Testosterone is overrated

Forget balls, ovaries are the metaphor for courage now

Secretary of Forever War and frat house caricature Pete Hegseth is worried that his soldiers are turning into a bunch of sissies. He recently announced that soldiers over 30 will undergo mandatory testing for testosterone.¹

Apparently testosterone makes you a better fighter. After all, what do women know about fighting? It’s not like our ovaries have been training for combat since age twelve or anything.

This week I’m on vacation with my sister, mom, and kids, so I’m sharing this piece I wrote a year ago that feels relevant today.

Forget balls, ovaries are the metaphor for courage now

Talk to any human with ovaries, and they’ll tell you that the real “enemy within” resides within our bodies.

Our ovaries wage a battle every month, leaving us incapacitated, writhing in pain, and bleeding from the inside out. We are rendered weak, iron deficient, and hollow boned, all in the name of humanity‘s self-preservation. It is our unasked-for act of self-sacrifice.

This is why ovary-bearers are fighters by nature. Sure, men have more testosterone and thus more aggression, which is why my beamish one-year-old boy would yeet a perfect Easter egg on the rock and watch it break in delight while my daughter coddled it like a baby chick.

And yet. She still learned to fight. And how. The moment my daughter realized the world was unjust and her agency commensurate with her size, she discovered her inner Athena (who, incidentally, is her favorite of all Greek goddesses).

Everyone knows that balls are sensitive, especially when hit. But ovaries are monthly bitches. Every month, our ovaries try to cripple us, and we keep going! We fight nature every month, just like we endure mansplaining from men who are less informed, educated, and qualified.

My daughter is every woman who’s felt the sting of injustice. Who has found that her voice is her best and only weapon.

In town halls, encrypted servers, protests, and rallies, it’s the women who are speaking out. It’s the women who have the balls — ahem, ovaries — to speak up.

For years, men and their brave balls have commanded the stage. Cojones became the metaphor for courage. In the many years I lived in Latin America, I learned at least five expressions for the male genitalia.

Women in fairytales and ‘80s movies relied on men to save them. But throughout history, it’s been the women who fought back and stood up for justice:

Cassandra, Lysistrata, Harriet Tubman, Elizabeth Peratrovich, Audre Lorde, Susan B. Anthony, Sojourner Truth, Elizabeth Cady Stanton, Rosa Parks, transgender women at Stonewall, Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Greta Thunberg, and Malala Yousafzai.

Recently in Mexico, two women vied for the presidency, claiming they had “the ovaries to fight crime.” Then, Mexico elected its first woman president, Claudia Sheinbaum. Maybe it’s time the U.S. adopts that phrase.

Now, those brave enough to stand up to hollow men whose deepest relationships consist of power, ketamine, and self-tanner seem to be those who possess ovaries.

Photo by Europeana on Unsplash

While progressive men are fighting back about as forcefully as a Tesla Cybertruck in a snowdrift, it’s women like Teresa Borrenpohl who had the ovaries to speak truth to power in an Idaho town hall (and was violently dragged out as a result). It’s the governor of Maine, Janet Mills, refusing to cower. It’s Jasmine Crockett bringing the chutzpah. It’s Alexandra Ocasio-Cortez rallying the troops. It’s Bishop Budde beseeching the president’s empathy during his own inauguration.

It’s Lisa Murkowski breaking with her party to vote against Kash Patel. It’s Jane Fonda’s speech at the SAG Awards. It’s Brittany Petterson flying in with her newborn to vote on the house budget after Speaker Johnson denied her request to vote remotely.

It’s Heather Cox Richardson and Anne Applebaum who continue to deliver the truth. It’s Libby Bakalar of One Hot Mess putting our Alaskan governor on blast, getting fired for it, and then successfully suing him for it. It’s the women in my community of Juneau, Alaska, who continue to organize resistance to the current administration.

We need to stop with the patriarchal framing of male genitalia as an indicator of courage and women’s parts as weakness.

(Top, L & R: I’m emceeing education rallies. Bottom L: with my kids at an artist “Die-In” to protest dismantling arts funding in Alaska. Bottom R: with my kids - that’s my baby under the puppet - at a rally to save school arts education.)

Why do men and their bollocks get all the clout when it’s the women who are showing the most courage?

Maybe it’s because girls and women carry a rage of injustice that is older than Eden.

Maybe it’s because we’re tired of our ovaries defining our usefulness, and tired of our ovaries being legislated.

Or maybe it’s because from eternity until, um, yesterday, we have been told to shut up or called hysterical.

It’s because we grow things. We fiercely protect our young. We’re tired of fixing shit that men break. Maybe it’s because we bleed and go through perimenopause, self-sacrificing for the greater good. Maybe because, unlike men, we’re expected to rejigger our bodies on birth control and for the male gaze.

It’s because, in every ‘80s movie that raised us, the girls screamed helplessly while we screamed back at the TV, “C’mon, do something!” Because sexual assault against women was a punchline in the movies. Because the heroine would always fall for the bad guy — then we did, too.

Maybe it’s because we do more unpaid work in our relationships. We have to work harder for the same pay, respect, and credibility as men. Maybe because in many states, the life of a fetus is considered more valuable than our lives. Maybe because historically, we had to make ourselves smaller and sexier so a man would claim us. Or because our god and savior both use he/him pronouns, and our languages — English and Spanish — betray our misogyny with words like hu-man and his-tory and a-men while turning p*ssy and sissy into code for weakness.

Maybe because, like the dik-dik, we mark our territory with our tears. And sometimes, our blood.

Maybe it’s because when we rage, we are told to sit down and be quiet while the president of the United States has temper tantrums in all caps.

Maybe because my parents’ neighbor wears a Lock her up T-shirt because Hillary Clinton had the balls I mean ovaries to use her personal email server at work.

And because Republicans are now trying to pass a bill that won’t allow people (read: women) whose last names differ from their birth certificates to vote. Because women are tired of being expected to change themselves AND THEIR NAMES to that of their husbands.

Maybe because, like Cassandra, we are tired of not being believed. Like Baba Yaga, we want to fly into the woods in our mortal and pestle, or maybe because we’re just sad that we weren’t born as Artemis, running feral through the woods at night with forest friends. Because the stories we were given were about strange men kissing us in our sleep without our consent and leading us happily ever after, which meant married with children, except what it really meant was doing more invisible labor. Or, conversely, a la Little Mermaid, giving up our voice for a man.

Dancing friends from our dancing troupe the Off the Hook Honeys, with their sewn-in signs, readying to perform at the Alaska Folk Festival

Maybe because somewhere along the way, we lost our red tent. We lost the ability to live collectively. Because we are always bleeding. Maybe because it’s a new moon, but it’s hard to tell with all of this light pollution.

Maybe we’re just sick of men fucking up everything. We’re sick of not being heard. Because we said fuck this shit and went to go live in another culture, then realized the misogyny was even worse there, so we had to come back to the first culture, which wasn’t nearly as bad as the other one, but comparing poop to shit doesn’t make the poop any better because it’s still poop. All the while, we’re being told not to swear and just smile more.

Or maybe, as suggested, women are stronger because we face, rather than run from, our feelings — and then go and do the hard things.

(Fun fact: the word "courage" comes from the Latin word cor, which means “heart.”)

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Love,

Summer

My Sister Resister and I on the 4th of July

The Dalai Lama says the world will be saved by Western women. Not any women, perhaps not all women, but Burning Women. Women who have stepped out of silence and into the fullness of their power. Angry women who love the world and her creatures too much to let it be destroyed so thoughtlessly for a moment longer.

Burning Woman is the heart and soul of revolution — inner and outer. She burns for change, she dances in the fire of the old, all the while visioning and weaving the new. — Lucy H. Pearce, Burning Woman

1. https://www.nytimes.com/2026/07/15/us/politics/hegseth-troops-testosterone.html