#also I hope this makes sense it kinda became rambley bc I had a million and one things to say but didn’t want to give you an essay

[violetsandshrikes]

Can you clarify what you mean when you say people need more information on hormones and don't understand them? I don't think you're TERFy but things have been bad recently.

Sorry this has taken weeks to reply to - I got caught up with uni and then family things, and I was trying to think of a good way to explain what I meant.

From memory, when I posted about needing more hormone education, I meant in the general public as a whole, and stupidly I actually forgot about gender because I was thinking about the rise of the trad era and their beliefs, and a lot of the (sometimes very strange) misinformation they spread about health.

Since getting into animal hormones and working with them, I’ve had a lot of strange questions from different people, whether that be family, friends or strangers. At first I was honestly quite confused and a little horrified at some of them, but it came quickly apparent a lot of people just…don’t have any basic information to work off of, and so it’s really hard for them to take an idea presented and decide if it has any truth to it or not.

One example I’ve seen a lot is people really concerned about testosterone - particularly a lot of men, usually younger, really concerned about their testosterone levels for various reasons. I was at an event and I had heard the older teenage son of a family friend talking to people about how there was basically a movement within governments and heath orgs to give men low testosterone because destroying masculinity and so on. When he mentioned being worried about his own low testosterone, I just simply asked him if he’d requested a blood panel from his doctor. And he wasn’t the only one who looked…genuinely confused. People were arguing that you couldn’t just ask your doctor for a basic blood panel. And I was like uh…yes you can. If your doctor doesn’t want to, that’s usually a pretty good sign that the working relationship isn’t going to be great, and you should seek a new one. A lot of people seemed really confused by this concept as well (which is a whole other concerning kettle of fish).

I think that basic health and biology is already pretty poorly understood by a lot of people for a variety of reasons. Hormones in particular are a bitch because they can be complicated to explain, and because of that, it’s easy for an air of mystery to be added and for them to be used for people to peddle some real bullshit.

Ideally, I think we need more science communication to the general public about what hormones actually are, what they do, that you can ask to have them checked on a basic level and HOW to do that, and genuine signs that you should be concerned about. I think good public health campaigns would help disperse a lot of general misinformation and fear around them.