Sexing Hormones, Sexing Prostates

Posted: Wed, Mar 25, 2026

Today

If you enjoyed reading the ovulation chapter, let Beck know!! (These emails from students make our day!)
My interest in the sociology of sex biology literature:
- Understand the biology of sex
- Interrogate the biology of sex
- Convince you that you need philosophy to do good science
Try our hand at T in ovulation, P in cis women
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- Pacific APA in April
- Fall 2026 course: Philosophy & Feminism

There are not just two of them.
All of them are derived from cholesterol.
They are interconvertible: Testosterone can be metabolized into estradiol by aromatization.
They are not exclusive to each sex.
- Fausto-Sterling tells the story of a 1934 study “variously described by other scientists as ‘surprising,’ ‘anomalous,’ ‘curious,’ ‘unexpected,’ and ‘paradoxical,’ ” in which “the German scientist Bernhard Zondek described his discovery of the ‘mass excretion of oestrogenic hormone in the urine of the stallion’—that cherished mythic symbol of virility.”
They are functional! E.g., testosterone perhaps plays a necessary role in ovulation (Jordan-Young & Karkazis).
They are not just about sex: The brain, the lung, the bone, the skin, …

The “male” & “female” hormones: Assumed to exist on philosophical grounds, to be located by science.
First identification: Measure effects of gonadal extracts on castrated animals.
- Testosterone ~ testes ~ cockscomb growth in capons (castrated male chickens)
- The “ovarian” hormone ~ “changes in the cellular contents of the vaginal secretion of the rat or mouse” (R.U. vs. M.U.)
First purification: Urine from pregnant women and Berlin police officers.

Steroid hormones may be a more neutral name?

The “heterosexual hormones” view:
- “They’re just nutritional by-products with no connection to the gonads. (So suggested Robert T. Frank, who claimed that ‘‘all ordinary foodstuffs contain female sex hormone. An average-sized potato contains at least 2 M.U.)”
- Others “argued that the heterosexual hormones indicated a diseased state. Although the men from whom estrogen was extracted appeared to be normal, they might, perhaps, be latent hermaphrodites.’ ”
The “bisexual” hormones view: “[In the 1930s,] Korenchevsky and co-workers referred to such hormones as ‘bisexual’ and proposed to group both androgens and estrogens according to this property. Only one hormone (progesterone—from the corpus luteum) could they envision as purely male or female. They designated a second group as ‘partially bisexual,’ some with chiefly male properties, others with predominantly female ones. Finally, they proposed the existence of ‘true bisexual hormones,’ ones that cause a return to ‘the normal condition of all the atrophied sex organs . . . to the same degree in both male and female rats.’ Testosterone belonged to this group.”

Tuana’s point: Nature does not speak for itself; what it says requires our interpretation.