Zen-ish Thoughts About Testosterone and the Illusion of Certainty

I recently read an article about testosterone and aggression, by Dr. Robert Sapolsky, a neuroscientist and primatologist. For as long as we've known about testosterone, we have collectively believed that anything we associate with being male is caused by it – not only certain tendencies in structure and function of various body parts, but also competitiveness, aggression, violence, and sex drive.

Just seeing that this list groups the first three things mentioned with the last one says a lot about the cultural expectations and excuses made for the exaltation of competition between men and denigration of competitive women, male aggression and violence, and male-female animus. We have been thinking about gender as if it is all one package, immutable in design, varying only in intensity, with one of two different packages each exclusively given to approximately half of the population.

Sapolsky brings several studies to our attention that challenge the idea that this collection of traits is both testosterone-driven and immutable, that assholes are the Real Men™.

We have mountains of data correlating testosterone with "traditionally male" characteristics, but these particular studies invite us to wonder if it works the other way around from how we've been thinking. It might be that time spent exercising those behaviors stimulates the release of more testosterone to support them, not that testosterone shows up first and causes them.

Sapolsky says: "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." That is, maybe more testosterone makes one feel less secure, more sensitive, anxious, threatened. Now there's a plot twist.

My paraphrase: testosterone is an intensifier, a co-agonist, a support molecule, not a primary cause. If you already love painting flowers, a boost in testosterone might make you paint them more passionately. If you do not love painting flowers, testosterone will not make you want to do that.

He notes that castration, which completely eliminates testosterone production and release, greatly reduces but does not completely eliminate the behaviors we have long associated with it.

If there is one thing it does seem to be especially tied to it is defense of one's status. Also from Sapolsky: "… a castrated male (monkey) 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."

My goal here is not to do justice to Sapolsky's article. If interested, you can find it here: Testosterone Is Misunderstood, and I highly recommend it. The main thing his article underscored for me is that once we learn to behave a certain way, the brain tends to "immortalize" it. Once a neural pattern has been "burned into" the brain, even castration or injections of testosterone are unlikely to fundamentally alter it, just diminish or intensify it.

The brain immortalizes what it learns, and then the same brain wonders why change is hard. It's not a very self-knowledgeable brain we have, is it.

In culture after culture since before history, in one person after another since birth, we have told ourselves that this is how men are, and this other thing is how women are, and then we wonder that lots of men and women are the way their culture told them they must be, or we mistake social training for biological difference, or we ache profoundly because the person we are is not aligned with the rigidly defined role we have been given. We wonder why men and women, trained to be more different than they inherently are, have a hard time with their differences. We wonder how something "as simple and binary as gender" can "suddenly" include not only differences in orientation, but in identity. The only sudden thing about it is how rapidly we went from pretending it had not been there all along it to talking about it out loud.

If you are not convinced of the cost of deviating from gender training, then you have missed the immense social pressures that begin with blue beanies and pink ribbons on newborns, missed the fact that all young children scream, and only boys are required to stop screaming while girls are comforted, missed the centuries of women living lives in which they are powerfully cast as less than men (the era of which is far from over), missed the celebration of male sexuality, male competitiveness, male aggression, male violence, and the shame showered on women who display the same traits, missed the shame showered on men who are not jerks, and the celebration of women who give more than they should, missed the demonization of non-hetero sexuality. There can be no essay large enough to contain all the ways we train newcomers (babies and children) for gender tropes that hurt everyone at least in passing, most of us substantially, and many of us profoundly. The price we pay as individuals and as a society are incalculable other than to say they are immense.

The brain's "immortalization" of things once we come to believe them is a much broader subject than this article's focus on gender and testosterone. What do you believe about who you are, and how do you feel when that model of yourself is brought into question? What do you believe about who that other person is, and how able are you to see them fully, including the bits that contradict your current model of them? What do you believe about religion, country, politics, race, occupations, socioeconomic status, … and how flexible is your thinking in light of new information?

The world is much too complex for our tiny little human brains to grasp, let alone deal with dynamically. We have to make gross simplifications or we could not carry on at all. Given that, it's good to recognize that most of our thoughts and feelings are necessarily based on gross simplifications, and that the meta-simplification device of the brain to to impute clarity and permanence to things that are actually vague and variable.