Testosterone: An Unauthorized Biography

Testosterone is not what you think it is, and it is decidedly not a "male sex hormone." Here is the authoritative life story of a maligned and misunderstood molecule.

Testosterone is a familiar villain and attractive bad boy that supplies a ready explanation for innumerable social phenomena, from the stock market crash and the overrepresentation of men in prisons to men's dominance in business and politics. It's a lot to pin on a simple molecule.

Yet your testosterone level doesn't predict your competitive drive or tendency for violence, your appetite for risk or sex, or your strength or athletic prowess. It's neither the biological essence of manliness nor even "the male sex hormone." This unauthorized biography pries T, as it's known, loose from over a century of misconceptions that undermine science even as they make social fables about this hormone seem scientific.

T's story didn't spring from nature: it is a tale that began long before the hormone was even isolated, when nineteenth-century scientists went looking for the chemical essence of masculinity. And so this molecule's outmoded, authorized biography lived on, providing ready justification for countless behaviors--from the boorish and the belligerent to the exemplary and enviable. What we think we know about T has stood in the way of an accurate understanding of its surprising and diverse effects. Rebecca Jordan-Young and Katrina Karkazis focus on what T does in six domains: reproduction, aggression, risk-taking, power, sports, and parenting. At once arresting and deeply informed, Testosterone allows us to see the real T for the first time.