Taking T for Jesus

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 guests, Don Colbert, who bills himself as “America’s #1 Doctor for Faith and Preventative Medicine,” and his wife, Mary, contend that hormone therapy can keep elderly women (and men) in divine health. According to the Colberts, testosterone therapy for women clears brain fog, removes belly fat, prevents wrinkles, cures migraine, enhances libido, and generally restores one’s zeal for life. After seeing the Colberts’ segments on Kenneth Copeland’s Victory Channel and The Jim Bakker Show, and reading Don’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.”

But while the Lord purportedly designed each member of humankind to be easily sorted between two genders, like the animals on Noah’s ark, it seems that people at and after midlife sometimes need a little assistance to help them perform their God-given gender more perfectly. A 2019 post on Copeland’s Victory Channel website, “3 Ways Hormones Keep You in Divine Health,” cites Colbert for the proposition that believers don’t have to settle for “getting old and tired” and that “God is calling His people into divine health, healing and wholeness.” But to be part of the “thriving, disease-resistant Church,” you’re probably going to need a prescription for hormones—or at least maybe to try one of a number of hormone-boosting supplements from Don Colbert’s Divine Health store. The essence of the pitch is that there is a certain amount of testosterone established by God for elderly Christians to restore their most essential manliness or womanliness and that, via God, Colbert knows what that amount is. 

In Dr. Colbert’s Hormone Health Zone: Lose Weight, Restore Energy, Feel 25 Again!, he writes that “many of the troubles we face in marriage are the result of our testosterone levels going lower and lower.” He suggests that men are sick of their sexless marriages and women are disgusted by their couch-potato husbands. But when women’s testosterone levels get fixed, “their curves start to come back, and they have boundless energy, feel great, and are loving life again.” Whatever they do, he suggested on a talk show recently, women should take care not to let “the old lady hormone estrone [take] over.”

Hormone replacement therapy is frequently prescribed, usually on a short-term basis, to treat symptoms of menopause such as insomnia, hot flashes, and low libido. At one time the medical establishment believed that replacing lost hormones indefinitely during and after the transition to menopause would improve women’s overall health, but studies have revealed serious risks that now are generally seen to outweigh the possible benefits for people over age sixty-five. Colbert and Copeland claim that these risks arise because most hormones prescribed by doctors are synthetic, whereas the ones Colbert pitches are bioidentical. “To prevent feebleness and frailty, we need optimal hormone levels,” explains another helpful post on the Victory Channel website. “But synthetic hormones can cause disease and negative side effects. Bioidentical hormones are the safe and effective way to optimize hormone levels.”

For what it’s worth, this view isn’t widely shared in the medical community. Both synthetic and bioidentical hormone treatments are processed in a laboratory. The difference is that bioidenticals are engineered to have the same molecular structure as hormones produced by the human body. They tend to be produced in compounding pharmacies, exempting them from FDA regulation. (Somewhat confusingly, traditional hormone treatments may also be bioidentical, but aren’t marketed that way.) According to Kaiser Permanente, “there is no evidence to support [the claim that bioidentical hormones are safer]. Both bioidentical and synthetic hormones are made in a laboratory—the main difference is the raw ingredient.” A Harvard Medical School blog post notes that “bioidenticals may be riskier [than synthetics], because they aren’t scrutinized or tested by the FDA to verify dose and purity.” A clinical consensus statement from the American Congress of Obstetricians and Gynecologists says much the same.

Like other forms of hormone replacement therapy, bioidenticals may increase the risk of blood clots and stroke. Sex hormones are particularly risky for a patient who has had a stroke or has a family history of heart or cardiovascular disease. My mom would seem not to be an ideal candidate given her own history of strokes (at least two), her mom’s history of strokes, her father’s death from a heart attack, and her grandfather’s death from a cerebral hemorrhage. But she didn’t hesitate. When my stepsister raised concerns, my mom scoffed that she wasn’t a “shrinking violet” and would “rather go out with a bang” than live a life of fear. So she was, at least to some extent, aware of the risks. (Just weeks after I learned about her hormone regimen, my mom collapsed from a clot in her main cerebral artery. The procedure she had to clear it is risky, but she pulled through.)

In many ways, my mom has always been an outlier insofar as notions of “biblical womanhood” are concerned. In her youth, before she became a believer, she swore, drank, smoked, chased frat boys, visited strip clubs for laughs, got divorced, worked as an early programmer, and ran a cat rescue. She didn’t like babies—except, she maintained, her own. She had no interest in joining the PTA or making cupcakes for bake sales or otherwise being, as she put it with a tremendous roll of her eyes, “Supermom.” Even after her conversion to evangelical Christianity, when she started studying the Bible for herself, she got my family kicked out of various churches—including the Southern Baptists—for arguing with the preachers about whether women could be pastors and whether prophesying and speaking in tongues were still possible for Christians today. Eventually she started her own church, where she continued to argue with men about whether God “called women to lead.”

Going back to my grandmother, who raised my mom on her own in the 1940s and 1950s, and suffered foolish men not at all once she kicked my grandfather to the curb, none of the women in my family, myself very much included, are submissive or retiring or particularly strive to evoke the Madonna in any way. My mom is forceful, declarative, often more able to identify with the projects of men than the traditional home-and-hearth focus of women. In that sense, on reflection, it wasn’t so surprising that my mother would find her way to testosterone. What surprised me was that she believed Jesus endorsed it, even as she’s fully in favor of legislation banning hormones for trans and nonbinary people.

She’s not alone. Evangelical Christianity is a big tent of factions, many of whom revile one another, but the proportion of believers who endorse hormone therapy that enables Christians to more fully manifest traditional gender roles in keeping with biological sex appears to be growing. Copeland and other Charismatic Christians of the tongues-speaking, faith-healing, demon-exorcising type who’ve hosted and endorsed Colbert and his hormone therapy gospel may not be well known in the mainstream population, but with Pentecostals they represent an enormously popular and rapidly growing segment of the evangelical church. Casting trans people as instruments of Satan is a common theme, and most other evangelicals, from the Southern Baptist Conference to the Presbyterian Church in America, join them in embracing biological essentialism. “Our true identity, as male and female persons, is given by God. It is not only foolish, but hopeless, to try to make ourselves what God did not create us to be,” says a 2017 statement released by the Council of Biblical Manhood and Womanhood that was signed by more than 150 evangelical leaders, including James Dobson of Focus on the Family. Of course, there are outliers. The Evangelical Lutheran Church in America and Presbyterian Church, for instance, appear to allow ordination of trans clergy; the Episcopal Church is openly inclusive of the LGTBQ+ community, but as a liturgical branch of Protestantism it is not generally understood to be an evangelical denomination.  

It can be difficult for a nonbeliever to access full-throated faith-based conversations among Christians about hormones, but eavesdropping on chat forums, including on Reddit channels, confirms the kinds of conversations I would have expected. A common question is whether taking hormone therapy is a sin. Responses vary, but tend to fall in three camps. Some suggest, for example, that due to changes from pesticides, microplastics, and other environmental pollutants many men may need testosterone supplements to reach God-intended levels. Others maintain that hormone therapy is appropriate only in cases where a specific believer needs a particular sex hormone to manifest their (sorry, his or her) biological sex in the traditional way. Still others take the position that hormone issues should be addressed more naturally, through changes in diet and exercise. One thing that just about everyone in these forums does agree on is that a trans person taking hormones for gender confirmation is an abomination. Among evangelicals who believe that there’s a place for hormone therapy, all but the most inclusive view it as a form of perfecting, confirming, and sanctifying the ideal Christian subject—the man or woman more perfectly manifesting their creation in God’s image.

My mom didn’t always get her health advice from preachers on TV. Growing up in the 1940s, she had playmates who lost limbs to polio. When I was little, she often told me how relieved she was that vaccines would protect me from the worst childhood diseases. Measles could cause deafness, she said, and mumps sterility. But even with modern medicine, I was a sickly kid. My mom grew exhausted by my childhood allergies and perpetual illnesses. At the same time, she began to reject the catechism of our Presbyterian church, which presented everything bad that happened as God’s will, including the death of our neighbor’s child in a car accident. Turning toward Charismatic Christianity, she came to view sickness as the devil’s handiwork and to believe that faith in God would keep it away.

Soon she was practicing faith healing herself, laying hands on people in our living room so that they could throw away their crutches or chemo medication. If this didn’t happen, she maintained, it was because they lacked faith. She still took me to the doctor and kept my vaccinations current, and occasionally she sought the advice of a physician herself, but after I grew up, most of her remaining links to the medical establishment fell away. In the late 2000s, she opted to ingest colloidal silver and pray rather than seek a doctor’s care for a case of pneumonia that ultimately confined her to the hospital for a week. And of course, throughout the worst of Covid, she scoffed at masks, reviled the vaccine, and very well may have taken ivermectin, which I know she had on hand for preventing fleas and ticks in her dogs.

I struggle sometimes to explain why people in my mom’s branch of the church look to their spiritual leaders for medical advice. When I was growing up, the emphasis among Charismatic Christians was on pure faith healing. A TV preacher might sell you books or sermons on tape, or a prayer cloth—anointed scraps of fabric that were all over our house growing up—but their main product was faith in God. The shift toward lifestyle advice and health supplements occurred more recently. I suspect the motivations behind this shift were more than a little mercenary. But whether or not the preachers peddling these wares wholeheartedly believe in what they’re selling or just want to make a quick buck, they’ve exalted themselves into a role that would otherwise be held by medical professionals, and they’ve characterized those professionals as quacks and themselves as trustworthy ambassadors of healing in accordance with the dictates of God.

Believers buy products like Jim Bakker’s “Silver Solution” (marketed to protect against Covid, a claim that got Bakker sued by Missouri’s attorney general) or Colbert’s Divine Health Hormone Zone because faith leaders like Copeland and Bakker present themselves as prophets, and thus as the direct mouthpiece of God. Trusting them is tied up with faith. It’s an extension of the common evangelical idea that the Old Testament prophets and the New Testament disciples and apostles essentially served as God’s stenographers and that the Bible is the direct “word of God,” rather than the opinion of someone who believed in God.

While the Bible itself may not opine on the merits of testosterone injections, Copeland’s endorsement is often as good as God’s, which might go some way toward explaining how he has amassed an alleged estimated net worth of $760 million and why he is often described as the wealthiest pastor in the United States. In the eyes of believers, substances endorsed by these self-styled prophets become sanctified by their affiliation with faith leaders, as opposed to the ungodly medicines dispensed by secular clinicians. And so: yes, believe in God for health and healing, but know that God also wants you to spend $45 on Dr. Colbert’s Divine Health Testosterone Zone.

As one Kenneth Copeland Ministries post puts it, “The devil is the author of confusion. To prevent men and women from receiving life-giving treatment, he has instilled a fear in people and the medical community about hormone treatments.” Hormone skeptics, in other words, are doing the devil’s work. Except, of course, when they’re condemning trans people. Then they’re working for the Lord.