Hegseth and the MAGA male aesthetic

The Trump administration has denounced puberty blockers and hormone therapy for transgender minors as “chemical mutilation”. Last week, it made clear it has no similar qualms about injecting US soldiers with testosterone.

Liberal lawmakers and military veterans seized on that contradiction when Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth announced that US service members aged 30 and older found to have low “T” levels would be offered testosterone replacement therapy (TRT).

“Pete Hegseth comes out in favour of gender-affirming care,” Adam Schiff, a Democratic senator from California, wrote on X.

Hegseth’s detractors have portrayed the TRT initiative as a perfect illustration of the Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement’s fixation with virility and bodily optimisation, and its belief that gender expression should be firmly binary.

Cultural critics have long noted the Trump world’s penchant for muscular, ready-for-prime-time men and glamorous, hyper-feminine women with unmistakable cosmetic enhancements.

They have ridiculed the “Mar-a-Lago Face”, a look synonymous with fillers, Botox and ultra-white veneers. In their view, Hegseth’s championing of “high-T” warriors is the latest manifestation of the MAGA aesthetic.

“It’s gender as performance,” said Juliet Williams, professor of gender studies at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). “It’s completely cartoonish.”

But Hegseth’s move also reflects the new, hard-edged masculinity that has seeped into right-wing politics from the so-called manosphere, the sprawling network of online influencers whose support for Donald Trump was seen as a crucial factor in his 2024 US presidential election victory.

It is a world infused with testosterone, as evinced by right-wing media star Tucker Carlson’s 2022 documentary The End Of Men, which presented the decline in testosterone levels and sperm counts as a public health crisis and counselled men to use red-light therapy on their testicles to stimulate hormone production.

Meredith Jones, professor of gender and cultural studies at Brunel University of London, sees the phenomenon as part of a “backlash against gender fluidity”, “the trans movement (and) homosexuality”.

She argued that it was comparable to the reaction that set in after World War II, when women of the “Rosie the Riveter” generation, who had entered the labour force in droves and “taken men’s jobs”, were pushed back into traditional domestic roles.

The hypermasculinisation of the American right comes at a time when men’s dominance in society is being eroded, experts say, though they argue that testosterone is unlikely to restore their former status.

“There’s no question that there’s increasing uncertainty among men about their place in the world,” said Kathleen Gerson, professor of sociology at New York University. “But the answer is not returning to a time when physical strength was the determining factor of who did what. The answer is not testosterone.”

Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr would no doubt beg to differ. Kennedy, who has filmed himself working out with musician Kid Rock and sliding into an ice-cold bath with his jeans on, has admitted using TRT.

He has also gone out of his way to praise Trump’s high “T” levels. “He has the constitution of a deity,” Kennedy said on a podcast in January hosted by Katie Miller, wife of White House deputy chief of staff Stephen Miller.

Mehmet Oz, a top Trump health official, had recently looked over the President’s health records, Kennedy said, and found he had “the highest testosterone level that he’s ever seen for an individual over 70 years old”.

MAGA’s testosterone fixation comes at a time when physical attractiveness is increasingly seen as social currency – a trend reinforced by the “looksmaxxing” movement that has flourished during Trump’s second term.

One of the movement’s most prominent influencers, the 20-year-old streamer Braden Peters, also known as “Clavicular”, has admitted to experimenting with testosterone while still a teenager and using hammers to reshape his cheekbones.

“Appearance has become a dominant value, such that who we are is how we look,” said Heather Widdows, professor of philosophy at Warwick University and author of Perfect Me: Beauty As An Ethical Ideal.

“We are literally writing ourselves on our bodies, moving from the cut of the dress to the cut of the breast,” she added.

Trump officials have insisted that Hegseth’s plan is all about health, not appearance.

Brian Christine, assistant health secretary, said men with hypogonadism – the clinical term for testosterone deficiency – had decreased fertility and contributed to higher rates of obesity, diabetes and heart disease.

“They have a one-to-two-time greater risk of death, greater risk of mortality from all causes,” he said. “This is about making our war fighters optimised to do their job to protect us and carry out their critical missions.”

But others describe the talk of testosterone as performative, akin to Hegseth’s stated intolerance of beards and overweight generals. In a speech to military commanders at Quantico, Virginia, in September 2025, he declared there would be “no more beardos”, adding that it was “completely unacceptable to see fat generals and admirals”.

Becca Balint, a Democratic Congress member, even sees parallels between Hegseth’s jacked aesthetic and the work of Tom of Finland, the gay artist famous for his hypermasculine sailors and lumberjacks.

She noted the contrast between the “intense”, even at times “homoerotic”, relationship that some members of the Trump administration appear to have with masculinity, and their “not just homophobic, but, like, hate-mongering, fear-mongering about the LGBTQ community”.

Williams at UCLA makes a direct connection between the testosterone announcement and the administration’s policies targeting gender-non-conforming people.

Under Trump, the US government has attempted to restrict gender-affirming care for minors, exclude trans girls from competing in female school sports and bar transgender people from serving in the US military.

“From the start, Hegseth has been about purging the military of anyone he feels is not by birthright entitled to its privileges,” she said. “It’s a way of putting men back in the centre, with respect to the military.”

The Defence Secretary revealed his screening plan hours after blocking the promotion of seven Navy officers – five of whom were women or people of colour – to two-star admiral. A Pentagon spokesperson declined to comment.

Mark Hertling, a retired general, said that after Hegseth’s video was posted on X, he had received a text from a female colonel bemoaning the fact that women were being pulled off promotion lists while “we’re talking about giving more assets to the male soldiers”.

“She said, ‘I wish we would quit worrying about low-T’ and start worrying a little bit more about low-IQ’,” he told cable channel MS NOW.

Michael Kimmel, author of Manhood In America, said that Hegseth, who once spoke out against women serving in combat, had consistently pursued policies aimed at reinforcing traditional gender roles in the military.

“The Trump administration, of which Pete Hegseth is a prime example, are true believers in gender politics circa 1950,” he said. “It means male breadwinners going off to fight dragons in the corporate jungle and tradwife women staying home, having babies and taking care of the house.”

The problem, he added, was that the traditional view of gender roles was out of sync with a world in which both parents often had to work. “Women’s participation in the labour force is not optional,” Kimmel said. Financial Times