@datarama you are technically correct, the best sort of correct! /ref

Yeah, testosterone isn't completely absent at that age, just extremely low compared to the levels you'll see going into puberty.

@Colman it rises and falls. There was a push in the nineties and AIUI the seventies towards more "gender neutral" parenting. But we seem to be swinging away right now.

I am sympathetic to parents because I think you do have to come to terms with the limits of your control. You send your boy off to preschool and he's coming back smashing up all his toys. That's real.

But it's not biologically ordained, and you have the responsibility to counter the messages he's internalising from society at large. To set positive examples of adult behaviour, to maintain clear rules of what is acceptable and what isn't.

The fact that "testosterone made him do it" is being projected onto a four year old boy is proof of how ridiculous the demonisation of a simple sex hormone has become. The lie is taking on a life of its own, free from any sort of scientific rationality.

Biological essentialism of gender is a complete load of balls, if you'll excuse me for that.

And fuck the demonisation of a sex hormone anyway!

I've said it before: testosterone might make you hairy, horny, hungry, and hot, but it does not make you violent. It does not make you destructive. It does not make you anti-empathetic. Those are choices; gender behavioural norms that boys and then men are encouraged by social pressure to conform to, and may reject if they have the strength and the support to do so.

People seem to really want to believe this right now, and in a large part I think this is part of a pushback on trans rights. People are clinging to biological essentialism because the presence of people blithely switching from one sex to another Makes Them Uncomfy. They want to keep their boys and girls in very definite boxes, so said kids don't get ideas.

The other part is of course the antifeminism sweeping society. Presented with the evidence of all the shit that men are responsible for, we seem to have just given up on the entire gender. "Boys will be boys"— testosterone fates half the world to just Being Bad People so we just have to accept that.

Of course, these are not independent factors. They're very much linked.

As far as I can tell, this absolute lie was popularised by a popular book called "raising boys", which claims that boys have a "testosterone spike" when they're four years old.

The paragraph in question says "one scientist has claimed that", followed by admitting that this is "controversial" (that is to say, unsupported by any evidence whatsoever).

But it's really convenient to the argument made by the book, of implicit behavioural differences of girls and boys, and so the author lets the conjecture stand with a wink and a shrug.

Kinda galling talking to my brother and realising he's already written his own son off due to his gender.

"Yeah, he's just destructive, he can't help it. That's just how boys are. You know, because of the testosterone."

"He's four years old. His body hasn't started producing testosterone yet."

"No, I'm pretty sure boys always have testosterone, throughout childhood. You can see it in the way they act."