The New Gender Synthesis

The new right is a great purveyor of images. Our new Secretary of Defense revels in taking off his shirt and displaying his tattooed, muscular chest. Andrew Tate is much the same, but poses with a cigar and a raw steak while he lectures millions of young men about the right way to treat a woman. Meanwhile AI or OnlyFans or Instagram delivers you an endless stream of dewy girls with flowing hair and glossy lips just barely parted at the camera.

The internet offers a psychedelic dreamscape of gender, perfected. Men with bulging pecs and gleaming biceps. Tradwives bursting out of their cottagecore dresses, slowly whipping batter and cream. You know the aesthetic I'm talking about. You see it on the news every day—or on YouTube, or Tiktok, or wherever visual content is sold. We are all drowning in it.

I call it reactionary camp. Fox News Face, the pancake makeup and bleach-blond hair that every female Fox News anchor is required to adopt. GearBod, the puffed-up look men get on too much synthetic testosterone, veins writhing beneath their skin like grey worms.

It's not enough to just be a man or a woman. You have to crank the dial up till it breaks. Every stereotype must be magnified to the utmost technologically possible. And I do mean technologically. I'm just saying what everyone knows. "Hard work and good eating" will only get you so far. And you'll watch guys who took the "hard work and good eating and mail-order meds" option rocket past you.

If a trans guy tried this we'd call it gender-affirming care.

Witness the bad dreams of the fascist dreamscape. Once-nebbish billionaire Jeff Bezos wanders around Miami roided out of his mind, the woman on his arm plastic-surgeried to the point of parody. Jordan Peterson goes on an all-beef diet until he has a mental and physical breakdown. Mark Zuckerberg wanders around in a baggy t-shirt and gold chain ranting to shareholders about "masculine energy."

Cock your head and recognize, in the bodies and styles of the reactionary right, the same styles taken from drag culture: exaggerated talismans of masculine and feminine, exaggerated performances of manhood and womanhood, all played with completely straight faces. There's no humor or fun here, just a dead-eyed desperation to finally be enough.

The vision of masculinity and femininity offered by reactionary camp is detached from any traditional values or material basis. No one ever looked or acted like this back in that 1950s era they venerate so highly. But reactionary camp speaks to—something. 

Reactionary camp promises you a way out. All those questions you've got about how to be a man or how to be a woman. All those fears and anxieties about your future. All that chaos of gender and gender roles roiling through society. All gone. Your body will be perfect and you will be enough.

It's seductive.

Amphibious beings

Reactionary camp promises beauty, strength, sex, power, and more than anything certainty. What can a feminist like me offer to compete with that?  

This is going to require a bit of a detour. You'll have to bear with me, for to answer these people we need not another quippy gotcha, but a true philosophy: one that grounds you in the truth and lets you answer what questions may arise after the gotcha fades and the doubts return.

But I'll start by telling you the answer. To be only masculine or only feminine is to be half a human. Reactionary camp wants you to deny half your soul. But you never can.

To understand why this is the answer, I need first to explain to you what you are. You are an amphibious being, living at once in the world of matter and in the world of ideas but never fully at home in either. You are an animal. But you are cursed, in a way that no other animal on the planet is cursed: you are an animal with one foot in the realm of the divine. Truth, justice, beauty: these words mean something to you. You are an amphibious being, one foot in both worlds, truly at home in neither. In this lies the tragedy of human existence

This is the perennial philosophy. The first clear articulation in the Western canon is, of course, Socrates. In Phaedo he begins with a simple point: you understand the idea of a perfect circle, despite having never seen one—for in our material world there is no such thing as a perfect circle. Two plus two is four. You know this not because you did a big experiment and checked all the twos and fours in the world. You know this because it is true. The mind takes flight from the material and into the world of ideas.

But the material pulls you back. Socrates laments that the body is the tomb of the soul, and "every pleasure or pain provides, as it were, another nail to rivet the soul to the body and to weld them together.  It makes the soul corporeal, so that it believes that truth is what the body says it is" (83d). Socrates himself is in prison, awaiting the moment of his execution, and the dialogue ends as he drinks the hemlock and exits the stage. And his friends and students weep bitter tears, no matter that Socrates might have told them not to.

This is the hard part about being human. You possess a concept of right and justice that transcends all laws and desires, an absolute justice that—just look to history—drives us to immense ends. Truth is truth no matter what anyone thinks about it. The Indiana House of Representatives may declare that π=3.2, but that will never make it so. The National Socialists may pass a law requiring you to kill children with Down's Syndrome, but that will never make it right. 

One might object: the Nazis who passed that law also thought they had a concept of right and wrong.  And they did.  I am not saying that everyone has innate knowledge of the truth.  I am saying that you—and everyone else—has knowledge of truth as a concept, a regulatory ideal that transcends all material attempts to pin it down.  Immanuel Kant called this the fact of reason: the knowledge that there is a moral law, even if you don't know what it is.  Kant himself thought that the content of morality could be derived from the pure idea of morality; others have found his derivation dubious.  Regardless, it is this fact of reason I am speaking of: the knowledge that there is a difference between what you want and what is right, a gap between what you think and what is true.  Even when we happen to be right, we are not guaranteed to be so.

Friedrich Nietzsche understood better than most the simultaneous wonder and terror of this perspective.  The madman cries that we have killed God, and in so doing we have drunk up the sea and wiped away the whole horizon (§125).  All the old certainties, the very foundations of earth, have evaporated.  And yet: for we fearless ones, this means that "the sea, our sea, lies open again; perhaps never before did such an "open sea" exist" (§343).

Yet at the same time, you yourself are always tied up in the material world: the world of the body, society, history. Your desires don't always answer to reason. You crave the esteem of others. Your ideas may reach for an absolute truth but they are invariably tied up with your own material history: the strange series of accidents that made you you.  You might be a seafarer but you set out upon it from a specific time, place, history.

It is the nature of the human curse to long to escape it. To take flight from the flesh and leap into the world of ideas alone—as Socrates tried, when he proclaimed the body was a tomb for the soul and drank the hemlock promising his followers he was on his way to a far better world. Of course the hemlock just killed him, and that was that.

But this fantasy is misguided. The material world is not a vale of tears. After all, that's where all the people are: people we love, people we learn from, people who inspire us—or people we just hang out with playing pinball and having fun. 

Newton saw so far because he stood on the shoulders of giants—just like the rest of us, who inherit truth and perhaps more importantly tools for understanding our world from our forebears. We are not each forced to recreate all science from first principles: we can learn from others. We construct not just our science but our identities from the tools that are given to us: the stories we grew up loving, the heroes we grew up idolizing, the spectrum of roles and lives our society offered us.

So we also find the reverse temptation: the desire to flee from the world of ideas and absolute truth and back to the mere material. The absolute perspective may be liberating, because in this view you are free to make your own choices—whatever your history, your society, your external circumstances—you are free to make up your own mind about how to feel about them and what to do about them. But it is for that very same reason terrifying, because in the world of ideas there is choice. Choice is freedom but it is also a burden, for it means you are accountable for those choices to the absolute tribunal: truth. Justice. 

Here is my contention: there is no escape from either world. We are creatures of the world of matter: flesh, society, history. And we are also creatures of the world of ideas: truth, justice, beauty. There is the perennial temptation to leap free from one and into the other: but, inevitably, we find ourselves called back. Both are inescapable.

A true theory of gender, in other words, must satisfy both aspects of the human soul.

The reactionaries dream of rape

Now we can see the nature of reactionary camp more clearly. We can understand why it is seductive—and why it is a lie. To see this we must look directly at its dark heart. For reactionary camp is more than just an aesthetic. It is a story. And the linchpin of that story is rape. This doesn't require some deep feminist reading. They'll just tell you.

• Right-wing influencer Pascal Emmanel-Gobry tweets "It’s a great ad. You know what would be a better ad? If instead of getting a factory job, she’s forced into a handmaid uniform, has the most mindblowing sex of her life while tied to a headboard, and then nurses an impossibly cute baby." 
• Jack Murphy (real name John Goldman), who hosted now-Vice President J.D. Vance on his podcast in 2021, writes "Feminists need rape… It is our duty as men to save feminists from themselves. Therefore, I am offering rape to feminists as an olive branch."
• Bronze Age Pervert (real name Costin Vlad Alamariu), preferred philosopher and/or short form erotica writer of young reactionaries, tweets "It's happening: democracy liberalism and the rule of law have been suspended in Miami-Dade county on orders of Trump and DeSantis: CUBAN extremely brutal rayp gangs of CUBAN bodybuilder liquidation squadrons are now active in the area...BEWARE!!"
• Andrew Tate, accused sex trafficker and manosphere influencer, says "Machete’s on the floor, her panties are all wet, you’re going to fuck her, that’s how it goes. Slap, slap, grab, choke, shut up, bitch, sex."

The story, in the end, is simple. The world is out of balance. Women have forgotten how to be women, men have forgotten how to be men, equality has made women uppity and men emasculated. In the act of rape the natural order is restored both physically and mentally. Women return to their reproductive role and they like it. Men are dominant again. And everyone is so happy about it.

This is of course why the new right is absolutely lousy with pedophiles. They think that children are easier to groom and control. QAnon must be understood in this light: it was a chance to dwell obsessively on the act of pedophilia while pretending otherwise—as was demonstrated when it became apparent that the makers of Sound of Freedom were, themselves, committing sexual assault against minors as part of play-acting their "fight against pedophilia."  

There's a reason reactionaries are obsessed with the beauty of women the day they turn eighteen "but not a day before ha ha we promise."  Josiah Lippincott of the Claremont Institute tweets "No, the pinnacle of female power is the young, fresh-faced, and buxom 19-year-old-girl in the flower of her youth.  Men will fight wars over her." There is a reason Republicans support laws allowing children to get married.

In reactionary camp children are reduced to a prop in the breeding kink. Pregnancy and babies are fetishized: the long hard process of raising a human being to adulthood is always offstage, for some reason—probably because it would mean recognizing that children are not props in a sexual fantasy but fellow humans on their way to becoming independent beings.

What the rape fantasy promises, in the end, is an escape from the pain of being human. In the fantasy men and women are both returned to mere animal nature. No more of that pesky conscience, no more of the difficult choices being human entails: the body answers all questions and fulfills all desires. All troubles and questions obliterated in an act of violence, after which only bliss and clear purpose remain. They want to unsoul you.

And this brings us to the true nature of reactionary camp: it is a lie. If you know someone who has been raped—and you probably do—you know this is not how it works. The new right's rape story is a porn scene, a little bit of noncon erotica. The reality of sexual assault is grubby violence that achieves little but human misery. You wake up again in the cold light of day and are, still, human: with all that that entails.

The divine unity of masculine and feminine

Whence gender?  The right presents a dark dreamscape of gender turned up to 11, and at the heart of that story is rape. Is there a better way?  A road that doesn't lead inexorably back to that nightmare?

Start with the question. What is this elusive thing, gender?  Masculinity, as we understand it, is a contingent concept with a history. Short hair looks very rugged and masculine to you—today, in the West; in various historical cultures it was quite the opposite. Masculinity is also an internal drive, an identity in that much-derided sense. It's an inner sense of yourself and what you want to be and how you measure yourself. And yet masculinity is also how others measure you. "Man up. Don't be a fag."  

And of course for many of us gender is closely related to the body and what we do with it and what it does with us. How we look, how we act, how we fuck or who or what happens after. Gender is, in other words, all tied up in the material world; it does not come to us from the pure realm of ideas.

A story from my own life, long ago, before I figured out I was trans. I was tying myself in such knots about gender. I just couldn't figure it out. There was a part of me that wanted rather desperately to be a woman. It gleamed in the dark. Beyond the shadow that you settle for there is a miracle illuminated. Yet there was so much else attached to that I couldn't bring myself to want. Did being a woman mean being weaker than men?  Did being a woman mean getting all excited to doll myself up?  Did being a woman mean wanting to be fucked by men?  Did not wanting those things mean I was a man?

Perhaps you don't relate to my late-night doubts. So consider instead what passes for feminism in certain circles, a kind of funhouse-mirror reflection of misogyny. Instead of denigrating everything feminine, it exalts everything feminine without errata. Whatever patriarchy teaches is bad is good actually. Violence is manly and bad. Physical strength is manly and bad. Rationality is manly and bad. Just focus on embracing the divine feminine within you.

Don't you ever get the sense there's something wrong here?  After all, "femininity" is a historical concept, and that history is intertwined with—patriarchy. Femininity can itself be a prison of sorts. This so-called radical feminism wraps around so easily into familiar patriarchy: "Don't worry your pretty little head over it—just remember to focus on looking good and making men happy and, always, always smile." 

And of course the sales people for patriarchy For Her^tm tell you they believe in girl power. Embrace your feminine side. Touch the Goddess. Whatever. Buy more makeup and leave all the hard stuff like wealth and power and decisions to the boys: that's masculine, and we're not having any of that icky boy stuff here.

Do you see it now?  "Being a Man." "Being a Woman." In our world there is such great pressure to swallow one or the other unchewed. This is, in the end, the seduction of abandoning the immaterial for the material. Forget all the doubts and the questions that keep you up at night. The body answers all questions for you: you are a man. Just look in your pants. History answers all questions for you: this is what being a man means. Just look at the magazine covers and the half-remembered movies of your childhood. Society answers all questions for you: the pack of half-wild children you went to school with sure seemed to know what was gay and what wasn't.

So there's the other answer, right?  Abolish gender. Just chuck it all in the bin, it's all rot and all a mess. In other words, the other perennial temptation: to escape from the material world into the realm of pure ideas. Deny the body, deny history, exist as pure choice. Equally, of course, a denial of your dual-natured humanity. Gender matters to people! People like being women and men, sometimes, in some ways.

And indeed masculinity and femininity each have virtues and each have vices. Strength is good actually. If your car breaks down on the side of a dirt road in Wyoming the divine feminine isn't going to change your tire: you are. And yet also: softness is also good. If your partner breaks down and starts sobbing, waving a tire iron and screaming at them to man up isn't going to carry them through it either. Kindness even in the face of unwarranted attack or emotional outbursts is what we might call mercy: a recognition of human imperfection, and the extension of grace even where it is not deserved. We all need that sometimes. At some point in our lives we will not be the hard perfect cold rational thinking thing, but—human, frail and failing, caught up in pain or brought low by age. Material.

Sometimes, reactionaries slip the chains of misogyny long enough to recognize that both masculine and feminine have their virtues. Their answer to this unnerving thought is "complementarianism": the idea that men and women have divergent virtues. Both sets are good individually, but incomplete; it is only in heterosexual marriage that they complement each other and form the whole virtues of a human life. Sometimes you get the warm-and-cuddly gloss on this. Other times the mask slips and you find these religious fundamentalists prattling on about male "headship" of the household and female nurturing obedience.

Either way, it's bullshit. You think because you have a wife you're never going to need to be nurturing yourself?  That there is no place for kindness in your heart?  You think because you have a husband that means never needing to make decisions again?  I am sorry but you are human: there is no escape from that pesky thing called choice. 

To be only masculine or only feminine is to be half a human being. To successfully incorporate the virtues of both in a single life is divine. And so is being able to reject the aspects of each that imprison you. I'm not going to go through the list of everything gendered and tell you which ones are good and bad. I'm going to tell you that you get to pick and choose yourself. You're allowed to. (You have to. All of life's a choice).

Yet the body

And yet isn't all this "you can pick and choose" language once again—a flight from the body?  Aren't I suggesting that you can pick and choose what you like, and your physical form and personal history and social perception don't matter?  

So let me start by saying: the body matters. Take it from a tran. The body matters. The body constrains us. A personal example: I cannot bear children. That is a part of the human experience that is foreclosed to me. The body constrains us.

In the past latter-day feminists have attacked me for admitting this. Any suggestion that there might be physical differences between men and women, and that these differences might matter, is verboten. Any suggestion that patriarchy—a system of tremendous antiquity, ubiquity, and durability—might have a material basis is verboten.

But I do not want to mortgage my feminism to tendentious anthropological theories of what did or did not happen "back on the savannah" a hundred thousand years before the start of recorded history. My feminism is not disproven depending on whether analysis of a few scattered fragments of bone and flint suggests that most large game was hunted by men or not.

Because this is the thing. The body matters. But it doesn't matter the way reactionary camp says it does. Reactionary camp believes in a hyperbinary, both natural and necessary to reinscribe at every turn. Men are from Mars, women are from Venus. Men are active, women are passive. Men are warriors, women are nurturers. The body is binary—and all non-binary bodies must be chopped into conformity. It's no accident that laws banning gender-affirming care invariably have carveouts allowing for the coercive gender assignment of intersex children. It's no accident that the people most obsessed with physical differences are obsessed with codifying them into law. But society should not be in the business of telling you who you can be based on what demographic group you are. If the binary were really so natural it wouldn't need law to enforce it.

The body is more complicated than that. Chromosomes are more than just XX and XY. There are women who have given birth and only later discovered they had XY chromosomes. The shape of your skeleton, the mass of your muscles, the presence or functioning or kind of your sex organs—all of it is far more variable and, frankly, weird than reactionaries allow. Biology is a mess. Evolution is a mess. We shouldn't expect otherwise.

But there is perhaps an even more important truth staring us in the face. The body has never been less of a prison than it is today. The progress of technology—the superabundance of the productive forces in our modern world—means that we have more ability to alter this flesh than ever before in history. 

The sheer volume of calories—especially protein—we can afford to feed our children has reshaped the bodies of the West.  The average woman today is 10cm taller than her counterpart from a century past.  Thomas Jefferson's wife Martha married him when she was 24, and bore six children in the ten years of their marriage—you can run the math, if you like, on how much of her marriage she spent nursing or pregnant—and then died of complications from childbirth at the age of 33.  Today birth control, especially hormonal birth control (over which men have little control at the moment of sex) is cheap and accessible, fundamentally altering our relation to pregnancy and reproduction.

The hormone testosterone was isolated and artificially synthesized in 1935; the hormone estradiol isolated in 1935 and synthesized in 1948. The GnRH agonist Leuprorelin, a puberty blocker, was patented in 1973 and approved for medical use in America 1985. Turning a boy into a girl was, physically speaking, more or less impossible prior to these developments. Today it's straightforward, at least if you catch it early enough.

Womb transplantations are no longer science fiction. The first was performed in 2014; now more than 100 have been performed, and 50 children born from them.. The technology of artificial wombs is likewise no longer science fiction: experimental devices can support a fetus from 22 weeks post-conception. That said, bearing children from conception to delivery is still beyond the state of our science. Give it time.

These are hardly the only interventions available to us today. Consider the explosive popularity of physique-enhancing drugs not among professional athletes but average Americans. Consider the explosive popularity of the weight-loss (and self control?) compound semaglutide. Log on to the right website, fill out the right forms, and a collection of needles and vials and pills will arrive at your doorstep in days, filled with chemicals that can transform your flesh. As The Substance teaches us, we all want to be a better version of ourselves.

The point of this all is that you are constrained in your choices by your body. It sucks but it is what it is. But the nature of that constraint is not what reactionary camp wants it to be. And the progress of technology means that constraint decreases day by day.

You can become what you want to be.

To be one among others equally real

Gender is about more than just flesh. It's about how you function in society: how you act and how you are acted upon; how you perceive others and how others perceive you.

And this takes us back to reactionary camp. Watch this video: a pretty boy so puffed by gear he can barely wipe his own ass, pretending to Do Business in front of his Instagram followers, while a faceless wifemaid serves him an all-protein breakfast. The fantasy is a fantasy of power and recognition. He needs to be seen to be admired. Yet he has done nothing of worth to command that admiration.

The cheat skill fantasy is the crypto fantasy is the sports betting fantasy is the day trading fantasy is the litrpg fantasy is the reactionary fantasy. There is a secret cheat code out there, one that only you possess, one that will transport you to luxury and leisure. You won't need to work hard. Wealth and esteem will fall into your lap and everyone will have no choice but to adulate you. 

This is called a rent: a return earned not from any real production, but just from excluding others. Melinda Cooper argues that the post-WWII economic order was structured to provide such rents to white men by excluding everyone else from the best-paying and most secure jobs. This economic rent was coupled with a social rent, a social rent embodied in a specific family structure: the fantasy of the housewife and the white picket fence, the fantasy of a woman not permitted any better options forced into dependence on and subservience to you.

This is the interpersonal promise of reactionary camp. Testosterone is literally magical, a secret chemical possessed of great power, and just possess enough of it and you will have Masculine Energy and riches and adoring women.

But look at these hollow men. Elon Musk has to pay someone else to play his video games for him so he can pretend to be good in front of a chatroom of anonymous fanboys. Look at these hollow men. Robin Hanson speculates that unfuckable men should get helpmeets assigned to them by the state. Look at these hollow men.

In a free society, the state should not be in the business of telling people who to love. The state should not be in the business of telling people how they have to live their lives based on some demographic category they got slotted into at birth. Why do you think the DMV should be handing out gender roles?  There is nothing more antithetical to human freedom and human flourishing.

To be adored by someone you do not respect is empty. I can tell you right now it is empty. The esteem that matters—the esteem that sticks with you—is esteem from those you yourself esteem. It is in this mutual recognition that we find satisfaction. What is good in life?  To be recognized as worthy by others equally real.

This is the vision I offer you. Not the dreamscape of reactionary camp. But a real human being, looking back at you with the same admiration you give to them. To be admired and respected for your unique take on what it means to be human. Grace for your failings and esteem for your virtues. This is what we queers call "partnership."  You should give it a try sometime.

But this means, among other things, making yourself worthy of that esteem. Escaping from the spiral of grievance and self-pity that manosphere influencers want to lock you into. Stand up straight with your fucking shoulders back, stop chasing get-rich-quick schemes and porno fantasies, get a job and try talking to that girl you like and listening when she talks to you. Stop sitting around the house all day playing video games and complaining how unfairly life has treated you. "If the wife doesn't work the husband gets a live-in maid. If the husband doesn't work the wife gets a live-in teenager."  Grow up.

For the most part it's young men refusing to be appealing partners to free and equal women, so I've focused on them. But the point is more broadly applicable. To be recognized for who you are and worthy by those you yourself find worthy: this is best in life. But this itself takes us back to the terrifying burden of freedom. It's easier to close your mind and just accept the pap society has fed you about what a Good Man or a Good Woman is. Harder to choose, to take responsibility for that choice, and to take recognition from those you yourself admire.

Peroration

Reactionary camp, at its heart, promises an escape from the pain of being human. It promises a world in which we are all mere animals and the body answers all questions. You already know it does not. To be human is simply to be forever navigating the difficulties of being a material being with one foot in the immaterial world.

Rejecting reactionary camp means living forever in that tension. I can't promise you that this will be easy. I can promise you that you will be free.

Featured image is "A female acetylene welder at work in an aircraft factory in the Midlands, September 1918," George P. Lewis 1918. Colorized by author.