My latest essay, “Taking T for Jesus,” on the transphobic evangelicals hawking hormones, and also developments closer to home, is up from The Baffler today. Here’s how it starts:
A few years ago, my then-eighty-year-old mom started taking testosterone to improve her health and sex life. As with most of her major life decisions, she got the idea from a guest on a televangelist’s talk show. The guest, Don Colbert, bills himself as “America’s #1 Doctor for Faith and Preventative Medicine” and with his wife and podcast sidekick, Mary Colbert, contends that hormone therapy can keep elderly women (and men) in “divine health,” so that “the peace of God comes upon you and you sleep like a baby.” According to the Colberts, testosterone therapy for women clears brain fog, removes belly fat, prevents wrinkles, cures migraine, restores sex drive and the ability to climax, and generally returns women’s zeal for life. After seeing the Colberts’ segments on Kenneth Copeland’s Victory Channel and The Jim Bakker Show, and reading Colbert’s book about bioidentical hormones, my mom tracked down a doctor willing to prescribe her testosterone—and a little progesterone for good measure. She opted for an implant injected into her butt every three months, joining the approximately 2 to 7 percent of women over sixty-five who take hormone therapy.
Having survived multiple strokes, my mom was at high risk for complications, so she didn’t want me to know about the hormone therapy at first. I only found out in 2022, when she’d been on it for about two years. It probably goes without saying, but in almost any other context, my mom and her favorite preachers condemn people who undergo sex-hormone treatment. Trans people are possessed by demons; they are destroying families, threatening children, and ushering in the end of the world, according to Copeland and his ilk. “We were created male and female in the image of God,” the Copeland Network tweeted in October 2020. “In causing people to question their gender, what Satan is really doing is causing people to doubt the image of God.”