Testosterone causes early menopause and heart problems in trans men
Kellie-Jay Keen-Minshull said:
“testosterone pushing young women into the menopause then... they will go through no hormones, early menopause... they end up with vaginal atrophy, and actually anecdotally, many of those girls report trouble, problems with their heart with the poisonous testosterone in those levels.”
Menopause is associated with cardiovascular risk and cognitive decline in cisgender women, so the idea that testosterone therapy mimics or causes early menopause sounds medically grounded. Describing testosterone as 'poisonous' at those levels echoes real clinical concerns about hormone levels being out of range.
Menopause is not a matter of which hormone is present; it is what happens when sex hormone production stops and is not replaced. Testosterone therapy maintains physiological hormone levels in trans men, which is the opposite of a hormone-deficient state, and the cardiovascular risks Kelly names are real consequences of hormone deficiency, the very thing testosterone treatment prevents. The word 'poisonous' has no clinical meaning at therapeutic doses: testosterone is a sex hormone that bodies, across sexes, have always produced and relied on, and the aim of treatment is simply to supply what would naturally have been there. A trans man who is put off testosterone by this framing, or whose family refuses to support treatment because of it, is the person who ends up at genuine risk.
What I said at the time:
“No, they, they- ... So what you need to do is give the right amount of hormones so that they have what we call physiological levels of testosterone. So for a trans guy, you're giving exactly the same amount of testosterone that their testicles would have produced if they had them.”
Trans men and their families who are misled into believing that testosterone therapy is inherently dangerous rather than a carefully dosed medical treatment.