Pete Hegseth's Focus on Male Health

Testosterone and the Culture Wars

Earlier this week, U.S. Secretary of Defense, Pete Hegseth, announced the “High-T Department of War,” a different look at male health in an age that has seen decreasing testosterone levels. Secretary Hegseth is making a commitment to testing military men thirty-years-of-age and over for testosterone deficiency as part of the “periodic health assessment.” Annual health assessments are required, and this simply adds one more important male measure. For those under thirty, testosterone testing is optional. The purpose is a commitment to better understanding male health and the longevity of the soldier’s health to perform at his best physically and mentally, not only as a soldier but “long after taking off the uniform.”

“If treatment is recommended [for a soldier with testosterone deficiency], it’s entirely your choice to receive testosterone replacement therapy (bold my emphasis). This initiative, it’s not about artificial enhancements. It’s about restoring and optimizing your natural capabilities, protecting your longevity, and ensuring you have the biological foundation required to sustain the fight. We owe our warriors the absolute best medical care in the world…. Taking care of your long-term health means ensuring you remain strong, resilient, and capable. Not just for your next deployment but for the rest of your live, so you can thrive long after you take off the uniform.”

Before moving forward, it’s important to understand that low-testosterone (Low-T) and testosterone deficiency are somewhat different. Low-T is when a male’s range falls below normal levels and is not chronic in nature. “The diagnosis of low testosterone should be made only after two total testosterone measurements are taken on separate occasions with both conducted in an early morning fashion.” The problem may result from sleep deprivation, obesity, incredibly rigorous training without proper recovery—like extreme military training, and other factors that may be temporary but impact performance. Aging is another contributing factor to Low-T. Testosterone deficiency is a chronic problem where testosterone levels are continually below the minimum range and impact one’s function over long periods of time. “The clinical diagnosis of testosterone deficiency is only made when patients have low total testosterone levels combined with symptoms and/or signs.”

For Hegseth, how does testosterone deficiency impact a soldier’s physical and mental health and performance? That question, if properly expanded, will leads us to a broader existential question: how significant is testosterone deficiency in the general male population? Some of those questions are already being answered.

We know that low testosterone is a comorbidity and impacts physical and mental health, something Michael Gurian and I discuss in Boys, A Rescue Plan: Moving Beyond the Politics of Masculinity to Healthy Male Development. It’s the B-title of the book “Moving Beyond the Politics of Masculinity to Healthy Male Development” that is at the crux of this particular conversation.

Modern arguments in academia, media, and government tend to focus on the social construct of masculinity with lesser attention to the details of male nature itself. There is a marriage of these things, of course, and as discussed in the last article, we must nurture the nature and not treat nature as a secondary component to life or something that simply shape-shifts with the whims of ideological fancies.

The High-T and Low-T arguments are more political in nature for a lot of reasons. The High-T vs Low-T argument certainly gained popularity during the 2024 presidential election and continues to do so today.

“Dads are lower-T and that’s mostly good” by Darby Saxbe appeared in the most recent Of Boys and Men Substack as part of her book, Dad Brain. Saxbe partly argues that “as our understanding of masculinity has changed over the last century, worrying about men’s T has become a way to hearken back to traditional masculinity ideals.”

Male nature has certainly not changed in the last half century, but it is true that masculinity—and femininity— have been rebranded in academia, media, and government in a way that lays-siege-against “traditional masculinity ideals.” Testosterone has now become part of the rebranding campaign that normalizes Low-T and lessons the significant role testosterone plays in human development.

Arguments about the natural lowering of testosterone associated with siring children is part of the natural life cycle. That episodic change should not be correlated with the significant drops we have seen in testosterone over the last several decades for a number of reasons that are more unhealthy than healthy.

Testosterone deficiency is certainly not a desirable goal, yet Low-T and testosterone deficiency are being used interchangeably. It is being ideologically celebrated as a type of new ideal too often at the expense of its real consequences, the reasons for its occurrence, and the inability to understand the role of testosterone in all phases of male development, from in utero, to fathering, to old age.

Part of the argument around the new masculinity of Low-T is cultural in dimension and formed from a blend of ideology, sociology, and biology with a lesser emphasis on biology so that cultural fixes become the hallmarks of change and the role of testosterone becomes aligned almost solely with violence and not healthy development.

Other ideological arguments are beginning to emerge that wrongly suggest a concern about testosterone deficiency is really an attempt to undermine female authority in the military: “Hegseth is the same guy firing female generals and blocking the promotions of women in leadership, so this testosterone move is just the latest salvo in an undermining of female authority in favor of a cult-like devotion to anabolic steroids.”

Nothing could be further from the truth and those arguments serve as a bait-and-switch, moving the conversation away from male health and toward ideological positions more political in nature.

In a New York Times article in April of this year, Joanne Lipman argued that “Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is purging the military of senior female officers after complaining that the armed forces had become effeminate.”

What Lipman fails to address is the role of the current administration to change policy as well as decrease the percentage of high ranking officials in the military overall, not as any slight against women or men but as a commitment to higher standards, equality under the law, and as a “broader government-wide campaign to slash spending and personnel across federal agencies.”

Lipman draws a false correlative by associating a change in policy to a type of discrimination, even though the data suggests otherwise and the current policy changes do not, in fact, discriminate.

Unreported by Lipman is the key fact that, in 2025, the military saw a surge in female recruitment. In truth, “around 7,260 more women have enlisted so far this fiscal year than at this point last fiscal year: from 16,725 to 23,985,” according to a report by Fox News. That is a 43% increase.

In 2025, Military.com reported that “nearly 10,000 women signed up for active duty in 2024, an 18% jump from the previous year, while male recruitment increased by just 8%, the data shows.”

The 2025 surge is one of the most compelling in fifteen years and Lipman makes no argument that policy changes at the Department of War may be a reason for the female surge in military recruitment. The warrior ethos, often touted by Defense Secretary Hegseth, may appeal to women who want to be judged by their abilities and not simply their sex classification. In other words, there is an argument to be made that equality, not equity, motivated women to join the military. Another consideration is the Department of War’s decision to assign female spaces based on sex (XX) and not gender, a social construct.

Also ignored by Lipman are the number of white-male military officers retiring early—as they say— or being removed from positions.

• Gen. Randy George: The 41st Chief of Staff of the Army, forced to retire in April 2026.

• Gen. James Slife: Air Force Vice Chief of Staff.

• Gen. David M. Hodne: Fired from his role leading the Army’s Transformation and Training Command in April 2026.

• Gen. James J. Mingus (Army Vice Chief of Staff): Forced to step down and retire a year earlier than expected in late 2025.

• Lt. Gen. Jeffrey Kruse (Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency): Fired as part of the string of dismissals under Hegseth’s tenure.

An emphasis on male health, equality, or other things generally receives extra scrutiny from an academic, media, and government class unaccustomed to a topic that wishes to focus solely on males.

Academia, media, and government have spent decades rebranding male & female nature and masculinity & femininity. False correlatives have, unfortunately, become part of that effort. Low-T testosterone has become part of that battle ground in the culture wars, where institutions that shape policy wrongly associates testosterone with violence instead of its inherently good aggression. If testosterone is a violence hormone, so the argument goes, then Low-T must be good, right? Michael Gurian addresses that very fallacy in Boys, A Rescue Plan and other works. Testosterone is not a violence hormone; it’s a healthy aggression hormone. After all, violence and aggression are not the same thing.

Concern for male health can easily become falsely associated with nature essentialism by new masculinity theorists (NMTs). Those arguments may harm and move us away from a commitment to nurture the nature and engage in a process that helps individuals and society thrive. The new masculinity theorist calls for a descriptive and not a prescriptive look at male health as a way to move the conversation. There is some truth in that approach and one that has been used for decades. But like the nature and nurture argument, male well-being must be understood, descriptive, and prescriptive. If we understand, for instance, that testosterone surges in adolescent males, and we describe how that looks in a classroom setting, we can than prescribe a school day and curriculum (the nurturing) arranged around that principle.

The U.S. Department of War’s decision to test for testosterone deficiency is an interesting one that garner’s the ire of the academic class because it focuses squarely on the primary male hormone. This decision, however, may provide us with incredible insights into male health and hopefully be expanded into the public sector—where the leading hormone in male development gets its rightful place and understanding in the field of healthy medicine and other social institutions that work with our boys and men.