Social post from the President endorsing the Enhanced Games would be worth more than any advertising budget.

There is an irony here: even as Trump celebrates the United States hosting the 2026 World Cup and the 2028 Olympics and the 2034 Winter Olympics, his son is investing in a venture that seeks to undermine conventional sport’s entire legitimacy.

The organizers have studied another recent transformation of vice into mainstream entertainment. Christopher Jones, the Enhanced Games’ Chief Communications Officer, previously worked at FanDuel, the sports betting platform now valued at approximately $31 billion. Some of the same people who helped legitimize one previously stigmatized industry are now trying to create another. “Look at the investors involved,” Jones told me. “They do not get involved with losers.”

And those investors want to make money. Jones described the Games as “the kickoff to a consumer products division”. The organization is already selling testosterone therapies, peptides, and enhancement protocols on its website, using social media clips and athlete testimonials as proof points. Clinical data generated by athletes could support an FDA approval process for additional performance and recovery products aimed at the general public. The billionaire businessman Mark Cuban once funded his own study into the effect of human growth hormone on injured athletes, telling me there was simply no other way to gather such data legally. The Enhanced Games hope to generate far more.

The organization has announced plans to go public in 2026 at an enterprise value of $1.2 billion — a valuation tied up primarily in their pharmaceutical business. To understand what’s at stake, consider the comparison: the global market for GLP-1 drugs like Ozempic and Wegovy is currently worth around $70 billion and is projected to exceed $200 billion by 2033. The Enhanced Games are betting that testosterone, peptides, and performance-enhancement protocols could capture a meaningful slice of that demand — pharmaceutical self-improvement marketed with the same slick simplicity as a Hims & Hers subscription.

Shane Ryan, a 31-year-old, three-time Irish Olympian and world medalist in swimming, described the arrangement as something closer to a tech startup than a sporting body. “It’s a business,” he said. “Once you learn how much money is actually invested in it, you realize it’s not going to go away.”

Ryan joined the Enhanced Games after retiring from traditional competition. “I made like $20,000 or €18,000 a year,” he said of his time competing for Ireland. “You can’t live on that.” The Enhanced Games offered him a salary, comprehensive recovery support, and the chance to see how far his body could go.

Whether any of this truly succeeds may depend on Kerley’s race. Given that the 100-meter record is the one thing even the most casual of fans will understand, the Games will remain a curiosity until enhanced athletes run faster than clean ones. A USADA official who spoke on condition of anonymity put it plainly: “If somebody breaks that record, everything changes.”

The official identified a specific scenario the organization might be hoping for: a white sprinter breaking the record in a discipline dominated by athletes of West African descent since Jim Hines first broke 10 seconds in 1968. “If the first iconic Enhanced sprint record comes from a white guy, the marketing machine goes into overdrive,” he said. Only two white athletes have ever run under 10 seconds — France’s Christophe Lemaitre (9.92 in 2011) and Virginia Tech’s Cole Beck (a wind-aided 9.87 in 2023) — and neither is currently signed with the Enhanced Games. But the USADA official argued the commercial potential would be, in Trump’s colorful turn of phrase, “yuge”.

Anthony Roberts, author of Anabolic Steroids: Ultimate Research Guide and a fitness journalist who has broken major steroid stories for The New York Times, offered a realistic view. “The Enhanced Games stick around as long as rich people fund it,” he told me — and in my conversations with the Enhanced Games team, it is clear they have a great deal of financial runway, carrying them through multiple iterations of the signature event. “Because it has mostly attracted retired athletes off the podium, I can’t see it becoming popular at the mainstream level. The top sprinter in the Enhanced Games isn’t currently faster than the top sprinter at the Olympics.”

The USADA official was similarly doubtful about the Games supplanting traditional competition. “The Olympics are baked into national identity, government funding pipelines, and a century of habit,” he said. But he acknowledged the organizers had put serious money in. His primary concern was the message the event sends to young athletes, most of whom are already experiencing money pressures in their chosen sports. “We already fight a constant battle to keep kids from thinking they need drugs to chase a scholarship or a pro contract.”

The organizers are not, as they explain it, trying to destroy the Olympics. They are trying to piggyback off conventional sport’s legitimacy while building a pharmaceutical empire on the side. Even so, the Games arrive at a time when moralistic conventions are under threat. Sports betting, once viewed as dangerous and confined to the shadows, is now embedded in all major broadcasts. GLP-1 drugs have made pharmaceutical weight loss mainstream, rapidly supplanting the more respectable custom of dieting. The Enhanced Games are betting that performance enhancement will follow the same trajectory, going from taboo to tolerated to normal: a future in which ordinary consumers pay for testosterone, peptides, and recovery protocols to get stronger, leaner, and younger-feeling. The long-term health consequences of mass-market hormone use remain largely unstudied, but the Enhanced Games are wagering that demand will outrun caution — as it did with sports betting, and as it is doing with GLP-1s.

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Importantly, they are also a post-national venture in a time of declining trust in and identification with nation-states. Athletes will not represent their countries; there will be no anthems, no medal counts by nation. Whether audiences will care as much about competitors without flags remains an open question, but the organizers are wagering that records and spectacle will prove sufficient.

For athletes like Shania Collins, a 29-year-old retired American sprinter and former US Indoor Champion, the appeal is transparency. She competed for six years as a professional, earning what she described as the bare minimum. “I had confidential sources and I’ve seen things that led me to believe that [competitors] were taking performance-enhancing drugs,” she said. “It always felt like an unfair playing field.” Her mother has taken to calling it “the honest games”.

Come May, amid the manufactured glitz and 24/7 gambling of Las Vegas, enhanced athletes will get to chase — and possibly exceed — times that clean competitors have never approached. If Fred Kerley breaks Bolt’s record on a global broadcast, investors such as Don Jr will have seen an early return and the Enhanced Games will have proved their thesis: that the appetite for superhuman performance outweighs any squeamishness about how it was achieved.

If no one does, they will at least temporarily remain what their critics have called them — a well-funded sideshow still awaiting its big moment. Either way, the answer will come down to a fraction of a second.

Let’s start with a simple fact: testosterone levels in men have been declining for decades. A man aged 60 in 2002 had about 85% of the testosterone level of a man the same age in 1987. Even more alarmingly, we’re seeing a 20% deficit in testosterone levels in adolescent and young adult males. This isn’t just a matter of feeling less manly — it’s associated with a host of health problems, from obesity to diabetes. After all, as well as regulating libido, testosterone is crucial for building bone and muscle mass, distributing fat, and producing red blood cells.

For many men aged between 45 and 50, testosterone replacement therapy (TRT) could provide significant health benefits. When properly monitored by a physician, TRT can improve mood, increase muscle mass, reduce body fat, enhance libido, and even help with cognitive function. And yet, instead of treating this as a normal part of ageing care, we’ve stigmatised it, driving people to seek dangerous alternatives or suffer in silence.

This reluctance is rooted in misconceptions about the risks of testosterone therapy. Yes, like any medical treatment, it has potential side effects, such as increased blood pressure, cholesterol, and stroke risk. But these more remote dangers are often exaggerated, while the immediate and obvious benefits are downplayed.

I speak from personal experience. In March 2022, at age 40, I tore my left pectoral muscle. Coming on the heels of two decades of “clean” lifting, this injury led me to explore testosterone replacement therapy under the supervision of a physician. My regimen consists of weekly doses of self-injected testosterone cypionate, with regular blood work to monitor my health. The results have been significant: my testosterone levels have increased from 600 to around 1,000 nanograms per decilitre, with no increases in bad cholesterol or other negative side effects related to liver or kidney function. This hasn’t made me into any sort of superhuman — and I’m still nowhere near as ripped as I was in my late twenties — but during this period, I squatted 600 pounds and deadlifted 700 pounds for the first time in two decades of strength training.

Of course, for every story like mine, there are others that are far from successful. Indeed, just as with every case of stigma, the misleading debate around steroids has created an environment ripe for charlatans and unsafe practices. Just consider the case of Brian “Liver King” Johnson, who built a fitness empire on the claim that his muscular physique was the result of eating raw organ meats and following “ancestral” practices. When it was revealed that he was actually spending thousands of dollars a month on steroids, many were shocked. But should we have been? From “natural” bodybuilders who are anything but to supplement companies peddling magic pills and boilerplate “customised” workouts, the entire ecosystem is built on a foundation of lies. It’s a classic case of prohibition creating more problems than it solves.

So, how do we remedy this? Most obviously, we could bring the subject out into the open, creating the space for better regulation, education and safety. This could start with the acknowledgement that there are legitimate medical uses for steroids and hormones beyond just athletic performance enhancement. Their therapeutic potential in treating conditions like muscle-wasting diseases, severe burns, and hormone deficiencies is well-established, but is often overlooked in the moral panic about “cheating” in sports.

This is, of course, as much a marketing problem as a medical one. The distinction between “natural” and “enhanced”, for instance, is often arbitrary and inconsistent. Over the course of a two-decade career in marketing, I’ve been paid to promote everything from stem cell injections (even getting them myself and making a documentary about it) to kratom powder. Most of us don’t bat an eye at these unconventional treatments, much less caffeine use, nutrient supplementation, or even cosmetic surgery. We accept that a 70-year-old woman might take oestrogen to alleviate menopausal symptoms. Yet the moment someone mentions testosterone for a man the same age, people react as if it’s fundamentally different.

This inconsistency extends to how we regulate these substances. Current laws and regulations around steroids are often not based on sound science. In 1989, against the advice of the American Medical Association, then-Senator Joe Biden led the charge to classify anabolic steroids as controlled substances. This decision, driven more by sports moral panics, has caused more harm than good by driving usage underground, where users resort to unregulated black market sources, underground labs, and dangerous self-experimentation.

Biden’s crusade against steroids is a perfect example of how hysteria can lead to bad policy. In 1989, as he led the push to reduce access to steroids and increase penalties for their distribution, he claimed: “The illegal use of steroids is a major drug abuse problem in this country. Steroids are dangerous drugs that threaten the physical and mental health of hundreds of thousands of young people.” There was, naturally, no mention of their potential benefits when used under medical supervision. Indeed, in 2004, when the Controlled Substances Act was made even stricter by removing the requirement that an anabolic steroid classified as a controlled substance had to actually “increase muscle growth”, Biden was that bill’s sponsor, too.

More than three decades have passed since then, and the current system treats them as if they’re nearly as lethal as opioids. This, despite the fact that you can’t overdose on testosterone the way you can on fentanyl. Yet possession of anabolic steroids can lead to hefty fines and even prison sentences — punishments that far outweigh any potential harm caused by the drugs themselves.

So, what’s the alternative? Well, imagine a world where, instead of being ashamed to discuss declining testosterone levels with their doctor, men viewed hormone check-ups as a routine part of health maintenance, like checking cholesterol or blood pressure. The fact that vanishingly few men know that the normal range for male testosterone levels falls between 300 and 1,000 nanograms per decilitre is criminal; such information should be as widespread as awareness of normal blood pressure. This is more than a matter of virility: low testosterone is associated with a host of health problems, including increased risk of cardiovascular disease, osteoporosis, and cognitive decline. By addressing hormone imbalances early, we could potentially prevent or mitigate these issues, improving overall health outcomes and reducing healthcare costs in the long run.

There are also problematic double standards in how male versus female hormone therapies are regulated and perceived. Women’s hormone replacement therapy is widely accepted, while men’s is often viewed with suspicion. Or consider the case of transgender individuals. Here in the United States, if a transgender man is prescribed testosterone (a controlled substance), the physician must hold a Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) licence in addition to being registered with the relevant state medical board. The quantity of the prescription is strictly controlled. However, when a transgender woman is prescribed oestrogen, these stringent controls do not apply. This discrepancy is difficult to justify on medical grounds and seems to stem more from cultural biases about masculinity and femininity.

A more rational approach to hormone regulation could also help tamp down some of the hysteria associated with gender transitioning itself. Today, hormone therapy is treated like some radical act that has to be shouted to the heavens. But if we normalised the idea that hormones are just another tool for optimising health and well-being, it might take some of the charge out of these debates: turning them into discussions about identity rather than simply chemical imbalances.

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Hanging over all this is the need for a more evidence-based approach to steroid and hormone regulation. This means several key changes in our approach. First and foremost, we must decriminalise personal use and possession of steroids. Treating steroid use as a criminal issue rather than a health issue has been a costly failure, driving users into the shadows and preventing many from seeking proper medical guidance.

We should also regulate steroids like other prescription drugs, not as controlled substances. This shift would allow for better quality control and medical oversight, ensuring that users have access to safe, pharmaceutical-grade products rather than potentially dangerous black market alternatives. Encouraging more research into the potential therapeutic uses of steroids and hormones — something long championed by the likes of Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban — is also crucial. However, as Cuban told me when I interviewed him and his research team in 2020, the regulatory environment as it currently exists makes it difficult to conduct large-scale, publicly-funded studies on the long-term effects of hormone optimization. By easing these restrictions, we could gain valuable insights that would inform both medical practice and public policy.

Finally, we must address the root causes of declining testosterone levels in the population. This could include research into environmental factors, dietary changes, and lifestyle interventions that might be contributing to this troubling trend.

Imagine a future where hormone optimisation is viewed as a normal part of health maintenance — and where following the best available science might mean most men starting TRT as they enter their mid-forties, if not earlier. A future where athletes can be open about their use of performance-enhancing substances, allowing for better monitoring and research. Where men don’t have to suffer in silence as their testosterone levels decline with age. Where we can have rational, nuanced discussions about the role of hormones in gender identity that are fully divorced from performative partisan politics.

This future is possible, but only if we’re willing to step out of the shadows and confront our societal hangups about hormones and enhancement. It’s time to clear away the smoke and break the mirrors. As I’ve learned from my own careful experimentation, the future of health is one of normalisation, not prohibition. Let’s embrace it.

Kennedy, who is 69 years old, recently shared videos of himself lifting weights and doing press-ups shirtless. Alongside these, he pledged that should he become President, he will “restore America as the global example of health and well-being. Not through pills or syringes, but through character and self-discipline.”

The idea that physical and moral vigour go together is ancient. The first Olympic Games were held nearly three millennia ago, around 776BC, and many athletic-looking Greek statues survive to this day that vividly celebrate male physical beauty and strength as shorthand for good character.

This association persisted. In his 1855 poem “I Sing The Body Electric”, Walt Whitman celebrated human beauty as a fusion of character and embodiment, where flesh and gesture “are not the parts and poems of the body only, but of the soul”. According to Whitman, the “well-made man” expresses his character in both body and movement — all of which offers a clue as to character.

But fusing beauty and value lands differently today. The modern progressive mainstream has set itself firmly against the idea that our bodies say anything moral. Kennedy’s videos prompted a flurry of accusations that in showing off his muscular torso, he’s mired in toxic masculinity, dog-whistling body fascism and eugenics, and implicitly promoting discrimination against disabled people. And – perhaps most damningly of all for someone who promotes natural health – that he’s faking it: of using unnatural means to pump his muscles when in reality he’s old and weak.

Kennedy has not responded to the rumours about steroid use. But the argument hits a live and divisive issue on the Right: biotech. A significant chunk of his support comes from a cluster of emerging popular movements whose common theme is resistance to “unnatural” biotech innovations. He was a prominent opponent of Covid vaccine mandates, one such innovation; other issues in the same cluster include medical gender transition, and artificial meat – all of which inspire strong opposition as unacceptable incursions of technology into our nature.

So we might ask: how can Kennedy advocate health and wellbeing via character and self-discipline, and show off his ripped physique to underline the point, if he attained that physique with the help of synthetic hormones? It’s a fair question. But the collective shrug from Kennedy supporters suggests that what was gleefully pointed out as an inconsistency — an advocate of “natural” health possibly using medical tech to attain that health — is not, in fact, seen as contradictory in the slightest.

We take the opposition between tech and nature for granted today — not least because we’ve spent two centuries using tech to escape the limits of nature, and told ourselves this was a story of moral progress. This forms the backdrop — among other things — to the women’s movement, a story that wouldn’t have been possible without a host of now near-invisible technologies that underwrite women’s relative autonomy.

Beyond this, it forms the backdrop to progressivism in general. It’s not just women who now seek to escape the idea that our bodies say something about us: it’s everyone. From the disability rights movement to “body positivity”, the driving idea is that any judgement or constraint imposed by our contingent physical form should be challenged. Perhaps the logical endpoint of this challenge has been gender medicine’s all-out resistance to embodied limits, a politics that’s centrally about “pills and syringes” as liberation.

This utopian drive to break the bounds of human nature, then, began in earnest with the industrial era. As the world modernised, technology and a Protestant work ethic were applied not just to escaping our limits, but also to resisting our waning strength as physical work became less important. With the freshly-minted Land of the Free roaring from agrarian colonial backwater into industrial superpower, new anxieties proliferated about health, vitality and masculinity. In response, a “muscular Christianity” emerged which framed manly fitness as an expression of religious devotion — and whose many legacies include the still wildly popular sport of American football.

But it wasn’t just the Christians. As industrialisation made life easier and people richer and freer, so this new wealth and leisure drove an explosion in social and cultural experimentation in how to live well. In this free-for-all, a dizzying array of health entrepreneurs flourished, offering “water cures”, physiology lectures, anti-masturbation campaigns, sanatoria, and diets and lifestyles of such experimental weirdness, they make our 21st-century keto diets, NoFap forums and jade yoni eggs look positively normie.

Even Walt Whitman contributed to this emerging culture. Just three years after “I Sing The Body Electric” was published, he wrote a 13-instalment guide to Manly Health and Training in a New York newspaper, under the pseudonym “Mose Velsor”. In it, he sets out the intimate link between physical fitness, moral virtue — and also personal efficacy and performance. Training doesn’t just deliver a “perfect physique” but also helps a man “exalt the intensity of his personal force” — a transformation that will, in turn, “attract to him attention, friendship and respect”.

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This mania for self-improvement tracked the wider transition in American culture, from largely agrarian to increasingly wealthy, entrepreneurial and technologically advanced. To succeed in this new era, the ambitious man had to grind. In other words, the fitness culture that emerged with modernity serves as a mirror of the machine age that spawned it: a “body electric” for the age of electrification, in which our physical forms become sites of industry-like labour and competition.

Today, we live in a biotech age, in which our flesh appears less in Whitmanesque terms — as union of body and soul — than as organs for donation; DNA for re-writing; a uterus for rent. We are raw material for the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

With this new turn has come another round of dematerialisation. Work is not just de-sexed, but virtualised. Life is sedentary. Happiness, risk-free sex, even weight management or the appearance of the opposite sex can be obtained in a pill or syringe. There’s no pressing reason to attain any level of physical fitness, except personal desire. And on top of these disintegrating forces, the dominant culture has also set itself (at least overtly) to the dissolution of physiological norms.

And just as industrial technologies spawned egalitarian challenges to our limits, and also new cults of the body beautiful, so today’s biotech age of hormone-enhanced affirmation and “inclusive” body culture has also given rise to a countervailing one, of aggressive physical beauty. One influential aspect of this backlash is a Right-wing subculture of bodybuilding, whose proponents oppose the progressive war on human nature along every possible axis. In general, adherents embrace effortful self-improvement, vitality and individual excellence, while dismissing “body positivity” and egalitarianism of every kind. Centrally, the RWBBs embrace the link expressed so controversially by Kennedy between physical health and moral worth — especially what health implies about individual effort and discipline.

Perhaps the most influential figure in this movement is the pseudonymous Bronze Age Pervert, whose Bronze Age Mindset decries egalitarianism as the attempt to abolish excellence and natural hierarchy in favour of meaningless “buglife”. His social media account abounds with “Handsome Thursday” images of honed male physiques, presented as aesthetic resistance to such levelling-down.

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Unlike the 19th-century “muscular Christians”, this 21st-century fitness subculture draws inspiration more from the Hellenistic ancients, especially their sculptures of athletes. This affinity is so closely held that when a historian recently suggested ancient Greek soldiers would have been lean and tough, rather than “ripped”, he was deluged with furious anons, who accused him of self-interestedly attempting to legitimise “dad bods” and emasculation, and undermine men’s aspiration to physical beauty and strength, and — implicitly — to the superior character such beauty and strength have classically been viewed as reflecting.

But when such aspirations are located — as in the contested Greek soldiers — somewhere in the distant past, before the world modernised, what hope does anyone have of holding on to it? Critics sometimes accuse the RWBBs of clinging to a type of masculinity that has simply been rendered obsolete by changing social conditions. And maybe there’s something to that idea. Even “I Sing The Body Electric” expresses a palpable sense of loss at disappearing physical cultures: Whitman eulogises an agrarian grandfather hunting, boating and fishing with his many sons and grandsons. Hale and tan, loved by all, overwhelmingly magnetic, he’s a compelling figure – and was written in an era when that version of America was already disappearing.

Today, much as in the 19th century, we’re embroiled both in a tech-enabled war on human nature and a defence of that nature that is also tech-enabled — not least in how extremely online it is. But one upshot of this entanglement is that it might not, after all, be such a gotcha for Robert F. Kennedy Jr to be using testosterone replacement therapy to pursue the body beautiful.

Right-wing body-builders and their fellow travellers may decry the use of synthetic hormones for anti-normative ends, such as “transgender” medical interventions for children. But there’s far more ambivalence where it comes to using biotech to enhance human beauty and performance. For example, there’s no clear consensus in this community on whether using anabolic steroids is OK. And perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised if even those who criticise the use of tech to wage war on our nature might be less troubled about using tech to give nature a helping hand. After all, there’s no going back even to the 19th century, let alone the world of the hale, tanned farmers Whitman eulogises – or indeed of Greek hoplites. And, in theory at least, technology and desire can be turned to ends other than flattening every physical difference between individuals.

So perhaps this is the best we can hope for: diverting our “pills and syringes” from waging war on our nature, toward wielding them in support of human health and beauty. It’s a risky path, with many pitfalls. But with no obvious route back to a supposedly “natural” state, it may be that the only way out is through.

The Times last week reported that steroid use in the UK has increased tenfold over the past decade, while recent studies have shown that 2% of Canadians, and between three and four million Americans, have used steroids in their lifetimes — with roughly a quarter of those users reporting “psychological dependence” on the otherwise-non addictive drugs.

I have been on the periphery of the strength and fitness culture for my entire adult life, and steroids have always been part of the athletic game: if you want to win, not just at bodybuilding and powerlifting but at any sport, you take performance-enhancing drugs. Initially, I had primarily positive views about the drugs: steroids, I thought, were merely a means to an end, a way of getting stronger and increasing functional capacity, something reams of academic and anecdotal research have confirmed they do. However, I gradually learned that the individuals using them in this way are few and far between.

That small pool of people largely consists of pro athletes, driven by financial incentives or competitive instincts to pursue every conceivable advantage. But recreational users have always outnumbered professional users, whose livelihoods depend on athletic performance. And that gap has only widened as these drugs have become available everywhere from internet forums to legally operating testosterone clinics. Their pull is irresistible: a relative of mine who never played sports or even took to the bodybuilding stage was arrested for felony possession of steroids in 2014. 

These recreational users are trying to win a different kind of game. When I started investigating steroids, an increasing number of users were following in the footsteps of Aziz “Zyzz” Shavershian, a Russian-born Australian who built a following on YouTube at the end of the Noughties. One of the first notable influencers to emerge on the now ubiquitous site, Zyzz preached a gospel of “aesthetics”, relying on steroids consumed in conjunction with exercise to develop a physique similar enough to his idol Frank Zane’s that it would win him the undying admiration of his followers.

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The key difference, of course, was that Frank Zane — whom I interviewed a year ago — was a professional athlete, training his body to win bodybuilding pageants, and Zyzz was merely someone who wanted to look the part. Zane detested selfies and self-recorded footage, believing it to be deceptive and no substitute for up-close, objective inspection of another person’s body; Zyzz relied on these methods to project a particular self-image. Taking steroids arguably made him weaker and sicker, not stronger. Zyzz died after a cardiac arrest aged 22, the victim of a congenital heart defect and cardiomegaly — an enlarged heart — worsened by the drug use that, like many fitness influencers including the recently disgraced Brian “Liver King” Johnson, he had spent the majority of his career denying he used. (Zyzz’s deception was exposed a month before his fatal heart attack, when his brother Said was arrested for possession of anabolic steroids.)

Zyzz’s early death should have made him a cautionary tale. Instead, he became a “muscle martyr” beloved by other fitness posters. People like my felonious relative saw him and wanted to be him, while emerging social media platforms provided convenient playgrounds for their carefully-curated exercises in brand-building narcissism. I’ve now interviewed hundreds of users, and the reasons for their use all arise out of some sense of absence, some internal emptiness. A gay user whose steroid-abetted transformation I profiled explained to me that he wanted to transition from being a chubby, schlubby teen to a “hyper-masculine” man. Others said they added mass in the hope of “becoming someone”; all that hypertrophied flesh would obscure an essential lack of self. Several steroid users who were attending bodybuilding pageants merely as spectators told me how eager they were to be mistaken for competitors, that passing for one would constitute the highlight of their year. 

“The first casualty of steroid use is the truth,” the fitness journalist and bodybuilding competition coach Anthony Roberts has told me repeatedly. Even if steroids are obtained with a perfectly valid prescription, there is still a cultural taboo that prevents most users from admitting to using them. As Roberts tells it, lying is the oldest and most effective performance enhancer of all: lying about what you take, how much you take, what else you take — because steroid use, for many, is but a small part of a drug-filled lifestyle. Certain fitness influencers, in addition to denying or at least staying silent about steroid use, have gone even further, inflating their on-screen workouts with the use of fake weight plates and exaggerated claims about their performance.

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Meanwhile, they are risking their health. Heavy steroid users are already uniquely susceptible to cardiovascular problems — and so many influencers are using steroids in excess of what a physician would prescribe for therapeutic use. Those with pre-existing heart problems, like Zyzz, are uniquely vulnerable, particularly in recent times. During the pandemic, each widely-publicised bodybuilder death was met with waves of accusation: at first, it was the evil virus that did them in, then it was the “clot shot”. Never mind that most of these so-called “recreational users” are teetering on death’s doorstep at all times, aware that even a common cold could stop their engorged hearts.

Bodybuilding prodigy Dallas McCarver, for example, died in 2017 with organs so enlarged that they strained credulity, and a recorded testosterone level of 55,000 nanograms per deciliter (the normal range for a male falls between 300 and 1,000 ng/dl, and the highest recorded testosterone level captured in a failed Olympic drug test was 20,000 ng/dl). So, as they near peak muscularity, and fame, these bodybuilders are also nearing the end of their lives. Their spectacular bodies serve as both temple and tomb. 

Hours of conversations with men like these have led me to believe that their behaviour is, in part, a response to the socioeconomic situation in which we find ourselves. Since the early Eighties, in the West, deindustrialisation has proceeded apace and the world of finance has become dominant. To people coming of age, it might appear as if nothing is made anymore but money. Farmers and manual labourers, such as the steamfitter captured in Lewis Hine’s famous 1921 photograph, sometimes exhibit a high degree of muscular development related to their jobs. By contrast, middle-class workers, performing increasingly less strenuous work for more than a century, have to actively cultivate muscular physiques to project power for which there might be little purpose — beyond showing that they aren’t subject to the degenerating tendencies of their age. In the absence of any tangible construction projects, the only thing that you can gain approval for building is your body — a body that is both an “aesthetic” calling card and a prison for your enlarging viscera and solipsistic thoughts.

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In more recent years, there has been much commentary on declining male testosterone levels. Blame is assigned to everything from poisoned food to sedentary lifestyles. Some pundits, such as manosphere influencer Mike Cernovich, have urged men to set aside $80-100 a month for testosterone replacement therapy. Whereas Cernovich’s cohorts would most probably deride the prescription of SSRIs for depression, or oestrogen for transgender-identifying individuals, they accept a pharmaceutical solution for the crisis of masculinity. At least testosterone administered in a clinic is accompanied by regular blood tests that can detect cholesterol issues and other problems before they become dangerous. But it is still another of modernity’s many panaceas: here is a weekly or biweekly needle to the thigh or buttocks that will make you feel and perhaps even look like someone you are not, but feel entitled to be — or at least appear to be, on social media.

The overdiagnosis of SSRIs, the superfluity of steroids, and the legions of men killing themselves to look strong are tragedies. They are disordered responses to a kind of existential emptiness, a world in which our identities are all we have left to display and sell. And we know, deep down in our hearts, that such a meretricious product is worth nothing at all. 

Transgender ideologues tell us that everybody has a gender identity — an innate and immutable feeling of maleness and femaleness — that determines whether we are women or men, or perhaps something else. If that conflicts with the sex “assigned” to you at birth, then come join us under the transgender umbrella. We will even give you a flag to make sure you feel special.

But what if gender identity is bunkum? To the true faithful who dutifully chant “transwomen are women”, even asking the question is tantamount to blasphemy.

The term “gender identity” was coined by Robert Stoller in 1964. He described it as “a congenital, perhaps inherited biological force”. But evidence is lacking. As Alex Byrne, Professor of Philosophy at MIT, has observed: “If there is some kind of ‘gender identity’ that is universal in humans, and which causes dysphoria when mismatched with sex, it remains elusive.”

Rather like the “luminiferous ether” of the 19th century, a hypothetical substance used to explain the transmission of light, gender identity was invented rather than discovered. But when Einstein showed that ether was unnecessary to explain its existence, that idea was abandoned. Presumably, then, if transsexualism can be explained without a mysterious biological force, gender identity can join it in the history books.

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Since the whole debate rests on the distinction between men and women, it makes sense to consider the differences between them. In humans, adult males tend to be taller, while females tend to have wider hips. But the crucial difference — which defines male and female in any species — is the production, or potential for production, of one of two gametes: ova in females and sperm in males.

Having fathered three children in the usual way, there can be no doubt which gametes I produced. I am male, and hence I am a man.

So why am I also transsexual? What could have caused psychological distress so severe that I felt I had no choice but to transition? At the time — nine years ago — the urge to change not only my social presentation but also my body was irresistible. But can this be explained by differences in psychology, rather than a mysterious force?

Male and female psychologies are not the same. The most obvious difference is sexual orientation. According to the Office of National Statistics, 93.4% of men are attracted to women, while 93.9% of women are attracted to men. But to attract partners, men and women also signal sexually in grooming, dress and presentation, and they tend to do it differently. No doubt some of this will be socially conditioned, but that cannot explain our observations of other species. Peacocks not only possess distinctive plumage, they show it off.

In her book, Testosterone: The Story of the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us, Carole Hooven — currently the Co-Director of Undergraduate Studies in Human Evolutionary Biology at Harvard — builds a persuasive case that testosterone in utero affects the psychology as well as the physiology of the developing embryo. She tells me, however, that unlike other species, “what particular [sexual] signals we use are heavily dependent on culture”.

Like sexual orientation, sexual signalling applies differently to the two sexes. But it is also overt and pervasive, extending far beyond clothes and makeup. Even the words man and woman evoke their sexual signals. When we hear “a real man”, we don’t picture an authentic producer of small gametes; we think of a man with sexually attractive, testosterone-driven male qualities: strong and tough, and probably not wearing a dress.

And so sexual signalling is more than mere gender expression. While gender is a poorly defined term and rooted in culture, sex is the reason our species is here. Sexual attraction involves two vectors: sexual orientation is the sex we are attracted to, and sexual signalling is how we make ourselves attractive. Neither can be disconnected from sex and the biological impetus to reproduce.

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Just as people with an atypical sexual orientation can be labelled as gay, those driven to atypical sexual signalling can be labelled as trans. So isn’t sexual signalling just gender identity by another name? Yes and no.

Yes, it is an innate quality that is hard-wired into us: it is not something that we can choose, and it can lead to transsexualism if we are driven to signal in the way typical of the other sex rather than our own. But no, sexual signalling does not supplant biological sex. When transgender activists chant “transwomen are women”, they are in effect demanding that gender identity replaces biological sex when we demarcate men and women. The deleterious impact of that approach on female people — “birthing bodies”, according to one female health charity — is profound.

Sexual signalling is also an observable reality, and it is a starting point to understand why some people are trans. There may be multiple different reasons, but I will focus on the group I know most about: heterosexual males who transitioned in midlife.

Not only can our maleness not be wished away — we are members of the sex that produces sperm, after all — I would claim that the reason why this group wants to wear dresses and makeup, grow out our hair and develop breasts is linked inextricably to our maleness. To quote another transsexual, Anne A Lawrence, we are “men trapped in men’s bodies”. That was the title of Lawrence’s book that contained a series of narratives written by autogynephilic male-to female transsexuals.

Autogynephilia was a term introduced in 1989 by the American-Canadian sexologist Ray Blanchard. Blanchard told me that autogynephilia denotes “a natal male’s tendency to be sexually aroused by the thought or image of himself as a woman.” He added, “in the Western Hemisphere and English-speaking Commonwealth countries, the overwhelming majority of adult natal males presenting with gender dysphoria are of the autogynephilic type.”

It’s not difficult to conceive why autogynephilia can lead to severe psychological distress in heterosexual men attracted to their own bodies. Because their sexual and romantic interest is directed inwards — a target location error according to Blanchard  — they respond by sexually signalling to themselves. But while their interest is in females (they are heterosexual), their bodies are male. Clothing may help to create an illusion of femaleness but, for some, medical transition may seem to be the only way to square the circle.

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This scientific approach to just one form of male-to-female transsexualism is a world away from a metaphysical claim that “transwomen are women”. But the concept of gender identity has been comforting and politically useful for autogynephilic transsexuals in a society that stigmatises unusual male sexuality. Unsurprisingly, Blanchard’s theory provokes a very strong reaction in some.

It should not, however, be ignored: gender identity has caused significant collateral damage to children and adolescents, women’s rights, biomedical science and Western political life. Moreover,  it is as unnecessary as the ether. Transsexuals — and other gender non-conforming people — do not need to invent an innate gender identity to understand ourselves.

We just have a need to communicate ourselves — sexually signal — as other human beings do, just in a way more typical of the opposite sex. There may be a host of reasons why that happens, of which autogynephilia is just one, but gender identity explains nothing. Worse, it hinders exploration into the conditions that make us the people we are.

It was 1991, the height of the Gulf War, and the debate on militarism, masculine stereotypes and violence towards women was punctuated with references to testosterone. At one point, after he had nipped to the loo and topped up his glass, Reed leant over to kiss Millett — much to her disgust — leading one male guest to pronounce: “A man can never have too much [testosterone].”

In her new book, Testosterone: The Story of the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us, Carole Hooven explores how the hormone is often presented as both a justification and excuse for male dominance over women. Women have far lower levels of testosterone, so it has often been argued that housework and childrearing come naturally to them. Men, on the other hand, are programmed to be hellbent on impregnating as many women as possible, fighting off male rivals and dragging a carcass home for dinner.

But as Hooven acknowledges in her fascinating book, despite the undeniable effect of the hormone on our behaviour, how we relate to others is based on evolving and complex external forces.

Both sexes produce testosterone, though men create up to twenty times more. Testosterone, then, is at the heart of the nature versus nurture debate. For feminists, it is our culture, rather than hormones, that most influences gendered behaviours. There are, for instance, enough studies which show that women enjoy plenty of sex and risk on par with the most testosterone-fuelled men.

It’s the same with male and female behaviour, neither of which can be reduced to binary Ken and Barbie stereotypes. As a lesbian and gender non-conforming feminist, I know this only too well. When I rejected traditional female toys and dress, I was frequently told I had too much testosterone and that was what made me a tomboy. Even into adult life, I have lost count of the times I have been told I’m a lesbian — or that I will grow a beard and never feel a desire to reproduce — because I have “too much testosterone”.

It’s a load of nonsense, but it raises an important question: how is it that the genetic and hormonal components of sex can create two distinctly different reproductive systems, and yet human male and female behaviour shows itself to be flexible, diverse and often surprisingly similar?

Hooven’s expertise is in natural sciences and biological anthropology — and the answer, she suggests, is that testosterone might strongly influence how we behave; too much of it can make males more aggressive, and those with raised levels often end up taking too many risks so they tend to crash and burn.

That may seem logical, but it does not explain violence against women or rape. As Cordelia Fine, author of the acclaimed Testosterone Rex (2017), points out most men are not violent, which leaves a hole in the theory that testosterone drives behaviour.

Nevertheless, if we are to properly understand sex differences, we still need to educate ourselves about testosterone. Crucially, the controversy around trans women in sport — namely that going through male puberty results not just in far higher levels of tesosterone but also greater bone and muscle mass — is tackled head-on by Hooven. “You may be wondering if natural variation in T [testosterone] levels has anything to do with being transgender in the first place,” she writes. “And given what we know about testosterone, that’s a logical question. The answer is, we don’t know.”

Indeed, Hooven found that there is not much relation between higher testosterone levels and performance among professional athletes when compared to others of the same sex. Between the two sexes, however, “the link is very much stronger”. And this is because “T levels are dramatically higher in males, and have a lot to do with the fact that they are stronger, faster and more aggressive than the vast majority of their female counterparts.” That is, of course, why we have sex-segregated sports in the first place.

If we accept that testosterone can cause aggression in males and change behaviour, which Hooven does, should it be used as an excuse in cases of male sexual assault? No, says Hooven, because even behaviour related to biology is not hardwired and unchangeable. Even if biology is a factor in social ill, it does not make it determined.

Yet it is disappointing that Hooven relies on questionable data to challenge the reality of male violence. For example, in picking apart the trope that male violence towards women is inevitable because it is hormone-driven, she looks to the violence perpetrated by women on male partners and concludes that, with caveats, women are as likely to be violent to male partners as vice-versa, but less likely to kill. I have campaigned to end violence towards women and girls for 40 years, and every bit of evidence from around the world concludes this is simply not the case.

But how much does testosterone affect the way men view women? One example Hooven relies on is that of trans man Griffin Hansbury and his reaction to T injections during the early days of his transition:

“I remember walking up Fifth Avenue, and there was a woman walking in front of me,” says Hansbury. “And she was wearing this little skirt and this little top. And I was looking at her ass. And I kept saying to myself, don’t look at it. Don’t look at it. And I kept looking at it. And I walked past her. And this voice in my head kept saying, turn around to look at her breasts …. It was like being in a pornographic movie house in my mind. And I couldn’t turn it off. I could not turn it off. Everything I looked at, everything I touched turned to sex.”

While even I, a hard-line social constructionist, concede that testosterone can cause strange behaviour and be as potent as oestrogen is for females, I strongly suspect there are other explanations for his behaviour. Surely, for example, we should put at least some of it down to the privilege and arrogance afforded to men, including trans men.

After all, Hansbury is still living in a world where male entitlement and lack of punishment can lead to the dehumanising and over-sexualisation of women. Hansbury’s testosterone-induced journey from his previous life as a self-described “butch dyke” who used to perform poetry about street harassment cannot be blamed on T alone.

As Hooven observes: “To bring about changes in male behaviour it is not necessary to depress testosterone. Changes in attitudes and culture can do that all by themselves.” She is right, even if the likes of Oliver Reed may suggest otherwise.