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While trans rights provide fuel to America’s never-ending culture wars, there’s something in the corner that doesn’t get as much attention: doing medical body modifications and gender-affirming care had gone mainstream long ago. Everyone does it — from RFK Jr to Andrew Tate to beauty influencers to the lonely dad at your local suburban gym.

We talk to Oliver Bateman about how body building culture, with the help of the internet, took over the world and helped forge a path to our century of the modified self.

—Yasha

PS: Read Oliver’s most recent essay on body building culture and gender identity…and subscribe to his Substack. As he writes…

This concept emerged from my research with steroid users, whose narratives often paralleled transition stories but without identifying as transgender. One gay user, “Zander,” told me: “I sometimes see the use of steroids by men as like, being assigned male at birth, but identifying as even more male than your natural physiology would allow." He added, “In a world in which we were truly free to express our gender identity, I wonder if people like me wouldn't be prescribed super-doses of testosterone to fix the persistent feeling that we were not manly enough.”

…Another user, who trained six days a week and had cycled through multiple performance-enhancing drugs, told me: “I don’t even care about competing. I just want to look like a f*****g statue or have people ask me if I’m a Mr. Olympia. That’s the whole thing. That’s the juice.” When I asked him why, he grew quieter. “When I was a kid, I got bullied. I hated myself. I looked like s**t, short and flabby, belly over my little dick. And then I started seeing these pictures — Frank Zane, Arnold, Dorian Yates, Bob Paris, you know — and I thought, what if I could be that? Not just look like that, but be that.” He wasn’t using muscle to gain functional strength or external approval. He was using it to overwrite an earlier self, to become someone else entirely. That someone else was a man — wide, ripped, mythically confident in spite of a lack of height or endowment — whom he loved and longed to become.

These narratives recur again and again. A man dislikes his body, not because it’s unfit by some neutral measure, but because it fails to match an idealized internal standard. That standard is often hypermasculine: jacked, vascular, assertive, hard, "tumescent." And the process of bridging the gap — through steroids, training, self-presentation — takes on ritualistic, even devotional, qualities. These men sculpt themselves as both artists and subjects. They are, in a very real sense, becoming the men they want to desire — or, more precisely, the men they want to be desired as, even if they eventually begin to look so odd that only they still find themselves attractive (as is the case with many heavy site oil injection addicts, who use this substance to cause their muscles to swell like tumors).