Overview

Since the 1970s, feminism has had a second, quieter conversation running alongside its main one: what should men make of it, and what does it say about men? Some men took feminist ideas about gender roles and turned them on their own lives. Others organised against feminism. Poets, psychologists and sociologists built whole fields around the question of what masculinity is and whether it harms the men who live it.

This page traces those movements and debates: men's liberation, its split into pro-feminist men's groups and the men's rights movement, the mythopoetic men's movement, academic masculinity studies, the idea of "toxic masculinity", the recent attention to boys' and men's problems, and the online manosphere. It then asks why any of this matters for male detransitioners. Many of them describe growing up with a deep sense that being male was something shameful, and for some that shame became part of the road to transition.

None of these movements speaks for all men, and none of the feminist analyses below speaks for all feminists. Each is a particular argument made by particular people, and each has drawn serious criticism.

Men's liberation in the 1970s

The men's liberation movement grew directly out of second-wave feminism. In the early 1970s, small groups of mostly white, middle-class American men began meeting in consciousness-raising groups, copying the format women's groups had used to talk about their lives and link personal problems to social ones.

One of the best-known figures was Warren Farrell, a political scientist who served on the board of the New York City chapter of the National Organization for Women (NOW), the largest US women's rights organisation. His book The Liberated Man (1974) argued that rigid sex roles hurt both sexes: women were kept out of public life, and men were cut off from their feelings and their children and pushed into lives built around work and status (Los Angeles Times 1993).

Sex role strain

The movement's main intellectual tool was sex role theory: the idea that men and women learn "roles" from their culture, and that these roles can be changed. The psychologist Joseph Pleck turned this into a research programme. In The Myth of Masculinity (1981) he proposed what became known as the gender role strain paradigm (Division 51 of the APA). It makes three claims:

• Discrepancy strain: masculine norms are contradictory and often impossible to meet, so many men fall short and suffer for it.
• Trauma strain: the process of being made to fit those norms (being toughened up, shamed for crying, bullied for softness) can itself be traumatic.
• Dysfunction strain: even men who meet the norms can be harmed. Traits like emotional suppression and refusing help have costs for their health and relationships.

This paradigm replaced the older "gender role identity" model, which had treated a strong masculine identity as the mark of a healthy man. Under Pleck's framework the problem was no longer a boy who failed to be masculine enough. The problem was the standard itself. It remains the main framework in the academic psychology of men (SAGE Encyclopedia of Psychology and Gender).

The split: pro-feminist men and men's rights

Men's liberation did not stay unified for long. The sociologist Michael Messner argues that its founding idea, that sex roles are equally costly for men and women, held two incompatible readings (Messner 1998). If the emphasis fell on men's power over women, men's liberation became a support act for feminism. If the emphasis fell on men's costs, it could turn into a case that men were the real victims.

By the late 1970s both readings had their own organisations:

• Pro-feminist (or anti-sexist) men held the first National Conference on Men and Masculinity in Knoxville, Tennessee, in 1975, organised by men taking a women's studies course. That network became today's National Organization for Men Against Sexism (NOMAS), which describes its history as an explicit rejection of the "male-self-interest philosophy" of men's rights (NOMAS).
• The men's rights movement focused on areas where men appear disadvantaged: divorce and custody law, military conscription, workplace deaths, shorter life expectancy, and false accusations. Farrell himself moved in this direction. His book The Myth of Male Power (1993) argued that men are "the disposable sex" and that the media had spent decades "male bashing". NOW leaders who had once worked with him denounced the book (Los Angeles Times 1993).

Both sides kept something real from the original insight. Pro-feminist men were right that "both sexes suffer equally" ignored real differences in power, money and violence. Men's rights advocates were right that some male disadvantages (suicide, workplace death, school failure) were hardly discussed. What the split cost was a shared language for talking about both at once.

The mythopoetic men's movement

In 1990 the poet Robert Bly published Iron John, a reading of a Brothers Grimm fairy tale about a wild, hairy man kept in a cage. Bly argued that modern men had lost contact with a deep, vital masculinity. Industrial work had taken fathers out of the home, and boys were growing up without older men to initiate them into adulthood. The book became an international bestseller and gave its name to the mythopoetic men's movement: weekend retreats, drumming circles, storytelling and ritual, led by Bly and writers such as Michael Meade and James Hillman (EBSCO Research Starters).

The mythopoetic men differed from both earlier camps. They were neither campaigning against feminism nor joining it. Their focus was grief: the "father wound", emotional numbness, and the absence of male community.

Pro-feminist scholars were sharply critical. In The Politics of Manhood (1995), the sociologist Michael Kimmel gathered profeminist responses arguing that the movement offered men emotional comfort while sidestepping questions of power, and that its "deep masculine" relied on romantic stereotypes of warriors and kings (Kimmel 1995). The book also printed replies from the movement's leaders, who rejected that reading.

Masculinity studies and "hegemonic masculinity"

In the 1980s and 1990s, the study of men as men (rather than as the default human) became an academic field. Its most influential concept came from the Australian sociologist Raewyn Connell.

What the concept means

Hegemonic masculinity was first set out in a 1985 paper by Tim Carrigan, Connell and John Lee, and developed in Connell's book Masculinities (1995). The word "hegemony" comes from the Marxist thinker Antonio Gramsci, who used it for power that rests mostly on consent and cultural authority rather than force.

Connell's argument is that there is not one masculinity but several, arranged in a hierarchy. At any given time and place, one form is the most honoured way of being a man. Other men must position themselves in relation to it, and it helps justify men's overall dominance over women (Connell & Messerschmidt 2005). Below it sit:

• Subordinated masculinities, above all gay men, and more broadly men seen as effeminate.
• Complicit masculinities: most men, who do not fully live the ideal but benefit from it.
• Marginalised masculinities: men excluded by race or class, even when they display "masculine" traits.

Crucially, Connell said hegemonic masculinity is not a personality type and is not statistically normal. Few men actually embody it. It works as an ideal that others are measured against.

Critiques

The concept became one of the most cited in gender studies, and one of the most argued over:

• Misuse as a list of bad traits. Connell and the criminologist James Messerschmidt complained in 2005 that many researchers had reduced it to a fixed type ("the aggressive, emotionless man"), losing the original point about relationships and change (Connell & Messerschmidt 2005).
• Too tidy a hierarchy. Demetrakis Demetriou argued that dominant masculinity constantly absorbs pieces of subordinated styles, producing "hybrid" forms that are hard to place on a ladder (Demetriou 2001).
• Out of date. The sport sociologist Eric Anderson's Inclusive Masculinity (2009) reported that many young men in Britain and the US now show less homophobia, more physical and emotional closeness with male friends, and more acceptance of behaviour once coded feminine. He argued that a hierarchy built on homophobia no longer describes them (Anderson 2009).
• Masculinity seen only as power. Critics outside the field argue that the framework treats masculinity mainly as a means of domination, leaving little room for the protective, loyal or self-sacrificing ideals many men value.

For male detransitioners, the most relevant part of Connell's map is the bottom of it. A boy who is gentle, small, artistic or same-sex attracted is placed among the "subordinated" masculinities by the people around him long before he has a word for it.

"Toxic masculinity"

Origins

The phrase toxic masculinity is now mostly associated with feminist commentary, but it did not start there. It was coined in the 1980s by the psychologist Shepherd Bliss, a central figure in the mythopoetic movement. He used it for "behavior that diminishes women, children, other men" (Flanagan 2023, The Atlantic). In the mythopoetic framework, toxic masculinity was the opposite of the healthy "deep masculine" men had lost, not a description of masculinity as such (Harrington 2021).

The psychiatrist Terry Kupers brought the term into clinical writing in a 2005 paper on prison mental health. He defined it as "the constellation of socially regressive male traits that serve to foster domination, the devaluation of women, homophobia, and wanton violence" (Kupers 2005). Like Bliss, he separated these traits from masculinity in general.

Popularisation

The phrase stayed obscure until the mid-2010s, when it spread rapidly through online feminism, journalism and then the #MeToo movement after 2017 (Harrington 2021). It became shorthand for sexual harassment, violence, emotional suppression, and sometimes ordinary male habits.

In 2018 the American Psychological Association (APA) issued its first Guidelines for Psychological Practice with Boys and Men. The APA's own magazine summarised the research behind them this way:

The main thrust of the subsequent research is that traditional masculinity—marked by stoicism, competitiveness, dominance and aggression—is, on the whole, harmful. — (Pappas 2019, APA Monitor on Psychology)

The guidelines provoked a strong backlash. Critics, collected for example by the online magazine Quillette (which publishes from a broadly heterodox, anti-progressive position), argued that defining masculinity by men's worst behaviour would put off the men who most needed help (Quillette 2019).

Critiques

Criticism of the term comes from several directions, including from within feminism and masculinity studies:

• Semantic drift. Its original users meant a specific poisoned form of masculinity. In popular use it often slides into implying that masculinity is toxic in itself. Many boys hear the second meaning even when adults intend the first.
• Individualising a social problem. The sociologist Carol Harrington argues that the term pins harm on bad men's personalities and distracts from the social and economic structures that feminist analysis originally targeted (Harrington 2021). The criminologist Michael Salter made a similar case in The Atlantic (Salter 2019).
• Missing the structural picture. Richard Reeves argues that men's problems are better explained by structural changes in education and work than by a masculinity that is either "too toxic" or too weak (Brookings Institution Press).
• No healthy alternative offered. If boys only hear what masculinity should not be, some go looking for a positive model elsewhere, including in the online spaces described below.

Boys' and men's problems

From the late 2010s, a growing body of work argued that boys and men face serious, measurable difficulties that neither the left nor the right was addressing well. The best-known is Of Boys and Men (2022) by Richard Reeves, a Brookings Institution scholar who went on to found the American Institute for Boys and Men. Reeves describes himself as committed to gender equality, and argues that this now includes attention to male disadvantage (Reeves 2022).

These figures are contested in their interpretation, not in their existence. Some writers argue that the "male loneliness epidemic" is overstated, since women also report high loneliness and the US is an outlier among wealthy countries (Gallup 2025). Feminist critics point out that men still hold most political and economic power at the top. Both things can be true at once: the most powerful people are disproportionately men, and so are the people at the bottom.

Several detransitioners describe meeting these problems in their own lives, sometimes only after they started being seen as men again:

You can not talk about your feelings openly save for very, very few people (online is different than real life). Conversations revolving around negative emotions are a no-go. Have to keep them to yourself. —Kowashisname, desister

Society treats men really badly in a lot of ways despite them supposedly having all the power and privilege. It took me a long time to become comfortable with the fact I was male because I thought it meant no one would ever love or care for or support me if they saw me that way. —Sagebrysh, detrans male

The manosphere

The manosphere is a loose network of websites, forums, podcasts and influencers focused on men and, often, against feminism. The media scholar Debbie Ging describes it as having become "the dominant arena for the communication of men's rights in Western culture" (Ging 2019). It includes several distinct communities:

• Men's rights activists, continuing the 1970s–90s movement online.
• Pick-up artists, who teach techniques for seducing women.
• Men Going Their Own Way (MGTOW), who reject relationships with women.
• Incels ("involuntary celibates"), men who feel shut out of sex and romance, some of whose forums are marked by intense hostility to women.
• "Red pill" self-improvement and fitness influencers, a newer and more commercial layer.

Ging notes that much manosphere talk is built around victimhood and "beta" status rather than confident dominance. A large-scale study of manosphere forums and subreddits found users migrating over time from older communities like men's rights and pick-up artist forums towards newer, more extreme ones such as incels and MGTOW, with rising levels of toxicity and misogyny (Ribeiro et al. 2021).

These spaces attract many young men because they speak directly to the loneliness and rejection described above, but they often answer it with hostility to women. Some detransitioners see a link between the incel world and male transition. One argues:

Being an incel basically leads directly to transitioning, because it means you feel jealous of women and have issues with being male because you think males have it hard. —UniquelyDefined, detrans male

That is one person's experience, not a measured pattern. What it captures is a shared starting point: a belief that being male means being unwanted. The manosphere and transition offer opposite exits from the same feeling.

Why this matters for male detransitioners

Most of the research on detransition has focused on young women. In the largest early survey, 31% of 100 detransitioners were male (Littman 2021), and in a 2024 survey of 78 young adults only 9% were male (Littman et al. 2024). That leaves male experiences mostly documented in first-person accounts. In those accounts, the debates on this page are not abstract. They describe what the boys absorbed about being male, and what they ran from.

"Men are the baddies"

A recurring theme in detransitioned men's accounts is growing up believing that men as a class are dangerous or morally lesser. This is the core of internalised misandry: contempt for being male, absorbed from the culture and turned inward.

Due to the nature of my upbringing I suppose I absorbed the message that men are the 'baddies'. As a teenager I looked out into the world and had many of these fears confirmed as true in many respects and that made it so much more painful. —cagedbunny83, detrans male

For some, progressive and feminist political spaces sharpened this. Analyses that describe men as an oppressor class, or "toxic masculinity" in its loosest popular sense, can land on a sensitive teenage boy as a verdict on his whole sex:

I hated the idea that being a man makes me an oppressor or an enemy, and I hated the fact that I was interested in a lot of the stereotypical things that guys like, which I assumed was a sign of toxic masculinity. —LeGrandFromage64, desisted male

This is not a failing peculiar to feminism. Many of these men also describe abusive fathers, bullying, and sexual abuse by men. A child who meets real cruelty from men, and then hears a cultural message that such cruelty is what men are, has two sources telling him the same story. The mirror-image story is common among detransitioned women, as one desister put it:

i wanted to be a man because i felt like the world saw women as inferior and less smart. same issues different side of the coin —portaux, desister

See internalised misogyny for the female side.

Failing at masculinity

Pleck's "discrepancy strain" and Connell's "subordinated masculinities" both describe something many feminine boys live through: being judged and bullied for falling short of a male ideal. In some accounts, transition offered a way out of the competition altogether.

my dysphoria was not spawned from a genuine want to be a woman, but from a desperation to escape the confides of ‘masculinity’ that I felt I had failed at. —MythicalDawn, detrans male

Masculinity for natal men is nebulous and unachievable because it's a weird, subjective competition. —Alternative_Road3694, desisted male

The research on feminine boys fits this picture. In the largest follow-up of boys referred to a gender clinic in childhood, 87.8% no longer had gender dysphoria by adulthood, and most were same-sex or bisexually attracted (Singh et al. 2021). For many of these boys, the "problem" was being a feminine boy, and possibly a gay one, in a culture with a narrow script for boys. See gender stereotypes and internalised homophobia.

Autogynephilia and shame

A different pathway involves autogynephilia (AGP): sexual arousal at the thought of oneself as a woman, a concept from the sexologist Ray Blanchard's typology. Here the shame is often about male sexuality itself. Some detransitioned men describe transition as a way to make an embarrassing sexuality feel acceptable:

I think a lot of the reason AGPs go through with it is the shame of being a man turned on by feminisation. —krjrhrhrhewiheh, detrans male

Another commenter suggests both dysphoria and AGP can grow from one root:

I think they both come from the same thing, shame over being GNC. —SuperIsaiah, desisted male

These are personal theories, not research findings, and AGP remains a contested idea. But they share the theme of this page: a male body and male desire felt as something to be ashamed of.

Trans perspectives on "male socialisation"

Feminist debates about men have spilled into arguments about trans women. Some radical feminists and gender-critical writers argue that trans women were raised as boys and carry male socialisation, so they should not be treated as women in single-sex spaces. Some detransitioners agree:

People who continue to act with stereotypical "male" condescension and lack of empathy toward women are failing at feminism, no matter what their identity is. —spirituallyinsane, desisted male

Many trans women reply that their boyhood was nothing like the confident male upbringing the argument assumes, and that what they learned as boys was mostly rejection:

My ‘male socialization’ was essentially being shit on every 0.5 seconds and treated like the local object of subtlety veiled pity by most of my guy friends - or just flat out backhandedly/subtlety mocked - for not being a ‘successful man’ or ‘successfully masculine’. —WYOakthrowaway, trans woman

We're not socialised to perform our assigned gender in a fixed way—we're socialised to associate certain behaviours, traits, and roles with specific genders. —Professor-pigeon-, trans woman

Detransitioned men and many trans women are, in a sense, describing the same boyhood: gentle boys punished for not fitting a male script. They draw opposite conclusions. One concludes that he was really a girl; the other concludes that the script was wrong. Accounts like WYOakthrowaway's are a reminder that "male socialisation" is not one uniform experience, but they do not by themselves show that being bullied for femininity makes someone female.

Finding a non-stereotyped masculinity

For many detransitioned men, recovery involves pulling apart three things that the culture tangles together: being male (a fact of the body), masculinity (a set of social expectations), and being a good person.

Once I realized that those are not male traits, they're just bad aspects of your character that everyone should try to cut out (even IF males tend to struggle with them more than women) I realized that I didn't hate being male at all, I just hated what other people assumed about me. —-ShinyPixels-, desisted male

I could decide what being a man meant to me. That I could still be sensitive, kind, understanding, emotional, and have a feminine side as a man. Challenging these stereotypes to me seemed more important to me than running away from them. —EntryRevolutionary37, detrans male

Some describe swinging too far the other way first, trading one costume for another:

when i first detransitioned i distanced myself far away from femininity because i felt like i had to, to be accepted as a man and to feel okay after what i put myself through. but i know how unhealthy that is and that it was just repression in the opposite direction. —bradx220, detrans male

Each movement on this page offers something to a man in this position, and each has blind spots:

• Men's liberation and sex role theory give him permission to be gentle, emotional and uninterested in competing for status, without that saying anything about his sex.
• The mythopoetic tradition speaks to the need for male friendship, mentors and a positive picture of manhood, which many of these men say they never had. As one wrote, "I didnt have a positive male role, so perhaps in the future, I can be one to another boy who doesnt have that" (5nine8, detrans male).
• Feminist analyses, at their most careful, separate harmful behaviour from maleness. The writer bell hooks argued in The Will to Change (2004) that men are harmed as well as harming, and that boys are taught to cut themselves off from love (bell hooks Books).
• Men's issues work confirms that his loneliness and his reluctance to ask for help are common, not a sign that he was never really a man.

What does not help is any message, from any side, that treats "male" and "bad" as the same thing, or treats a feminine man as a failed one. Being a gender non-conforming man without a label is a complete way to be male. See also healing and recovery.

Assessment

The arguments about men and feminism have mostly been arguments about blame and power: do men hold power, or suffer under it? Each camp tends to hear the other's claim as a denial of its own. For adults debating policy, that is a contest of priorities. For a boy who is already ashamed of himself, the loudest version of each side can be harmful. One says his sex is the problem; the other says his softness is.

The detransition accounts on this page suggest a different starting point. The original insight of men's liberation, that the male script is narrow and that falling short of it is not a defect, was never fully absorbed. A culture that let boys be gentle, artistic, emotional or gay without questioning their sex, and that criticised violence and contempt without attributing them to maleness itself, would leave fewer boys looking for a way out of being male.

References

• Anderson, E. (2009). Inclusive Masculinity: The Changing Nature of Masculinities. Routledge. book details.
• Carrigan, T., Connell, R. W. & Lee, J. (1985). Toward a new sociology of masculinity. Theory and Society, 14(5), 551–604. Cited via Connell & Messerschmidt (2005).
• Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, National Center for Health Statistics (2024). Suicide Mortality in the United States, 2002–2022. NCHS Data Brief No. 509. source.
• Connell, R. W. & Messerschmidt, J. W. (2005). Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept. Gender & Society, 19(6), 829–859. source.
• Cox, D. A. (2021). The State of American Friendship: Change, Challenges, and Loss. Survey Center on American Life. source.
• Demetriou, D. Z. (2001). Connell's Concept of Hegemonic Masculinity: A Critique. Theory and Society, 30, 337–361. source.
• Division 51 (Society for the Psychological Study of Men and Masculinities), American Psychological Association. Men & Masculinities 101: The Gender Role Strain Paradigm. source.
• EBSCO Research Starters. Iron John by Robert Bly. source.
• Flanagan, C. (2023, August). In Praise of Heroic Masculinity. The Atlantic. source.
• Gallup / Vigers, B. (2025, May 20). Younger Men in the U.S. Among the Loneliest in West. source.
• Ging, D. (2019). Alphas, Betas, and Incels: Theorizing the Masculinities of the Manosphere. Men and Masculinities, 22(4), 638–657. source.
• Harrington, C. (2021). What is "Toxic Masculinity" and Why Does it Matter? Men and Masculinities, 24(2), 345–352. source.
• hooks, b. (2004). The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love. Reading guide: source.
• Kimmel, M. (Ed.) (1995). The Politics of Manhood: Profeminist Men Respond to the Mythopoetic Men's Movement (And the Mythopoetic Leaders Answer). Temple University Press. book details.
• Kupers, T. A. (2005). Toxic masculinity as a barrier to mental health treatment in prison. Journal of Clinical Psychology, 61(6), 713–724. source.
• Littman, L. (2021). Individuals Treated for Gender Dysphoria with Medical and/or Surgical Transition Who Subsequently Detransitioned: A Survey of 100 Detransitioners. Archives of Sexual Behavior. study page, source.
• Littman, L., O'Malley, S., Kerschner, H. & Bailey, J. M. (2024). Detransition and Desistance Among Previously Trans-Identified Young Adults. Archives of Sexual Behavior, 53(1), 57–76. study page, source.
• Los Angeles Times (1993, August 9). A New Role for Men: Victim (profile of Warren Farrell). source.
• Messner, M. A. (1998). The Limits of "The Male Sex Role": An Analysis of the Men's Liberation and Men's Rights Movements' Discourse. Gender & Society, 12(3). source.
• National Organization for Men Against Sexism. History. Advocacy organisation. source.
• Pappas, S. (2019, January). APA issues first-ever guidelines for practice with men and boys. Monitor on Psychology, 50(1). source.
• Pleck, J. H. (1981). The Myth of Masculinity. MIT Press. Summarised in SAGE Encyclopedia of Psychology and Gender.
• Quillette (2019, February 4). Twelve Scholars Respond to the APA's Guidance for Treating Men and Boys. Opinion magazine. source.
• Reeves, R. V. (2022). Of Boys and Men: Why the Modern Male Is Struggling, Why It Matters, and What to Do about It. Brookings Institution Press. publisher; statistics from the author's newsletter: Why boys and men?
• Ribeiro, M. H., Blackburn, J., Bradlyn, B., De Cristofaro, E., Stringhini, G., Long, S., Greenberg, S. & Zannettou, S. (2021). The Evolution of the Manosphere across the Web. ICWSM 2021, 196–207. source.
• Salter, M. (2019, February 27). The Problem With a Fight Against Toxic Masculinity. The Atlantic. source.
• Singh, D., Bradley, S. J. & Zucker, K. J. (2021). A Follow-Up Study of Boys With Gender Identity Disorder. Frontiers in Psychiatry. study page, source.