You Were a Misogynist Before Testosterone:
A Response to an Episode of This American Life
I haven’t listened to This American Life in a while. But yesterday morning I saw their episode from Sunday, a re-released fifteen-year-old episode titled “Testosterone”. I pressed play.
Now, full disclosure, I was skeptical from the beginning. For a bit of context, I’m a genderfluid, femmy trans man and I’ve been taking testosterone for almost eight years. And between my education and activism I’ve learned to question the sensationalized narratives that are circulated around hormones and trans folks.
Hormones come up in narratives invented by Trans Exclusionary Radical Feminism (TERF) around trans women, to baselessly argue that trans women are not women. TERFs claim that testosterone makes trans women inherently dangerous and violent toward cis women (women assigned female at birth), despite the fact that cis women also have testosterone.[i]
With trans men, testosterone is often used to reinforce ideas of toxic masculinity, encouraging stereotypes about men as hypersexual, aggressive, angry, emotionally stunted beasts who want to hump everything they see. I see these narratives everywhere, from ‘activist’-leaning online forums to mainstream media.
Unfortunately, This American Life not only reproduces this reductive narrative in its 2002 and 2017 releases of this episode, but also reinforces misogyny and toxic masculinity.
Ira Glass introduces an interview of a trans man named Griffin Hansbury with producer Alex Blumberg halfway through Act I of the episode. Ira tells us, “A warning to listeners that they talk about looking at women and wanting sex during this interview”. Provided with this statement, I brace myself for an onslaught of misogyny, but still find myself appalled at how bad it becomes.
Griffin explains how he used to identify as a butch lesbian and came out as trans during his sophomore year of college. Kind of like me, minus the butch, so I relate to that. Alex asks Griffin to explain some of the changes he experienced after taking testosterone, to which Griffin answers an increased libido. Sure, this is a thing that many folks who take testosterone experience, of course to varying degrees. But Griffin elaborates that taking testosterone made him understand adolescent boys and men much more than he had previously. How, you might ask? Well, testosterone seems to have made Griffin empathize with why boys and men objectify and sexually harass women.
Griffin explains that due to his increased libido from testosterone, even the sight of an “unattractive woman’s ankles” would “flood [his] mind with aggressive, pornographic images”.
Even the sight of an unattractive woman’s ankles would lead him to aggressively sexualize a woman. Oh, God.
Griffin then tells a story of walking behind a woman wearing a “tiny” skirt and shirt, and how he kept on staring at her ass. He continues, “And I, I walked past her and this voice in my head kept saying ‘Turn around to look at her breasts, turn around, turn around, turn around.’ And my, my, you know my feminist female background said, you know, ‘Don’t you dare, you pig, don’t turn around.’ And you know, I fought myself for a whole block and then I, I turned around and checked her out.”
A whole block! Imagine the strength it took to walk a whole block without sexualizing a woman. Talk about self-control, because testosterone sure makes it hard to be a respectful and decent human being. You sure this is all because of testosterone, Griffin?
But y’all, it gets so much worse.
Alex probes again — sure the increased sex drive and misogyny, because of testosterone, obviously! But were there other changes, Griffin?
Get ready for it, folks.
“I became interested in science. I was never interested in science before.” Alex and Griffin laugh, but Griffin insists that he’s serious. Laughing, Alex tells him, “You’re just setting us back a hundred years, sir.” Griffin responds, “I know. I mean, and again I have to have this caveat in here, I cannot say it was the testosterone. All I can say is this interest happened after T… I found myself understanding physics in a way I never had before.” Alex and Griffin laugh.
As I heard this I gasped and my jaw dropped to the floor. I had to move to the next subway car, jaw in tow, because people were staring.
I wanted to throw my phone and scream ‘Are you fucking kidding me?!’ to Griffin, Alex, and This American Life. But maybe that was just the testosterone in my system talking. What a nice, tidy excuse for being a jerk!
Folks, there are so many reasons why anybody can become interested in science, none of which are connected to the hormone levels in your body.
Maybe he caught a late night Carl Sagan special, or got lost in a Wikipedia vortex on string theory. Maybe it’s just normal for people of all genders in their early twenties to find that they develop new interests. But who knows, because all Griffin attributes his newly discovered interest in science and understanding of physics to is testosterone, the magic hormone of rational, scientific, logical man minds. (Except when it comes to respecting women as humans. That’s apparently extremely difficult.)
For cisgender readers — as a trans person who’s been taking testosterone for close to eight years and who knows many other people who take testosterone, I want you to know that testosterone doesn’t make you a misogynist. It’s as laughable as the statement that testosterone makes you interested in science (#distractinglysexy, anyone?). Testosterone didn’t make Griffin a misogynist, nor did it suddenly send beams of empathy rushing into his brain for boys and men who sexually harass women.
Griffin was a misogynist before taking testosterone.
Griffin tells Alex that before he was on testosterone, he would go to poetry readings and read poems about women on the street. But now it’s different because he’s seen as a jerk when talking about women like that. He and Alex laugh. Because, you know, objectifying women is so funny. At another point in the interview, Griffin and Alex relate to the difficulty of saying things to women “without getting in trouble”. They laugh, again, together.
Griffin tells Alex, “You know, I call myself a post-feminist and I had a woman say, ‘You’re not a post-feminist, you’re a misogynist.’ And I said ‘You know, that’s impossible, I can’t be a misogynist.’ I couldn’t explain to her, you know, how I had come to this point in my life. And to her I was just a misogynist. And that’s, that’s unfortunate because it’s a lot more complicated than that.”
Except it’s not complicated.
Having been assigned female at birth does not render your misogyny complicated, nor does it excuse your misogyny or mean that you are not a misogynist. Beyond simply being incorrect, Griffin’s assertion that he cannot be misogynist follows an unfortunate habit of some trans men. When trans men claim that they can’t possibly contribute to the oppression of women because they used to identify as women or at some point experienced the world as women, that completely undermines women’s experiences of patriarchy, and silences women who try to call them out on the misogyny they reproduce.
Patriarchy, femmephobia, toxic-masculinity, and (trans)misogyny make you a misogynist. If you’re a creep to women, it’s because your misogyny has gone unchecked for most of your life, although I’m sure tons of women have actually called you out. You just haven’t listened.
When trans men argue that they can’t be misogynist because they were socialized as women, it further erases that women can also reinforce and reproduce misogyny. Of course Griffin could get away with sexualizing women at poetry readings as a butch dyke, because masculinity is prioritized in queer circles just as much as it is everywhere else. Masculine LGBTQ people can reproduce systems of power by objectifying feminine people and reducing them to sexual objects. It sounds like Griffin may have enjoyed this particular leniency.
And of course, Griffin’s whiteness further allows him and Alex to laugh at his objectification and sexual harassment of women. This light-hearted banter wouldn’t happen if Griffin were Black or Brown.
It’s been fifteen years since this interview was aired on This American Life and I find it alarming that they re-released an episode like this, completely uncritically, in 2017. That somehow these misogynist theatrics and damaging trans narratives were allowed to be aired again. I know that misogyny has no end date; I witness it every day and I am certainly not naïve or politically negligent enough to be surprised by its presence. But I expected at least a little more thought, awareness, reflection, and a critical re-visit from This American Life.
[i] I don’t want to give TERFs any space in this article, but for more information on their ideas and how they discriminate against trans women check out pieces written by Cristan Williams, theterfs.com, Kat Haché, Julia Serano, and other trans women.
*Thanks to Morgan Sea, Tobias, and Mona Luxion for their thoughtful comments on my initial Facebook post about this episode. And to the brilliant, majestic femmes Janet M and Krista Burton for offering me their incredible feedback and time to proof-read.
