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TRT has side effects. Anybody who tells you otherwise is lying.
But effects depend on dosage. A bodybuilding cycle of T will be many times a therapeutic dose. TRT aims to get levels into an average healthy range. Performance doping is about going superhuman. They’re taking 5-10x the amount.
Both will reduce your bodies natural ability to produce testosterone, and for the sake of this conversation let’s say the only steroid we’re talking about it is testosterone. Using exogenous T to get yourself up to normal levels is drastically different than having normal amounts of T and then adding more to get yourself above normal levels
Same reason cis children taking testosterone blockers for literally any medical condition is totally a-ok but a trans kid not wanting to go through puberty and taunting to take T-blockers isn’t. Transphobia ✨
There are different types of steroids. Testosterone is one type of steroid that’s medically indicated for hormone replacement. Taking steroids for asthma is what’s called a glucocorticoid, works in different ways. There are other steroids as well.
They come with side effects though. If you take glucocorticoids for a long time it dampens your immune system, weakens your bones etc. but it does have medical benefit for autoimmune conditions like asthma and other conditions. Ideally no one would ever take steroids because of their side effects, but they have medical indications.
Testosterone is the same, sure it has side effects but it also means that someone gets to live in and experience their preferred gender and that is that is the trade off.
Illegal steroids are often cut with cheaper but more potent steroids. Illicit steroid users often take far higher dosages than people on prescribed testosterone. There are also different molecular ‘structures’ of testosterone, and the stuff produced in illicit labs is usually a cruder old-fashioned form. Cutting edge industry leaders like Actavis produce a molecular testosterone that is quite different from the kind that was made 40 years ago. The black market producers are using archaic techniques and chemistry that produces what would be considered a messy product by the big boys of pharma.
**Edit**: poorcel black market steroid users are mad downvoting, but what I speak is the truth. Get some health insurance and stop taking that bathroom test.
TRT has side effects but the dosage is usually 100 to 200 a week as opposed to 500 to 1000 a week. And if you are doing it because your levels were dangerously low and it brings you up to normal levels it is a lot different than taking large doses and messing up a previously healthy body.
There are also much more dangerous performance enhancing drugs than testosterone.
So bodybuilders need a lot more T than normal to get big. Also, your body adjusts its own T production (from your gonads) to try to maintain a consistent “normal” level in your blood. Therefore, the T you inject does not supplement what your body already produces. It literally replaces the T produced by your gonads, which means they will atrophy and shrink after a while. And guys also have a little bit of E in their blood too, but it’s proportional to your T. So when there is too much T in your body, there is also going to be too much E. Therefore, most guys who take large doses of steroids not only experience gonad atrophy, they also take meds which prevent the conversion into E, and if they don’t it can cause gynechomastia, which is breast tissue development in males.
When trans men or cis men with hypogonadism undergo hormone replacement therapy, they are only taking just enough T to have “normal” male levels of it in their blood. There are still risks, like high red blood cell count for example, but it’s usually manageable.
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