If you’ve been moving through London lately — half-awake on the Tube, coffee in hand, trying to remember what day it is — you’ll have clocked them: male-founded Voy’s big, clean billboards declaring, “Men get hormonal too.”
Look closer and there’s a second line. Quieter, but arguably louder in impact: “It’s not him, it’s his hormones.”
And almost instantly, the backlash. Women — and plenty of people who actually care about women’s health — rolling their eyes so hard you can practically hear it echo down the Victoria line.
Because here’s the thing. As a sentence, it wants to be progressive. It’s attempting a cultural flip. Why “hormonal” is still coded as female, why it’s used to undermine women, why it so often becomes shorthand for being unreliable or difficult.
But as a moment — landing in 2026-adjacent London — it hits a nerve women have been living on for forever. Because men are met with curiosity and reframing. Women are met with dismissal. And that second line doesn’t soften the message — it exposes the imbalance.
It’s not him, it’s his hormones reads less like destigmatisation and more like permission — a reason to be patient, an explanation that invites understanding. Women are deeply familiar with the opposite experience, where being hormonal or in pain is something to joke about, downplay, or quietly endure.
So, should we care if men get hormonal too?
From a biological standpoint, there’s nothing radical here. Men have endocrine systems. Testosterone fluctuates. Cortisol responds to stress. Oestrogen exists in male bodies too. Hormones influence mood, energy, sleep, libido and mental health. None of this is disputed science.
What women are reacting to isn’t the biology. It’s the credibility gap.
For decades, women’s health has been under-researched and underfunded, and women’s bodies were historically excluded from clinical trials on the assumption that hormonal variation would “complicate” results — a bias that has left huge gaps in evidence and care even now.
This isn’t abstract. In the UK, people with endometriosis — a condition affecting roughly one in ten women and those assigned female at birth — wait nearly nine years on average for a diagnosis, with multiple visits to GPs before it’s recognised. Research from around the world puts the mean time to diagnosis at about 6.6 years for this condition alone.
Pain — one of the most common reasons people seek help — is another stark illustration. Women report more chronic and high-impact pain conditions than men, yet multiple studies show their pain is more likely to be underestimated, dismissed or treated differently than men’s pain, even when levels are comparable.
One UK survey found that 56 per cent of women feel their pain is ignored or dismissed by healthcare professionals, and nearly one in four women who felt ignored said no one took their pain seriously. Studies also show that female patients are less likely than male patients to be prescribed analgesics for pain, and their pain scores may be recorded less reliably by clinicians.
