They Sold Us Anti-Aging.
We Needed Medicine.

I am thirty days into hormone replacement therapy. I started through Hers — the telehealth platform — after months of waking up at 3 a.m. soaked through my sheets, eating less than I should because nothing sounded good, and feeling a low-grade fog that no amount of sleep or green juice was going to fix. My doctor confirmed what I already suspected: my estrogen was tanking. She wrote the prescription. I filled it. And thirty days later, the hot flashes have quieted and my appetite has returned to something resembling normal.

I want to be precise about what that means. I am not younger. My face has not changed. I did not wake up one morning with the skin of a thirty-five-year-old or the metabolism of someone who has never heard of perimenopause. What happened is quieter and more significant than that: my body started working the way it is supposed to work. The hormones that regulate my sleep, my hunger, my temperature, my mood — they are closer to the levels they need to be. That is not anti-aging. That is medicine.

The distinction matters enormously. And the wellness industry has spent the better part of a decade doing everything in its power to collapse it.

The Biohacking Boom Was Real

Let us give credit where it is due. The biohacking movement — at its best — brought legitimate science into the mainstream conversation about women's health. Continuous glucose monitors. Wearable sleep trackers. Functional medicine labs that test not just whether you are sick but whether you are optimized. Hormone panels that go beyond the cursory TSH check your GP orders once a decade. These are real tools. They have helped real women understand what is happening in their bodies at a level of granularity that was simply not available to our mothers.

HRT itself is a product of this shift. For decades after the flawed 2002 Women's Health Initiative study, doctors were terrified to prescribe it. Women were told to white-knuckle their way through menopause with fans and soy supplements and the quiet understanding that suffering was simply part of getting older. The biohacking conversation — combined with a new generation of researchers willing to re-examine the original data — helped crack that open. Women started asking questions. Doctors started listening. Telehealth platforms like Hers made access possible for women who could not get a straight answer from their OB-GYN.

That is progress. Genuine, meaningful progress. And I am a direct beneficiary of it.

Then the Industry Got Involved

Here is where it gets complicated. Because somewhere between "women deserve access to evidence-based hormone therapy" and "here is a $400 supplement stack that will reverse your biological age," something went badly wrong.

The wellness industry — which is a $5.6 trillion global market, not a movement, not a community, not a sisterhood — recognized that perimenopause and menopause represented an enormous and underserved consumer base. Women in their forties and fifties, many of them at or near peak earning power, many of them deeply motivated to feel better, many of them frustrated by a medical system that had dismissed their symptoms for years. That is not a demographic. That is a gold mine.

And so the language shifted. Slowly, almost imperceptibly, the conversation about women's hormonal health stopped being about health and started being about youth. The question was no longer "how do we help women function well in midlife?" It became "how do we help women not look like they are in midlife?" Biohacking — a term that once meant optimizing performance and longevity — got rebranded as the new anti-aging. Peptides, NAD+ infusions, red light therapy, collagen supplements, cellular reprogramming protocols. All of it sold not on the promise of feeling better, but on the promise of looking younger.

The influencer economy accelerated this. Suddenly every wellness platform was populated by women in their late forties who looked, by the standards the industry itself had created, like they were in their early thirties. And the implicit message — never stated outright, always present — was that this was the goal. Not health. Not vitality. Not functioning well and sleeping through the night and having the energy to do the things you love. Youth. The appearance of youth. The performance of not having aged.

What Gets Lost in the Translation

I want to tell you what I actually noticed at thirty days on HRT. I sleep through the night. I wake up without being drenched. I eat breakfast because I am hungry, not because I am forcing myself to. I have energy in the afternoon that does not require a second coffee. My mood is more stable — not flat, not medicated into submission, just less jagged at the edges.

None of that is visible. You cannot see it in a photo. It does not make me look younger. It makes me feel like myself — the version of myself that existed before my hormones started their slow withdrawal, before my body began the process of recalibrating for a different phase of life.

That is what the anti-aging framing erases. It takes a medical intervention that is genuinely about quality of life — about sleep, cognition, mood, bone density, cardiovascular health, metabolic function — and reduces it to a cosmetic outcome. And in doing so, it creates a new kind of pressure that is, in some ways, worse than the old one.

The old pressure was: accept your aging gracefully. Cover the gray. Wear age-appropriate clothing. Disappear quietly. That was its own kind of violence, but at least it was honest about what it was asking.

The new pressure is more insidious because it comes dressed as empowerment. It says: you do not have to age. You can biohack your way out of it. And if you are still showing signs of being in your forties — if your face has lines, if your body has changed shape, if you are not radiating the particular kind of dewy luminosity that the wellness industry has decided is the marker of a woman who is "doing it right" — then you are not trying hard enough. You have not found the right protocol. You have not optimized correctly.

It turns medicine into a beauty standard. And that is a corruption I find genuinely dangerous.

The Women Who Cannot Afford to Biohack

There is another dimension to this that does not get discussed enough. The biohacking-as-anti-aging complex is expensive. Not just the peptides and the NAD+ drips and the hyperbaric chambers — though those are genuinely out of reach for most people — but the entire ecosystem of optimization: the functional medicine practitioners who do not take insurance, the premium wearables, the specialty labs, the telehealth subscriptions, the supplement protocols that run $200 a month.

When we conflate biohacking with anti-aging, we make the entire conversation about women's midlife health feel like a luxury. And that has real consequences. Women who cannot afford the full optimization stack start to feel that their health concerns are also not worth addressing — that if they cannot do it the premium way, they should not bother. Women who are navigating perimenopause symptoms while working two jobs and raising kids and managing the financial reality of being a woman in midlife in America do not need a $400 supplement. They need their doctor to take their symptoms seriously and write them a prescription.

HRT through Hers costs me less than forty dollars a month. That is not nothing, and I recognize that for some women even that is a barrier. But it is a fraction of what the biohacking industry would have me spend to achieve the same result — and a fraction of what I would spend if I were trying to achieve the cosmetic outcome the industry is actually selling.

The Argument I Am Making

I am not arguing against biohacking. I am not arguing against HRT. I am not arguing against women using every tool available to them to feel well in midlife. I am arguing against the framework that has been built around those tools — the one that measures their success not by how a woman feels, but by how a woman looks.

The anti-aging pressure is not a side effect of the biohacking movement. It is a deliberate commercial strategy. It takes legitimate medical science — the kind that helps women sleep, think, move, and live well — and repackages it as a youth-preservation technology. And in doing so, it does two things simultaneously: it makes the tools more expensive and less accessible, and it makes the women who use them feel that they are failing if the outcome is health rather than youth.

I am thirty days into HRT. I sleep through the night. My hot flashes have quieted. I am eating again. I feel, in the most fundamental sense, like myself.

That is not anti-aging. That is medicine. And I am tired of an industry that cannot tell the difference — or worse, knows the difference perfectly well and has decided that medicine does not sell as well as youth.

We deserve better than that. We deserve tools that are measured by how well they help us live — not by how successfully they help us pretend we are not living in the bodies we are actually in.

We are Gen X women. We have been sold things our entire lives. We are old enough now to know the difference between a product and a prescription — and angry enough to say so out loud.