Moldy Monday continues.
this post was submitted on 12 Jun 2024
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I have a personal hypothesis that self-proclaimed alpha [males] may feel the same gender dysphoria that trans folk do, only it is the sensation that they present less masculine than they actually do, so in their effort to attaining a little bit of machismo they go way overboard.
It's similar I think to the way Donald Trump can be President of the United States, and still feel fragile and unworthy.
Lol, so if I'm hearing you right, people who yap endlessly about "being alpha" are "beta to alpha trans"?
I do think there is some element of gender disillusionment if not dysphoria in very insecure men. I don't think calling them some stage of trans has the right implications though. They are men that want to stay men. But their internal views of men are constantly challenged by their culture and environment.
Nothing says women can't have muscular bodies or else they must be men or being a woman wrong in some way. But that dissonance obviously irritates the type of guy that unironically wants to be an alpha gigachad. So they impose their own standards on others, unknowingly outing their insecurities.
If I'm being really honest though even if I thought all of that was likely, it's way more likely that people on the Internet just love to start flame wars about anything if they're bored enough. Especially when the target is a woman.
I think an argument could be made that since gender is a social construct anyways, the idea of "alpha", "beta", and "sigma" males are different genders.
I'll just copy-paste what I said last time:
Your quote reminds me of one of the biggest misconceptions about Judith Butler's work who wrote so much about gender....
People constantly misquote them and say that Butler wrote that "gender is a performance" and assume that Butler meant that gender is fake.
What Butler Butler actually wrote is that "gender is performative", ie. it involves a performance that communicates our gender identity to others without the performance being the end-all-be-all of gender.
I’m gonna guess you get push-back on this, depending on how you’ve phrased it before, because saying gender is not a construct is a strong/radical statement in the context of theory.
I imagine your point is that, for an individual, gender is not some arbitrary choice. It is very real. I agree. That is consistent with the idea of finding oneself on a dynamic gender spectra that is collectively defined; i.e., a social construct.
The people who try to deny an individual’s gender, who they are, by using social construct as a synonym for “not real,” do not understand the term and, more importantly, will always find some other reason to do so until they learn to be better people. That is, the term itself is not to blame.
To be clear, I'm saying gender identity isn't a social construct (gender roles definitely are). And that's hardly a radical statement given that there is a genetic factor to being trans, as evidenced by e.g. twin studies like this one which found a much higher amount of cases where both twins are trans among identical twins (who have the same genetic code) than non-identical twins. Also, like I mentioned before, a lot of trans people feel considerable relief to their own gender dysphoria upon seeking hormone therapy and gender-affirming surgeries, which is quite hard to explain on a social basis.
Then I’m with you 100%.
Sorry for going straight to pedantic bitch over semantics, but sometimes it’s injected as a wedge issue by bad faith actors with local clout, and then burying the lede is a mistake.
Coherency on the gender constructionism thing is a phalanx for everyone in the space (protecting mostly trans folk now, others later) because the potential contradiction in the gender [identity/expression] distinction and the resulting confusion (quickly seen here) is continually weaponized by phobes in an old but still popular have-it-both-ways narrative about wokism.
Thanks for coming back to reply to everyone.
ETA clarity and context
Why does gender identity being a social construct mean conversation therapy would work? I don't follow the logic behind that assertion.
I see no reason why you can't be biologically predisposed to identify as things that are socially constructed.
The rationale that many people follow is that if gender is socially constructed, it can be socially changed as well (through conversion therapy) to make your kid align with their assigned gender at birth, which doesn't work in reality.
Those people should probably read more. While a social construct does not have an absolute origin, that something is a social construct has never implied that it’s “fake.”
Especially at the level of the individual, where the gender “construct” becomes a monolith and internal and external perceptions belong to one person, it contains the entire definition for that individual at a point in time. So for the individual at a point in time, the construct is not only real, it’s literally all there is.
Changing the social definition of the concepts of gender, and how people view themselves are completely distinct.
I can paint new directions on the face of a compass , but it's still going to point where it was going to point regardless.
North is a social construct, but no amount of conversation therapy is ever going to move the north star.
hey! the idea that gender is entirely socially constructed is also advanced by agender enbys like young me who simply never experienced a feeling of gender in their lives, and thus agreed with fellow enby Judith Butler that gender is a funny silly game we play for no reason. do not go around presuming those people are cisgender or that everyone biologically feels gender like you do
I can see why this idea would seem appealing to agender people. But that's taking one's personal case and turning it into a statement about gender as a whole. Gender having a biological component isn't at odds with agender or NB people, but claiming gender is socially constructed is indeed problematic, like I said before.
That's toxic masculinity in a nutshell. See also the author of The Game describing sex in the most mechanical terms - coming reeeal close to acknowledging he does not actually desire women sexually, he's just conditioned to see them as a goal.
I'm pretty sure it's dysmorphia rather than dysphoria. Dysphoria is rooted in an accurate picture of yourself and dysmorphia in an inaccurate one. If a guy starts going to the gym because the idea of not being able to bridal carry his girlfriend makes him feel unmanly, I'd agree that's some flavor of gender dysphoria. On the other hand, someone like the liver king thinking he still doesn't have enough muscle is definitely body dysmorphia.
But I'd agree that (similar to dysphoria) the so-called alphas often have dysmorphia of more than just the body - they worry they come across unmanly in all ways of their presentation, regardless of how much "masculine energy" they're already putting out.
Yeah this is a favorite pet theory of mine as well, partly because I like imagining guys like Andrew Tate protesting being labeled “trans alpha” or whatever, but also because it’s just a fact that many cis people experience a form of gender dysphoria and commonly seek hormone therapy for it at early ages.
I’ve found that comparison usually clicks with uninitiated cis people immediately, even when they’ve only heard othering and alarmist narratives up to that point.