So I have this one very crisp and distinct memory of 9th grade biology, wherein my teacher told us that both men and women have hormone cycles. He then said that the only reason that we don't notice it in men is because men don't have periods. In my little 14 year old mind I was like,

Yeah, that checks out.

For whatever reason, this "fact" just never left my mind. Cut to seven years later when I was an employed scientist, and this interaction happened:

"So," I hear you ask, "your 9th grade biology teacher told you something misinformed one time and that's what you came here to yell into the void about?" No, of course not.

Googling the origin of this myth uncovered a tale that absolutely made my blood boil. My former biology teacher, bless his soul, got this information from sources that seemed genuinely reputable. Alas, this is why they are so dangerous.

The story starts in 1975. That year, history's least impressive instance of peer review occurred, leading to the publication of this paper. It supposedly "confirmed" that male hormones cycle, but all it did was show that hormone levels fluctuate in, like,,, some dudes. Basically, these authors took blood from 20 guys for a few months and measured their testosterone. Only 12 seemed to have any deviations at all, meaning that the other 8, nearly half the people they tested had no detectable changes. You know what would happen if you did the same study on sexually mature people with uteruses?

THEY WOULD ALL HAVE CYCLING HORMONE LEVELS.

But hey, I'm just some girl on the internet. Maybe we should ask these guys. Hey, Brad Anawalt, endocrinologist and chief of medicine at University of Washington Medical Center and Paul Marshburn, reproductive endocrinologist at Carolinas HealthCare System in North Carolina, do men undergo a monthly hormone cycle?

Hmm... what say you Stephen Hurel, consultant physician and endocrinologist at London Bridge Hospital?

If you read any articles that present the existence of the "male period" as a scientific debate, this is the guy they almost always cite to suggest that the phenomenon may be real. So who is he?

Jed Diamond is a therapist who has made a career out of writing about men's health issues. One of his big sellers was a book called “Irritable Male Syndrome,” in which he talks about how changing monthly testosterone levels can cause mental health issues for men. He claims that the research is solid, but shocker, it is not. Jed was the first person to describe "Irritable Male Syndrome" in humans. This is noteworthy because he is not a medical doctor, and his "research" was all based on a testosterone withdrawal phenomenon observed only in a certain kind of sheep. As a brief aside, rams are a terrible model organism to use for male reproductive behaviours in humans. Rams go through rut, which means they have demonstrable, periodic, reproductive behviours. Human males do not rut.

This is the least of Dr. Diamond's crimes against science, however. What's far worse is that Jed claims in many interviews that he's been doing research for decades, but I can't even find any evidence of this. He has apparently neither authored a single peer reviewed publication about "man periods," nor even mentions ever doing research in his self-written biography.

All that is to say, Jed may be communicating science a little irresponsibly when he says things like:

Look, I know that researchers often end up being wrong about their theories. That's just the way science works. When a scientist makes a mistake, they acknowledge it. They move on. They pull the shards of truth from the rubble of their ideas and use them to form newer, better, hypotheses. They don't double down on concepts that have been proven false, and continue to spout their decidedly unproven theories with certainty long after they'd still even be considered debate-worthy.

"But why did Jed choose this particular hill to die on?" I hear you ask. Well, dear reader, the answer is of course

On top of all the books Jed sells about his dubious "theories," Dr. Diamond also offers treatments for men with "irritable male syndrome." The symptoms of IMS just so happen to include practically every negative emotion a human person can experience. This charlatan has made untold money by pedalling unresearched, unsupported claims as fact. What's worse, Jed is a therapist. He targets men with depressive symptoms, men with relationship issues, men who may even be violent. Rather than helping them, he misdiagnoses them with his wackjob, bullshit, made up syndrome. The entire medical community regards his claims as fiction. These are claims that, let me remind you, have never been rigorously demonstrated in humans.

People like Jed are predatory. They know what they're doing is wrong, and why it's wrong. They have the skills and ability to make positive change in the world, but instead choose to give science a bad name, scam people, and lie. Fuck you, man.

Kat Out.