Caffeinated Politics

I trust my husband completely. But when he told me, as we were setting the table for dinner, that Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth will now annually screen service members’ testosterone levels and offer testosterone replacement therapy, framing it as a way to keep troops on the leading edge of lethality, I wondered if I needed to trust but verify.

The Pentagon’s new “testosterone initiative” is the kind of policy you get when a society has quietly accepted that its military is less a professional fighting force than simply the nation’s largest job-creating program for the young, the poor, and the under‑educated. Are we sure the problem with that group of people is that they have Low T? Their birth rates in rural America say otherwise. I am asking for forgiveness as I go all liberal elitist and make a wild stab in the dark and say that the problem is not with hormones but instead with opportunity.

It comes as no surprise that recruits too often come from broken homes, where the kids want to get the hell away from parents who act like children themselves. (I personally am aware of such a situation, and it was hard to watch a slight-framed young person tossed into the hyper-masculine military machine because the parents couldn’t work together to make college education possible.) I have also known recruits who came from communities hollowed out by economic neglect, underfunded schools, and generational poverty. Conservatives will not invest the required amount of money in neighborhoods and schools but will gleefully invest in bloodwork to make sure military men are “lethal” enough to carry out missions designed by people who’ve never had to choose between enlistment and a dead‑end job.

I continually land on education as the foundation for everything. For too long, we have not cared enough that in too many places, reading proficiency is treated like an optional elective right after playing football and basketball in high school. As such, if we are serious, and I mean genuinely serious about the strength of our armed forces, we’d be screening for something far more consequential than testosterone. We’d be asking whether recruits have been given the intellectual tools to navigate modern warfare, whether they’ve had access to decent schools, whether they can parse complex information, whether society has equipped them with the cognitive foundation that lethality actually requires.

But that would mean confronting the uncomfortable reality that America’s military readiness is inseparable from America’s social failures. And it’s so much easier, politically and emotionally, to pretend the problem is Low T.

This larger topic is one that I have laughed at and written about over the past few years, as this ‘crisis’ with Low T was piped into the heads of MAGA straight from the authoritarian fevered dreams of Viktor Orbán and Vladimir Putin, two men who treat masculinity like a state‑sponsored religion. It is truly preposterous what those tyrants believe. And want Americans to believe.

Orbán spent years insisting the West was becoming flaccid, feminized, and feeble. Putin turned shirtless horseback rides and icy‑river plunges into geopolitical branding, and Donald Trump was clearly swooning over it. Together they built a worldview in which strength is measured not by democratic institutions or intellectual capacity, but by hormone levels and performative toughness. That sick perspective has now seeped into the U.S. Defense Department.

The final aspect to this absurdity I wish to address is the moral panic from Hegseth types at the mere thought of a trans service member. The same crowd that claims hormone treatment for trans troops is a waste of money suddenly is having no issue with the military becoming a federally funded TRT clinic. Apparently, hormones are dangerous only when they help someone live authentically, but when they’re used to goose “lethality,” they become patriotic.

I must say, I felt I had seen and heard almost everything that could be labeled ludicrous under this administration. But I was wrong. Man, was I wrong.