TESTOSTERONE

An Unauthorized Biography

Publisher’s Weekly Starred Review and Top 10 Science Books for fall 2019
Gold Medal winner in the Science Category of the Independent Publisher Book Awards

ABOUT THE BOOK

Testosterone is not what you think it is, and it is decidedly not a “male sex hormone.” Here is the debunking life story of a molecule we thought we all knew.

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

Yet your testosterone level doesn’t in fact 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 urban legends 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 life story persisted, providing ready cause 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 functions and 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.

Arabic: Dar Altanweer (Beirut, Lebanon), 2023

German: Carl Hanser Verlag (Munich, Germany), 2020

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ORDER GERMAN EDITION: Hanser Literaturverlage

“In [the authors’] hands, testosterone provides fruitful ground for understanding what it means to be human,

not as isolated physical bodies but as dynamic social beings.”

— Science

“A deeply researched and thoughtful book that adds a fresh perspective to a growing body of work aiming

to debunk myths about hormones.”

— Nature

“A brilliant book. With a rare combination of meticulous scholarship and page-turner readability, Jordan-Young

and Karkazis unravel, dissect, and ultimately explode the traditional story of testosterone.”

— Cordelia Fine, author of Delusions of Gender and Testosterone Rex

“Jordan-Young and Karkazis brilliantly show how a wide range of popular beliefs and scientific research about

testosterone support dangerous gender, race, and class stereotypes that blame biological differences for

inequalities of power.”

— Dorothy Roberts, author of Fatal Invention

“Eye-opening … Readers interested in the messiness of the relationship between hormones and behavior,

and willing to consider that science can be far from neutral and objective, will find high-density food for

thought in [this] stimulating work.”

— Publishers Weekly, starred review

“This subtle, important book forces rethinking not just about one particular hormone, but about the way

the scientific process is embedded in social context.”

— Robert Sapolsky, Stanford University and author of The Trouble with Testosterone

“A fascinating attempt to cast doubt on some of the more popular ideas about testosterone, but the book

is really more about the messy complexity of science itself, and how science interacts with the wider

culture and is shaped by it.”

— The Lancet Diabetes & Endocrinology

“A beautifully written and important book. The authors present strong and persuasive arguments that

demythologize and defetishize T as a molecule containing quasi-magical properties, or as exclusively

related to masculinity and males.”

— Los Angeles Review of Books

“Through rigorous analysis and a transcendent examination of cultural narratives, it not only reexamines

and challenges some of our core beliefs about T; it also traces the way bias about gender is foundational

to the science used to uphold those narratives.”

— Thomas Page McBee, author of Man Alive and Amateur

“Testosterone science does not mix well with biases, social preconceptions, and politics of all sorts.

Jordan-Young and Karkazis provide a thoughtful overview of testosterone myths, their deep roots,

and grave consequences.”

— John P. A. Ioannidis, Stanford University

“A critique of both popular and scientific understandings of the hormone, and how they have been used

to explain, or even defend, inequalities of power.”

— The Observer

“Karkazis and Jordan-Young seek to expose several false narratives about their subject …

Testosterone is an extended exercise in myth busting.”

— Outside

“Given the increasing attention to these issues, the book’s auspicious timing and deeply researched

foundations are already having a huge effect on an important cultural conversation today.”

— TechCrunch