The number of women being prescribed testosterone has risen by 800 per cent over the past five years, according to a report in the Mail on Sunday. I am proud to say I am one of them.
Or at least, I have been since Saturday when my first little pink tube of AndroFeme 1.0% (a female version of the male hormone testosterone) arrived in the post.
I’ve been taking HRT for years, rubbing in the oestrogen gel and popping the progesterone pills daily like millions of women everywhere.
The relief the drugs brought from mood swings, hot flushes and sleepless nights of the menopause was so significant, I swore I’d be on them until the day I died. But recently, I’d been feeling I needed something more, something to turbo-charge me.
I can’t count the number of women between the ages of 40 to 80 plus who, often with a naughty twinkle in their eye, have told me of the benefits of testosterone, from eradicating brain fog to boosting energy levels and restoring a flagging libido.
And there is impressive celebrity endorsement, too. As a health minister who launched the first women’s national health strategy, I’d worked with TV presenter Davina McCall, a long-time advocate for the benefits of HRT including testosterone.
I was impressed by her detailed knowledge and her enthusiastic championing of better education and access to HRT. An evident workaholic, bursting with vitality and energy, you can’t help meeting Davina, now 58, and not think: ‘I’ll have whatever she’s having.’
Actresses Kate Winslet, 50, and Naomi Watts, 57, are fans, too, as is my fellow Mail columnist and mental health campaigner Bryony Gordon, 45.
And then there’s my near neighbour here in the Cotswolds, Bake Off’s Dame Prue Leith, 86. She credits testosterone as being ‘great for libido – you feel younger and better…’ and key to her working well into her ninth decade.
Symptoms such as low energy had crept upon me over years so that often, by 4pm, I’d feel like I was wading through treacle. By 9pm I was desperate for bed. Where was the old me, always the last one to leave a party?
And the brain fog was real. I was forgetting far too much far too often – the names of books, films, events, places – indeed, so much so that I began to panic.
One evening I had guests for dinner and popped into the garage to get some extra ice from the spare freezer. Next morning, en route to get the car, I heard an incessant beeping from the garage. I’d left the freezer door wide open all night.
The week before, I had come down in the morning to discover I’d failed to lock the external doors – and that wasn’t the first time it had happened in recent months. ‘Oh my God,’ I thought. ‘Is this it? Am I really having senior moments?’
I remembered Davina’s words in her 2022 documentary on Channel 4, Sex, Mind and the Menopause. Testosterone can be the missing piece in the puzzle for women on HRT and I knew instinctively my HRT was no longer working.
So why hadn’t I done something about it before now? Women produce testosterone naturally but at much lower levels than men and levels decline from your mid-forties onwards.
I knew I’d need to see my GP and have a blood test, and I just never got around to it. Then came the lightbulb moment.
What finally made me crack were the words of a close friend and former nursing colleague who visited over the Easter weekend.
Our conversation proceeded along the lines of every other conversation between 60-something female friends: sore joints, creaking knees, chronic tiredness, poor sleep and memory lapses. Then she said the fateful words: ‘Well, I suppose we are just going to have to embrace old age.’
Can you imagine the high pitch of screeching brakes I was hearing in my head at exactly that moment?
‘There’s no way on this Earth I will embrace old age, I will fight it every step of the way,’ I told her.
‘Well, it’s better to grow old with dignity,’ she replied, somewhat huffily.
But what is dignified about losing your memory or being chronically exhausted?
I made that GP appointment and had the blood test. The results showed that my testosterone levels were almost zero. I took my first dose three days ago – it involves rubbing a pea-sized amount of cream into my inner thigh every day. To my utter amazement, the benefits kicked in within 24 hours.
Dear Reader, I am buzzing! The soaring energy and reduced brain fog for me at least are real. At the quiz in my local pub on Sunday night, I was definitely back on form. And, with respect to Dame Prue’s claims about her libido….? Medical experts report only one in 10 women who take testosterone experience an increase in sex drive. What can I say? Maybe, it only works on women who live in the Cotswolds!
Davina was right, it is the missing piece of the HRT puzzle and I only wish I’d started it five years ago.
An elegant swan of a BBC drama
If you love Jane Austen and are a fan of Pride And Prejudice, you will adore the BBC drama The Other Bennet Sister. It’s a pertinent reminder of what the Beeb does better than any other broadcaster in the world.
Based on the book of the same name, the series focuses on the life of Mary Bennet, the bookish, boring, frumpy sister; the ugly duckling amid the swans.
Mary is played by Ella Bruccoleri (who also portrayed Sister Frances in Call The Midwife), who does an amazing job of bringing to life a feisty character who was barely a footnote in the original novel.
Ruth Jones as the monstrous Mrs Bennet is a treat and Mr Collins (Ryan Sampson) even more preposterous than his portrayal in the acclaimed 1995 BBC version of P&P.
That famously starred Colin Firth in a wet shirt. Well, there are two hunks in wet shirts vying for the heroine in this one!
It has everything else we love in period drama: from the costumes to the balls and locations, to the intriguing family dynamics and societal expectations of women in that era.
Oh, and the pursuit of marriage and a happy ending. I loved it so much, I will watch it all again.
When the long overdue reform of the bloated Corporation takes place, we need a government brave enough to do what is needed – but who will safeguard excellence where it prevails.
Zack, you’re the toxic one
Zack Polanski is the leader of the Green Party who, in a former ‘career’, claimed he could make a female reporter’s breasts larger through hypnosis. Hmmm.
He has since said he was misrepresented. Now he is saying that ‘toxic’ people who hold Right-wing views should be excluded by society.
Authoritarian doesn’t begin to cut it. Was he again misrepresented? Not at all.
Everyone should be very afraid of a man whose intolerant and undemocratic pronouncements make him a danger to political debate.
