TESTOSTERONE FOR WOMEN? YES.

TESTOSTERONE FOR WOMEN? YES.
Chew on this: Testosterone has long been characterized as the “male hormone” when, in fact, it’s also the most abundant active hormone in women. Sure, men have higher circulating testosterone levels than women, but regardless, testosterone, not estrogen, is the predominant sex steroid in women throughout their entire lifespan, or so say scientists Rebecca Glaser and Constantine Dimitrakakis.

The two scientists, writing in “Maturitas,” urge us to “look at how women’s estrogen levels are measured – in mere picograms per milliliter, while their T levels are measured in nanograms per deciliter, a 10-fold higher unit of measurement.”

Beyond estrogen, there are even higher, exponentially higher, amounts of pro-androgens circulating through their bodies, players like dehydroepiandrosterone sulfate (DHEA), dehydroepiandrosterone (DHEA), and androstenedione, each of which supply significant amounts of additional T.

Heck, even the gene for the androgen receptor that testosterone and other sex hormones latch onto is located on the X chromosome and not the Y, or male chromosome. Glaser and Dimitrakakis lamented the medical establishment’s myopic stance by writing, “Despite any clear rationale, estrogen was assumed to be the hormone of ‘hormone replacement therapy’ in women.”

They point out that this assumption occurred despite testosterone – as early as 1937 – being the treatment of choice when it came to treating female menopause.

while some of the decidedly masculine circa 1970 female Olympic athletes from East Germany and the U.S.S.R. played a part in the origin of this myth, it was competitive female bodybuilding that did the most damage.

I personally know women that once had voices like sweet, sweet nightingales who later, after taking stupid amounts of anabolic/androgenic steroids (which are all synthetic derivatives of testosterone), ended up sounding like the guys who do voiceovers for Coors Beer and Ford trucks; women who had to start shaving their faces every day except maybe for weekends when they didn’t have to go to work and could just putter around the garage.

So yeah, no wonder the medical establishment and their patients fear testosterone, but what they need to know is that all that scary stuff is dose dependent and that the doses used for T replacement in women actually “stimulate femininity” by increasing fertility and promoting ovulation. T was even used safely in the past to treat the nausea that often accompanies early pregnancy.

Still, side effects do sometimes occur, but Glaser and Dimitrakakis write that “true masculinization is not possible (with normal doses).” Even so, the benefits are often so great that some women often choose to treat the side effects rather than lower the dosage.

The authors also admit that, yes, pharmacologic and supra-pharmacologic doses of T are used to transform female-to-male transgender patients and that it may result in increased facial hair growth, hirsutism in general, and slight enlargement of the clitoris, but these effects are often largely reversible by simply lowering the dose.

Even so, an enlarged clitoris is not a medical problem, only a superficial cosmetic one that might invite embarrassment even though, in many cases, the additional length or girth can enhance sexual pleasure.

So no, when used in normal replacement doses, testosterone doesn’t masculinize women; it largely does the opposite.