Yes, Those "Hormones" Are Steroids
How Feelings About Anabolics Show People's Inconsistency on the Matter of Gender Transition
It is pretty clear that people who embrace intellectual fads do so without thinking about how these new beliefs affect prior beliefs. Here is an example.
If it is okay to give a biological female steroids, namely testosterone, in order to give her a more masculine looking body as part of gender transition, why is it wrong to give testosterone to a biological male who feels that his body is insufficiently masculine and wants to look more fit and athletic, esp. if he has had trouble reaching his goals through diet and exercise. Or why would it be wrong to give anavar to a woman who wants to look more athletic without changing her identity. In a strange way, one could argue that it is sexist: You can move to the opposite gender, but you cannot move along the spectrum that constitutes your own. A man may not use pharmacology to become more masculine or a woman to become more or less feminine: You must cross or do nothing.
Yet, most individuals who are in favor of using the steroid testosterone as part of gender transition would still instinctively oppose its use except for those extreme medical conditions where it is the accepted treatment. (Anavar is used to treat severe burn injuries and AIDS related wasting.)
Of course, what happened is that people formed their ideas about steroids in the 1980's based on arguments that were largely concerned with maintaining the integrity of intergenerational comparisons of sporting figures ("the integrity of baseball" was a common term). Anyone familiar with this particular form of argument knows that it is only slightly superior to making arguments about whether Spiderman or Batman would win in a fight to the death and that it made relatively little sense to ban anabolics.
You can argue the other way, though -- this kind of drug-use is perverse, so doctors shouldn't be prescribing these drugs to confused girls.
Have you noticed the wall between users and non-users in gyms? It's like the wall between junkies and non-junkies.. The users speak quietly among themselves and seem to avoid eye-contact with non-users.
Not that the stuff should be banned. It's just too bad that it's out there. Which is true of a lot of things -- the internet, for example.