Hegemonic Masculinity Runs on Anyone

Hegemonic Masculinity Runs on Anyone

Mx. Love C. Dialogos, LMFT | Buddhist Chaplain | AuDHD Clinical Psychotherapist

First published September 6, 2026, at lovepsychotherapy.com

Knowing the mechanics of a system is available to those who've spent a lifetime being oppressed by them, versus someone who inherits these traits and wrongly assumes, "that's just how things are." It's akin to someone who can build a car versus someone who can only drive one. Only one of those people can do both.

Someone came into my comments to tell me I was not a woman. I did not deny it. I conceded the accusation entirely, took the position of authority being claimed, ran it more competently than the accuser could, and there has been no reply.

The same move belongs where the stakes are not a comment section. Now that that's out of the way: what are we going to do about racial disparity, systemic poverty, vaccines, the lack of equity inherent to the legislative process? Mr., Ms., Mx. Representative, I'll use whatever bathroom you want, if you will take care of your constituents.

Both moves work for one reason. Hegemony is genderless. It is an operating system, and anyone willing to learn how it runs can run it, and can run it better than the people who inherited it and never had to look at it. Knowing how a system is built and knowing how to drive it are different things, and only one of those people can do both. Like a surgeon: deconstruct, then focus on what matters.

The working version of this framework is Connell and Messerschmidt's 2005 reformulation in Gender & Society. It explicitly rejects reading hegemonic masculinity as a fixed character type belonging to a fixed set of people, and describes instead a position inside the gender order that is culturally authorized at a given moment, held by whoever is currently able to hold it, contestable, and won and lost rather than owned.

The position is relational. It has no content standing on its own and exists only against the positions it subordinates, so enforcement is most of the work that sustains it.

A position constituted by relations rather than by bodies has no sex requirement and never did. Authority claimed through dominance, provision, sexual access, the power to confer and withhold approval, and the right to set terms for somebody else's evening is a set of levers, and anyone who has located the levers can pull them. The 2005 account is explicit on the corollary: women are central to the processes that construct and sustain hegemonic masculinity, which makes them operators of the system rather than its audience. The pyramid diagram in circulation, the one putting Women at the base labeled as judges and spectators, contradicts the account it claims to illustrate.

Two measurement findings say the same thing, and neither requires familiarity with the instruments that produced them. When researchers built a scale for extreme gender-role beliefs and deliberately made it answerable by anyone regardless of their own gender, the results behaved as a single dimension, meaning hypermasculinity and hyperfemininity are one underlying disposition expressing itself differently depending on who is holding it. And on the standard measure of sexism, women frequently score higher than men on its benevolent subscale, which is the operating pattern the framework predicts and the thing an instrument written only for men cannot see.

What does not exist is a measure of endorsement that has been shown to work the same way across genders. The instruments with clean cross-gender properties assess where people place themselves rather than what they believe, and the instruments assessing belief have not been tested to that standard. So the claim still has to be argued instead of shown, which is why I built one and published it unvalidated rather than waiting.

The largest group in the schema is complicit masculinity, meaning those who fall short of every honored quality, decline to challenge the structure that honors those qualities anyway, and collect the ordinary benefits of the arrangement while receiving none of the standing the ideal keeps promising. Complicity pays in advantage and confers nothing in standing, and the gap between them is unstable.

One cheap lever is available from inside that gap, and it is adjudicating somebody else's gender. It requires no qualification, costs nothing, carries no risk, can be pulled by anyone with an account and a keyboard, and pays out immediately in the form of an audience. Anyone who cannot climb the arrangement can still rule on somebody standing inside it.

So the accusation is virtue signaling. A performance of alignment staged for whoever the accuser assumed was watching, not a claim about the person it names and never intended as one.

Two more positions matter, and the training slides collapse them into one.

Marginalized masculinity describes those who hold the dominant norms and are excluded from full access to the payout by race, by class, by disability, by immigration status, by incarceration history. They are not excluded from the norms. They are excluded from what the norms are supposed to buy, which is why the enforcement often comes hardest from people the arrangement pays least.

Subordinated masculinity describes those positioned as constitutive failures of the norm itself, with gay men as Connell's central example, and the mechanism there is expulsion rather than exclusion. The subordinated position is not a lesser version of the honored one. It is the category the honored one gets defined against.

These are separate axes rather than rungs on one ladder. Someone can be marginalized without being subordinated, subordinated without being marginalized, or held in both at once, and reading them as sequential tiers will produce a formulation that does not fit the person in front of you.

The disciplinary vocabulary sits on the subordination axis, and it travels. Slurs built to police men who fall outside masculine norms get aimed at women, at nonbinary people, and at trans people with the same function and none of the accuracy, because the instrument was never calibrated to be accurate. It only has to be answered.

This is also where class enters the framework, and it is the part most often left out of the slide deck. The accusation costs least to make and most to absorb, and who absorbs it is not distributed evenly. The person who can afford a lawyer, a move, a different school, or a week off work experiences gender enforcement as an insult. The person who cannot experiences it as a loss.

A signal does not complete until somebody supplies resistance, so the accusation is engineered to extract a reaction. Two reactions are available. Supplication, where the accused explains herself, produces evidence, softens her tone, and asks in some register to be recognized. Escalation, where she becomes angry and is converted into the unstable one, which turns the exchange into a story about her temperament.

Both deliver the same thing, and it has a name. Emphasized femininity is the femininity organized around compliance with the interests of the hegemonic position. Supplication produces that compliance directly. Anger produces it by default, because someone made to look unstable has to work her way back to being taken seriously before she can say anything at all.

The demand was never that she prove she is a woman. It was that she perform the accommodating version of being one. And because the provoked response becomes the permanent record of the exchange, and that record is what gets cited by anyone later asking who the difficult person was, this belongs in the category of abuse rather than rudeness.

Legislative capacity exists, moves quickly, and goes where it is pointed. Since 2023 the ACLU has tracked more than two thousand state bills targeting LGBTQ people, roughly two hundred eleven of which became law, with three hundred sixty-six introduced across thirty-six states in January 2026 alone. Set that beside the Equal Rights Amendment, which passed Congress in 1972, was extended once to 1982, fell three states short, reached its thirty-eighth ratification when Virginia acted in January 2020, and remains uncertified and unpublished.

Three years to define who counts as a woman. Fifty-four years to not give one anything.

The amendment is an illustration rather than a cause. Gender disparity long predates it, does not run through it, and would survive its certification intact. What the comparison shows is allocation, and the same capacity has produced nothing comparable on racial disparity, on systemic poverty, on vaccine access, or on the inequity built into the legislative process itself. Salience is finite, floor time is finite, and a question that can be argued indefinitely without ever resolving is extraordinarily useful to anybody who would prefer the finite resource be spent elsewhere. No counterfactual proves what those legislatures would otherwise have passed, and the narrow version needs none: a question structured so that it cannot resolve is useful to whoever benefits from the status quo.

That is what the accusation is standing in front of, and it is why the countermove scales. Concede the premise entirely in the opening line, and then keep talking.

Congressperson, I'll be any gender you want, so long as you give me insurance, clean water, equal pay, racial equality.

Senator, I'll be whatever gender you need me to be. Now tell me you'll fix BIPOC maternal death and institutional racism.

Call me whatever gets the bill to the floor. I've been called worse by people who accomplished less.

The bathroom was never the negotiation. It was what got put on the table so the negotiation would not have to happen, and every hour spent litigating it is an hour the system is being paid for.

Do not fight. Outsmart.

The arrangement has no loyalty to the people it pays. It authorizes a position, the position goes to whoever can hold it, and it will hold just as firmly for someone it was built to exclude as for someone it was built to reward. That is not consolation and it is not irony. It is the opening.

What follows from it is a discipline rather than a feeling.

Learn the mechanics well enough to name the lever the moment it gets pulled.

Concede the accusation immediately. Denial is the trap, because answering concedes that the accusation was a description and that you would like your name cleared of it, and there is no version of denying it that does not first agree the question was fair to ask. Explaining yourself and losing your temper are the same move as far as the system is concerned.

Take the exact position being claimed and run it with more control than whoever claimed it. Not an adjacent authority and not a general refusal, but the specific one the accuser reached for. This refutes the claim twice. If the position required a particular body, someone outside that category could not occupy it at all, and occupancy settles that. Running it more skillfully than whoever claims it by birthright settles the second, which is that no proprietary competence in it was ever held.

Do it cold. Precise, unhurried, no anger anywhere in it, because anger is the failure state the provocation was purchasing.

Then leave, immediately, for whatever the accusation was covering.

This runs in both directions, and the second direction is the one that gets skipped.

A client who has been adjudicated by somebody with no standing does not need help proving the adjudicator wrong, since proving that wrong is still playing the game on the game's terms. What they need is the name for what happened, the structural location of the person who did it, and the operational fact that the accusation was never about them. It was about the accuser's position in a schema that was not paying out.

The second direction is the client who is pulling the lever. Not because they are malicious, but because the lever is there and the gap between what the arrangement promises and what it delivers is real and painful, and adjudicating somebody else's gender is the one move available that costs nothing and pays immediately. Naming that without shaming it is the clinical work, and it is harder than the first direction because it requires the client to give up a move that is working.

Neither direction is served by disputing the content of the accusation. The content was never the point.

Connell, R. W., and Messerschmidt, J. W. "Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept." Gender & Society 19(6), 2005, 829-859.

Connell, R. W. Gender and Power. Stanford University Press, 1987.

Schippers, M. "Recovering the Feminine Other: Masculinity, Femininity, and Gender Hegemony." Theory and Society 36(1), 2007.

Hamburger, M. E., Hogben, M., McGowan, S., and Dawson, L. J. "Assessing Hypergender Ideologies." Journal of Research in Personality 30, 1996, 157-178.

Glick, P., and Fiske, S. T. "The Ambivalent Sexism Inventory." Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 70(3), 1996.

ACLU Legislative Tracker; translegislation.com.