Since steroids are demonized, I had to make a throwaway account. Testosterone does not increase aggression, even when given in doses far above natural limits. [1] [2]

When I'm not programming, my hobby is bodybuilding. To make it as a bodybuilder, you have to use steroids. With a sample size of ~30 (fellow lifters and me), I can tell you that more testosterone makes you calmer, leaner, and bigger. My stress and anxiety on steroid cycles vanishes and all that's left is confidence, even with powerful steroids like trenbolone.

This study was designed by some of the most incompetent people around. Athletes inject long esters every 3-5 days and these guys were doing a shot every 8 weeks. Athletes take additional drugs to control the conversion of testosterone into estrogen (the hormone behind acne and mood swings). If I had designed this protocol, it would've looked like standard Testosterone Replacement Therapy (TRT) plus an injection of nandrolone decanoate every week (which is great because it heals your joints). Of course, good luck selling bi-weekly injections.

For decades we shouted about reefer madness from the rooftops, arrested millions of people and threw them in jail, and expanded corrupt government agencies because marijuana was "dangerous". It seems like we're learning our lesson on that front and I hope we get our act together when it comes to hormones.

[1] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/8855834

[2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12062320

> To make it as a bodybuilder, you have to use steroids.

What does it even mean to "make it" in something you do as a hobby? If you're willing to risk your health to play competitive games, go ahead, but to say you "have to" sounds like you're rationalizing a bit.

I'm trying to get my IFBB pro card. Natural drug-free bodybuilding as a hobby is healthy. What I'm doing is not. I have no delusions about this.

> To make it as a bodybuilder, you have to use steroids.

Does this not disqualify you? Or is everyone just cheating like in cycling?

There are divisions that are tested--monthly polygraphs and urine/blood. You've never heard of them. When people think about bodybuilding, they imagine freaks, which is not a natural state.

In software, we say: good, fast, cheap; pick two. In bodybuilding: big, lean, natural; pick two.

You can have a lot of mass and if you carry extra fat, or you can be shredded to the bone and carry a lot less lean mass. Naturally, the lower fat reserves run, the higher the chance that catabolic hormones break down lean mass. If you want to be big, lean, and win shows, you need to take the growth and steroid hormones to flip some bits on the config files in your muscular/adipose tissue to allow it.

Your DNA is the software for your body. Hormones bind to receptors on cells, get transported into the cell, bind to internal receptors, and then this complete structure moves into the nucleus where it transcribes certain DNA sequences into RNA chains that will be fed through ribosomes to produce proteins (your hardware).

Steroids/hormones (everything from vitamin D to testosterone) is the body's mechanism of editing /etc/* and calling kill -HUP on select daemons. Steroids evolved as the process for doing this because it's biologically impractical to grow a nerve ending to every single cell in the body.

Unless you have a homozygous myostatin deficiency, you can't compete without using them. Very similar to cycling.

You might be thinking of weightlifting, which is not the same as bodybuilding.

This comment is very misleading. These aren't injections of straight hormones. They are hormone esters that are injected into a muscle, where they are slowly released in the blood stream and slowly metabolized to active hormones so as to maintain a steady level of hormone in the serum over a long period of time.

You compare 0.35 mg norethisterone to 200 mg norethisterone enanthate used in the study. The normal dose for women of norethisterone enanthate injection is 200 mg every 8 weeks. The same is true of the testosterone undecanoate used in the study. One injection is released over weeks, not all at once. You mention hypogonadism. In an early study of testosterone decanoate for hypergonadism, they used (almost) exactly the same dose, 1000 mg every 6-9 weeks.

It does seem like the testosterone may have been too much, based on the side effects listed, but you shouldn't come on HN and start posting diatribes when you aren't sure what you're talking about. And if you were sure, well, that's another problem.

>It's an up front dose of 1000mg of testosterone

I've been reading about steroids and from what I understand different esters have different half life/release. Still every side effect described is usually associated with testosterone.

As for aggression, from what I've seen there is no direct relation in most cases but it can affect some (just like not everyone gets acne or hair loss, etc)

I have a lack of faith in the pharmaceutical industry if this is their best attempt at male birth control. Those side effects aren't from testosterone, they're from massive hormone fluctuations, which with 1000mg of testosterone every 8 weeks your gonna get. There's no ester that will increase the half-life by that much, most people get prescribed testosterone cypionate, which is considered a long ester, and it's half-life is only 8 days.

The 1000mg every 8 weeks is pretty much for marketing and sales, because having to get an injection every 2 months is already a turn off for their consumer base let alone get an injection more frequent than that.

So basically it's a horribly flaw experiment with little practical insight to be drawn from the results, or the lack there of.

"There is evidence that testosterone levels are higher in individuals with aggressive behavior, such as prisoners who have committed violent crimes."[1]

There are a lot of confounding variables when you're looking at a prison population.

I'm still not sure if you're serious with your comment about decreasing women's rights or if this is possibly the greatest troll comment in history.