When Laurel Hubbard was selected for the New Zealand Olympic female weightlifting team, it ignited a controversy that travelled around the world. In becoming the first transgender woman to represent her country (as a woman) at the Olympics, Hubbard landed in the centre of a debate that has been growing ever more impassioned both in sport and society at large.

Somewhere within the complex web of arguments and counterarguments lies the disputed role of an androgen hormone that is often seen as the very essence of masculinity: testosterone. Many supporters of Hubbard maintain that she has such low levels of testosterone, as a result of hormone treatment, that she does not enjoy any advantage over natal female competitors. And some go so far as to suggest that there is little evidence that testosterone confers an advantage anyway.

But opponents of the decision to send her to Japan maintain that the high level of testosterone Hubbard experienced in puberty as a male created a musculature and density of bone structure that do indeed provide an advantage over natal female competitors.

Alongside the scientific claims and counterclaims are a range of cultural assumptions and beliefs that inform our ideas about testosterone and, some suggest, affect the questions we pose and answers we seek.

For most of the past century, testosterone’s role in popular culture was so reductive as to be verging on the comic. Often subject to crass stereotyping and crude extrapolations, it worked as the all-purpose shorthand for macho and aggressive behaviour. Underlying this common caricature, however, was a conception that many people, in particular a number of feminist thinkers, found disturbing.

This issue goes to the heart of who we are as men and