After going on hormone replacement therapies, my taste began to change — but that effect wasn’t purely biological
On my last trip to the Burbank Costco, I felt like I finally perfected my optimum shopping route. First, the personal care section for Kirkland-brand minoxidil, then a pallet of Diet Coke; last, a quick weave through the snack aisles in search of a 30-pack of “snacking nuts,” individually portioned packages of salted peanuts, cashews, and almonds. I had started consuming nuts at an unprompted, voracious daily rate, getting through a 30-pack in two weeks or less. I wasn’t sure what brought it on, after a lifetime of feeling pretty much nothing about nuts one way or the other. But I took a picture of the three pounds of snacking nuts in my cart and texted it to a friend anyway, with the message: “epic white guy snack.”
I’ve been taking testosterone for two and a half years. Testosterone has broadened my jaw and receded my hairline, like my dad’s and my brother’s. My body is long-torsoed and my legs have newly muscular calves, a build that the men in my family call having “Lamberty legs.” Before I started hormone replacement therapy — before I was “a guy” — I never really cared about nuts (yes, you can laugh). Now well into my medical transition, I’ve found that my tastes have changed. Nuts are now my favorite snack, my go-to food. I’m at Target and Trader Joe’s every week looking for my next nut, where, in the aisles next to suburban dads who look more like me than not, I feel a kind of belonging.
Beyond the joke I won’t be able to escape here, nuts have become symbolic of a particular kind of masculinity for me. Both the seemingly biological change in my taste buds and my cultural associations with nuts have me evaluating my own gender expression, connecting the Midwestern men of my upbringing to the guy I’m creating. Standing in that Costco aisle, in relaxed-fit Lee jeans with a Gold Star membership and a value-pack of nuts in my cart, I recognized myself, for one of the first times I can remember, as a man.
When I began my medical transition, every doctor I met with took great pains to warn me about the changes my body would go through on testosterone. I had the top five side effects down pat after my second appointment: facial hair, lowering voice, bottom growth, fat redistribution, male-pattern baldness. I was excited about these changes. I wanted to grow an ugly little mustache. I wanted an expressive, deep voice. Those things came, in time, but what was never mentioned in my endocrinology appointments were the more nebulous experiences that occur when taking testosterone. My libido became almost unmanageable. I cried much less. And, it seems, my taste began to change.
When I noticed my taste buds reacting in new ways to nuts, something I’d eaten many times before to no major effect, it seemed like a straightforward hypothesis: My taste changed as a result of starting testosterone. As any good trans person would do, I took to Reddit, where I found hundreds of posts on the topic. “I used to really like spicy food, but I can’t stand it anymore.” “Does anyone else PERMANENTLY crave cold, smooth things like ice cream or pudding??” It seemed to be a common trans experience, yet with no through line between gender or taste or hormone introduced.
During a typical, cisgender puberty, hormonal changes affect one’s sense of taste to an extent. Infants are born with around 30,000 taste buds that dull and diminish over time, perhaps explaining why bitter foods become more palatable in the teen years. A sex-based explanation of taste is more complicated, and often contradictory. A recent study stated that women are more frequently identified as “supertasters,” or people who are genetically more sensitive to bitter tastes, but men report higher sensitivity to sweet and sour foods across the board. The study also stated that “taste preference, detection ability, and response to tastants have gender differences. However, the exact nature of these sex differences remains undetermined.”
There certainly aren’t any comprehensive studies on transgender taste buds over time. There’s still little known about the longer-term effects of transgender hormone replacement therapies (HRT), besides, for example, the hit list of masculinizing traits I saw during my first year on T. An article in a 2016 edition of Translational Andrology and Urology sums it up: Studies on the long-term health of transgender people taking HRT “have small patient numbers, short or medium-term follow-up, and very few of the patients studied are over the age of 65,” leaving your average trans Googler with anecdote-driven web forums. Social ostracism, institutional mistreatment, a lack of vocabulary around and access to gender-affirming care and an ultimately low life expectancy — there are clear cultural reasons why trans people have a minimal presence in contemporary medical literature. And few long-term studies on the effects of trans HRT doesn’t mean hormone therapy is dangerous or inadvisable (it clearly hasn’t stopped me); thousands of Americans, cis and trans alike, regularly take hormones to safe, well-documented effects.
At the same time, there’s a tendency for trans people to inventory our lives pre-transition in search of latent gender confusion, incidents that we can point to and say definitively yes, this is who I’ve been the whole time, testosterone or spironolactone side effects be damned. But much like one’s taste is impacted by factors like “cognitive restraint, attitudes toward foods, nutritional knowledge, social influence, and culture-based exposure,” so, too, is my gender expression. Was I born this way? Kind of yes, and kind of no. I love cashews now in a way I never did before regularly taking testosterone; I love their smooth unctuousness, the new luxuriousness of salt and oil on my palate. Maybe that’s a function of the medication. But beyond that, starting my medical transition has given me a new lived experience. Now that I move through the world differently — as a man — I relate to food differently. I relate to it as a man.
I can argue that nuts are associated with masculinity. Baseball games, sports bars, break rooms — I’ve mostly understood nuts as a foodstuff for the working man, fast and satisfying. Flavor and pleasure are usually second to fuel and efficiency when it comes to nutrient- and energy-dense nuts. Again, there’s limited evidence suggesting that after puberty, cisgender men’s palates lean salty, which could explain a broad masculine love for nuts. There are further studies claiming cisgender men’s sexual function may benefit from daily nut consumption — maybe there’s something there. These disparate facts and settings add up, in my mind, to a generally masculine positioning. When I listened to a recent episode of the podcast How Long Gone in which hosts Chris Black and Jason Stewart raved about the nut medley offered at a hotel in Sydney, I found myself earnestly relating. I felt like I had learned about a secret guy thing, something I was finally in on.
When I eat Sriracha almonds or honey-roasted peanuts, I mostly think about my dad, born in Wisconsin and raised in South Dakota. I think about growing up in Minnesota, and the strange omnipresence of nuts. Peanut shells paving the floors of Wisconsin dive bars. Cheeks full of sunflower seeds at Minnesota Twins games. My brother dipping into a huge bag of almonds after a workout. All of my uncles, no matter whose house, having a big-ass tin of Planters peanuts in the pantry.
I came of age around a masculine modality that was joyful, communal. Between four uncles and 14 cousins, family parties in Sioux Falls were rowdy and jocular. My uncles were always generous with their time, with their homes, with cases of Busch Light. Rough-hewn. Sturdy stock. They taught me how to play cribbage and shoot a bottle cap across a room with my fingers. The men in my family were the kind of people I wanted to be: aspirationally masculine, imbuing Combos and home-brewed beer and peanuts with significance. My dad would sometimes just have nuts and a couple cheese sticks as a late lunch, which never made sense to me; post-transition, I find myself doing the same.
It’s a chicken-and-egg question I think about near-daily: Where does the biology of my transness end, and where does the emotional, cultural experience brought about by my transition begin? Can I attribute any change in how I move through the world to weekly testosterone injections alone? Taking testosterone to change my physical appearance and biological responses was the first step in my transition: baseline physiological, HRT the variable, and my pre-transition self the control group. But my transness, my masculinity, didn’t begin with my first dose of testosterone. HRT merely caused physical changes that allowed me to engage with my masculinity in entirely new ways. Testosterone affected what I look and sound like, and it maybe affected my sense of taste, but fully realizing the guy I want to be is more alchemical than purely biological.
Making the connection between an innocuous cashew and my particular blue-collar, Midwestern masculine influences made me feel like a part of something I always desperately wanted to be a part of. It’s not really about the cashews themselves, a value-neutral food. It’s about the men surrounding them. It’s about the thrill I get when I enjoy what I’m eating, then realize the broader context of it all. I’ve wondered if my newfound relationship with nuts as I continue to take testosterone is at all similar to what cis men experience during puberty: an exhilarating boil of hormones creating the conditions for crafting the masculinity of one’s dreams.
Thirty-pack of snacking nuts in tow, I went to the Costco self-checkout. I showed my membership card to the clerk. It was the last piece of identification I hadn’t updated with my new name and photo. The clerk looked at my out-of-date card, then me, and said, “Is she here with you? The owner of the membership?”
I did a little “Oh, that’s me, I — you know, I’m —” I wondered what the clerk thought. I wondered if she’d had this kind of thing happen before, if she saw what was in my cart and what it might all say about me. Were these the Costco purchases of a man? She didn’t really seem to care, and I was grateful for it. She waved me through the line. I proceeded through the self check-out, I grabbed my nuts, and I left.
AC Lamberty is a writer and filmmaker from the Midwest, now based in Los Angeles.
Beck Deresse is a Black, queer illustrator who loves Brussels sprouts.
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