The red-pill far-right are recreating a Victorian gay discourse (badly), and it's weird.
We truly live in the worst and weirdest timeline.
CONTENT WARNING: This post contains discussions of sex, fascism, actual Nazis, transphobia, misogyny, historical pedophilia, sexual abuse, historical slavery and possibly the greatest example of “queerness is morally neutral and can be used for evil as well as good” I have ever seen in my life. I’m also using terms and language no longer deemed appropriate because I’m talking about historical context and words have historical meaning. Please skip this one if you don’t have a strong constitution for reading about people being awful across time and also right now.
My dear reader. Imagine you are sitting with me at a pub or a café, and someone has brought up the terms “groyper” or “transmaxxing”. Imagine a deep, heavy sigh, as I bury my face in my hands and rub the bridge of my nose.
That is how I come to you now, writing this post. Normally, I would ignore any and all red-pill incel fascist trends and behaviours because I don’t believe in giving them oxygen, and I do believe in protecting my own peace. But I can’t actually ignore this one, because I know too much. I am literally doing research as we speak involving the exact things that they are (badly) recreating. So, I feel obligated to explain the historical background behind what they’re doing, and how it’s supremely surreal that we are repeating this specific bit of history in a completely backwards way. And I’m going to do this not in a purely academic way, but as if we were sitting together in a pub and I had to explain. Because this is, unfortunately, a community nightmare not an academic project at this exact moment (but it will be for future historians, I am sure). I’m going to be massively oversimplifying a lot of complex concepts, but I want this to be comprehensible to people who know nothing about this, so please forgive me fellow academics.
If this is the first time you’re hearing either of these terms (groyper, transmaxxing), you have a chance now to run away and not keep reading this, save yourselves! But if you’re genuinely curious, definitely heed the content warnings at the top of this post because I won’t be giving them again, and this feels like a traumatic nsfw fever dream from huffing paint while reading The Female Man by Joanna Russ (will come back to this specific reference at the end!).
There are people who will be able to explain what both of these terms mean better than me, and godspeed on your tiktok or google search (tiktokers have given me the majority of my information on what this is, and they’re really doing great work there). But the basic premise is that members of the red-pill incel community have a femboy (distinct from femmeboy, which is a queer-community term which they have co-opted) to fascism pipeline. In this weird little bubble of the fascist internet, they hate women so much that they have built a system (based on an imagined idea of Greco-Roman masculinity) where (ostensibly) cisgender, male-identifying but less “masculine” young men are intentionally taking estrogen to become more feminine and breedable (transmaxxing) so they can be the objects of affection to the more masculine macho fascists in their community. All while pretending that this isn’t objectively and definitively both queer and gay, and while saying that, actually, having sex with women is gay (read: effeminate).
Yes, you read that all correctly. Remember how I said this felt like a huffing-paint fever dream? We have reached maximum absurdity.
So this is really eye-opening for a lot of reasons. For me, it’s most eye-opening because it explains (a.) why the far-right think trans women are men playing dress up as a fetish (because they literally have this happening in their community, and please see footnote [1]), and b. why TERFs think the same thing (which is ironic because what’s actually happening is tremendously gay and has little effect on women except that their husbands may be cheating on them with femboys—also not historically new, chasers have been a thing forever [2]).
But where my knowledge comes in is that this isn’t new. It’s just weird. It’s weird that this particular bit of history is repeating when we have much better language and discourse now to avoid any of this happening than we did 150ish years ago. And frankly the only reason this has repeated itself in this way is because of the funnelling of young white cis men into the fascist pipeline, a lack of sex and queer history education, and a whole boatload of social stigma.
What they are essentially doing is trying to recreate an idea of Neoclassical Platonic Eros and the erastes/eromenos dynamic. This exact project was enacted in the mid 19th/early 20th century, and fed into Nazi Homoeroticism in the 1930s/40s. And somehow, people 150ish years ago did it better than they are doing it now. Now, they are doing bad interpretation, which I think the Victorians and actual Nazis would balk at.
So buckle in, time for a history lesson. Let’s go back to basics, and by basics I mean Plato.
In actual Ancient Greek times, patriarchical values were the norm and misogyny was rife (and so, really, the more things change, the more they remain the same). One of the concepts that Plato discussed was the idea that men and women could not really understand each other as equals (because again, misogyny) and so the truest form of love was an intellectual and spiritual equality between equals, in this case men. This is what people talk about when they are talking about Platonic Eros. Theoretically, this would mean the intellectual supersedes the physical, and when a lot of Victorians (and contemporary conservatives) talk about Platonic Eros they read this as meaning without any sex, just intellectual and emotional “platonic” love and companionship between men. This is, of course, nonsense. Eros means passionate, sensual love, and the Ancients were not so hung up on sexual “morality” in the same way that we are now (a hangover from the Victorians). To think that sex wasn’t happening is entirely disingenuous, especially since they derived a whole system on how to make this kind of sex okay, and we have artistic evidence of sex happening.
What the Ancients were concerned with wasn’t the sex/gender of the people having these sexual and intimate relationships. They were concerned about the power dynamics of masculinity vs effeminacy (distinct from femininity but again, loaded terms, too much to go into here). It was seen as emasculating to be the receiving partner, a giving up of masculine power. So, they came up with a system. The pederasty erastes/eromenos system. The idea behind pederasty was that an older man would be the teacher of the younger partner (usually a boy around puberty age) who would teach him to become a man intellectually and physically, in exchange for sexual favours, basically. An oversimplification, but that’s all you really need to know here. It’s important to note that the age of adulthood/maturity was VASTLY different from what it is now, so what we would now consider pedophilia was not considered a problem, because these boys were considered to be on the cusp of adulthood and no longer children. And this distinction will come up again when we get to the Victorians.
The function of the Greek system was simultaneously to educate young men into how to be citizens while also fostering intellectual and intimate homosocial community, without having to get any pesky women involved (please do hear my sarcastic tone here). The erastes/eromenos system wasn’t the only way to foster this homosocial intimacy, but it was the expected way. Certainly, there were adult men of equal or closer to equal status who were romantically and sexually involved (you could look at Achilles and Patroclus as a possible example, though hotly debated by classicists to this day). And certainly there were also adult men taking advantage of male slaves, because of course there were. But the former would have been considered uncouth due to patriarchical norms suggesting that being the penetrated partner was a sign of effeminacy, and the latter is again, more complicated. Again, we’re oversimplifying here to paint a picture.
When we get to the Romans, the rules get ramped up and vague freedoms get clamped down (as is typical of the Romans, who never did anything in half measures). The Romans were much more concerned with masculine power and patriarchical values, and thought of sexuality as much akin to conquest (the grand imperialists that they were). Gay sex was perfectly fine and acceptable if you were the penetrator, and definitely never the penetrated, by these ideas of enacting power and conquest over the bodies of others. To be the penetrated was to be considered emasculated and effeminate, and so lesser in this deeply patriarchical structure. This was much less about homosocial bonds of intimacy and intellectual equality, and a lot more about martial power and where the sex-drive is directed (because it couldn’t be directed at respectable women who weren’t your wife, as much as anyone ever really obeys the rules). The pederasty tradition continued, but they were much stricter about their rules and sex workers and slaves were usually the (willing or unwilling) bottoms to Roman homosexual desire due to the valuing of the hypermasculinity of a martial society rather than intellectual intimacy.
So now we jump ahead in time, past the rise of Christianity, past the Medieval period and past the Enlightenment, and into the 19th century. Enter: the Victorians.
While the Neoclassical movement was really a project of the 18th century when Enlightenment intellectuals were beginning to dig up the ruins of Greece and Rome with an antiquarian eye (Johann Winckelmann is a great person to look into if you’re interested in gay neoclassicism of the 18th century, as he is kind of the Father of Neoclassical Art History and Homoerotic Neoclassicism), the Victorians were particularly good at logical gymnastics to allow whatever pleasures they wanted to engage in within the constraints of social norms, and in establishing elaborate rule systems to validate whatever the hell it is they were up to at any given time. See: phrenology and early anthropology as a “scientific” basis for both classism and racism, and thus validating the British Imperial Project.
So let’s keep in mind that until the 20th century, the vast majority of educated intellectuals who are also considered “respectable” in Britain are going to be Oxbridge educated [3]. And in the 1860s Oxford was undergoing a tremendous change, which is that they were shifting from being a religious institution to a secular one, and one of the major components of this shift was centering Classical education over Biblical education. And a major part of this shift in centering Classical education was an emphasis on Plato, including Platonic ideals of homosocial intimate intellectual discourse, as well as shifting pedigogical practice to emphasise small and intimate tutorial learning groups to foster intellectual stimulation, community, and discussion. So now everyone being educated at Oxford was being educated in Classical Philosophy and History. This is really ideal for a society that is already heavily patriarchical and misogynistic, and for a school system that is not yet gender integrated. Because let’s remember, the Victorians had a real patriachical misogyny problem, quite similar to that of the Romans actually.
So within this cauldron you have two kinds of people naturally coming out of it: You have people who believe in “platonic” eros as purely non-sexual due to Victorian social norms and a rejection of any other possibility, and who believe in a homosocial, masculinist, intimate intellectual community and who reject involving women because women couldn’t possibly understand (à la Plato and also Victorian pseudo-science). You also have people who aren’t so bogged down with rejecting the possibility, are reading Plato and his contemporaries, and are seeing a homosexual (term used loosely here because the language at the time is still developing) option as both possible and preferable to having to deal with women at all, because of this belief in an equality of masculine minds over the feminine one. And all of these people are going to the same schools, are in the same communities of discourse, and it is sometimes VERY hard to distinguish who is who, because most people (Symonds, Pater, and Wilde being exceptions) were not writing down their percieved-to-be-illicit activity. [4]
And so the pederasty system is brought back to life. Again, pederasty and pedophilia are not the same thing, but now we’re closer to a modern conception of age of majority (but also still not yet there) and with a lot more concern for the moral responsibility to protect children. There is a venn diagram between pederasts and pedophiles. There is absolutely, definitely overlap. André Gide is like the best example of a bastard using pederasty as a smokescreen. But there are plenty of people who are one and not the other. We also have to remember that young girls were being abused by men just as often as young boys were (if not more often due to legality), but gay sex (and then anything construed as “gross indecency” to imply the possibility of gay sex) was across the board illegal, so we see a lot more pearl clutching about teenage boys and young men being in gay relationships than we do about their female counterparts being married to men in their 40s or being prostutes before puberty. [5]
Victorian pederasty is basically what we’re looking at when we think about Oscar Wilde and Bosie Douglas. Victorian pederasty is the idea (based on a Victorian interpretation of Classical Ideals) that a Younger man (usually of university-age, so like late teens early 20s, but again age of majority is still quite young at this time) and an Older man are an ideal pairing. The younger man gets an education from the mind of an equal who has more experience, and the older gets access to a beautiful young person, whether sexually or just to be around (because age and beauty have been linked for all time, Kate Lister of Betwixt the Sheets fame is on the hunt for a society that did not link youth with beauty and has not yet found one). And most importantly, neither of them needs to try to engage women in any of this, because it’s between perceived “equals” and outside of the constraints of the social rules of marriage, where men can be more “free”. [6]
AND SO WE GET BACK TO NOW. This is essentially the same thing that the red-pill incel fascists are attempting to do now, but worse (will get to that in a moment). And it’s a weird thing for them to be recreating, especially because they don’t believe that what they’re doing is queer or gay at all. Now, this is where terminology and language becomes important. We now understand all of this history that I just described to be a history of homosexuality, a history of queer thinking, and a history of queer behavior. But the term homosexuality didn’t exist until the 1860s in Germany, and didn’t really enter the public discourse in the English speaking world until the early 20th century. This doesn’t mean that homosexual behavior and homoerotic thinking was not happening before—we know that it was, I’ve shown here how it was, but it wasn’t thought of at the time in those terms.
It wasn’t until the 1960s that the idea of Gay as an identity became a thing. It’s important that it became a thing, because a definition of an identity rather than a set of practices that could be defined as moral or immoral is essential for the fight for civil rights. But prior to the 1960s, homosexuality wasn’t something you were but something you did (there are exceptions, I’m oversimplifying, forgive me). But the development of the identity of Gay or Queer has in some places caused a rift, because there have always been (and still are) people who engage in gay sex but who would never consider themselves to be gay as an identity. Ask anyone whose ever been on Grindr or have cruised, they’re still out there. Chasers are another great example of this, because Chasers (see footnote [2]) are engaging in what some people might consider gay sex (genitally speaking rather than gender-wise) but do not consider themselves to be gay or bi—which would be reasonable with our contemporary understandings of transgender identity, if they also were attracted to cis women. There are plenty of straight men who are open to dating trans women as well as cis women because they genuinely see trans women as women and so their sexuality does not come into question. But these men are not the same as Chasers. It’s a fetish for Chasers, inherently tied to a belief in the taboo of same-genital-contact, but with a desire to not be seen as Gay.
Which is, again, exactly what the red-pill-incel-fascists are doing. They are trying to find a workaround to (a) engaging with women (who they hate) while still identifying as straight and (b) still engage in same-genital-sexual-contact without being called gay, while trying to navigate a world that they refuse to accept, that trans women are women, where the genitals don’t matter, and where a lot of trans women have had bottom surgery anyway. In essence, they want to have sex with trans women because they think trans women are men (and therefore fit within the pederasty paradigm as better in their eyes than cis women, but with all the aesthetic trappings of women that they find attractive), but trans women reject them because trans women are not men, and so the fascists have….created their own through manipulation of a vulnerable community (young “feminine” men who are terminally online and already on the fascism pipeline because we have failed to teach our boys empathy and understanding in a terminally hostile world).
Which is extremely weird on its own, but its even weirder when you consider that the people they are modeling their philosophy on (the ancient Greeks and Romans, and then the actual Nazis they aspire to be) would probably have balked at this entire prospect. Why? because they valued masculinity and either embraced or turned a blind eye to all the homoerotics that came with that. The Ancient Greeks valued the community bonds between masculine men, and the erastes/eromenos system was built on a valuing of youth not femininity (the difference, today, between a twink and a femme). The young men/boys who were their eromenii would eventually grow up into citizens (masculine men) who would then have their own eromenii. The Romans were probably the closest to what the current fascists are doing (unsurprising) but again effeminacy did not equal womanhood to them, womanhood was another thing entirely. Effeminacy was linked not to presentation (an oversimplification, again, please forgive me) but to the act of being penetrated, and so not being considered a dominant member of the partriachy. The Victorians are kind of a mess (which I love and am fascinated by) because they were actively debating what qualified and constituted homosexuality and “acceptable” queer behavior, but for simplicities sake let’s just say that the two major players in this debate were the pederasty system (which valued the beauty of youth not femininity), and the masculinist system of Edward Carpenter and Walt Whitman which spoke to masculine bonds of intimate equality among masculine men. But in both cases, they were pretty much focused on masculinity and community between men, and less so anyone who falls between the gender cracks (who certainly did exist and were often excluded from these conversations).
And then there are the actual Nazis. While the Nazis would eventually round up homosexuals and anyone they found to be a sexual or gender “deviant”, that wasn’t how it started. The Nazis saw the appeal of a hyper masculinist homosociality, and monopolized on this homosocial and homosexual desire in the face of what they saw to be “degenerate” gender nonconformity. The Nazis also followed in this trajectory of trying to emulate the Ancient Greeks and Romans, but emphasized not the pederastic system but the the homoerotics of martial masculinity (for as long as it was useful to them). Through acting gay Nazis like Ernst Röhm (who they eventually killed along with his entire cohort), they encouraged hypermasculinity in community over the perceived “effeminacy” of so-called “degenerates” [7].
So all in all, we’re in a very weird place suddenly, where fascist chasers are trying to create their own fetish objects out of red-pill incels, have reproduced a system we’ve created multiple times before, but interpreted it badly, and somehow have done the opposite of what their horrendous idols would have aspired towards, and gone so far right that they’ve actually turned left without realizing it. All while being desperately afraid of ever considering anything that they’re doing to be gay or queer in any way.
They are so so close to understanding that gender and sexuality are social constructs and none of it matters, and that they can be free, but they just won’t reach out and grab it. Because to do so would require them to rethink their brainwashing, rather than twisting themselves into knots trying to explain what they’re doing within the limits of their ideology.
And the wildest part of all of this (to me) is that Joanna Russ somehow predicted this. In her novel The Female Man from 1970-75, there is a chapter where exactly this happens. Now, ironically the title is misleading in this case. The novel is about a woman who meets multiple versions of herself from parallel universes and is an experimental theorization of second wave feminism. But in ONE chapter, they go to a dystopian future where women and men are at literal war with each other, and live in different cities/communities. The men are depicted as hypermasculinist, macho, and warlike. In this city, because there are no women and the men of this society require a “female” object upon which to exert power, they’ve created their own women by forcibly transitioning effeminate men into their sex slaves. The whole thing is a commentary on a hypermasculine need for a feminine object onto which exert dominance: if they cannot find one, they will make one. This is actually, in my opinion, the most compelling chapter of the book, but it has very clearly aged like milk. Or so I thought, until this week, when we entered this fever dream.
Anyway, I’m sorry that this was my first post after promising research-related things. But we live in the worst timeline. I did not have this particular example of “Science Fiction Author was accidentally pressient” on my 2025 bingo card, but here we are.
[1] As an aside, I am deeply saddened that we have lost genuine transvestites (a term now considered derogatory but was once used in-community pretty freely) to this madness. Transvestites are distinct from Transgender or Transsexual people historically speaking (but there’s a whole lot of history in unpacking the language changes, which I won’t go into here). Transvestite was a term used specifically for cis (often straight or bi) men who enjoy dressing up in women’s clothes as a fetish, and there is nothing wrong with that. Having a fetish is okay, actually, as long as you’re not hurting anyone and/or everyone involved is consenting. The problem is, in my opinion, that we as trans/queer people have alienated this fetish community in our desire to be seen as socially acceptable, and so we’ve ended up here. I know ONE active transvestite (very much not a femboy from my understanding), and he’s really lovely, but he’s an absolute unicorn these days. But the shaming of fetish and kink communities is a whole other (adjacent) problem.
[2] Oh god, what’s a chaser, you ask? A chaser is a self-proclaimed straight person (usually a man) who has a fetish for trans people (usually trans women). This is also a loooong history, they’ve been around for as long as we’ve been around and any trans person who has been on any dating app has had to deal with at least one chaser in their lifetime. Some people like them, most people don’t, it’s personal preference. It’s just a shame that these femboys won’t just admit they enjoy being fetish objects to chasers, because that’s definitely part of it.
[3] My primary source for the Oxford stuff here here is Linda Dowling’s “Hellenism and Homosexuality in Victorian Oxford”, which is a great book, but was also written in the 90s, so take from it what you will.
[4] If anyone was wondering how any of this has anything to do with the research I’m currently working on, this is it. When people talk about the homosocial intimate communities that Tolkien was involved in as an Oxford student and then as an Oxford don they are missing this part of the equation. Watch this space, thesis work incoming. I also briefly mention this in my chapter on Queer Theory for the upcoming publication, keep your eyes out for it!
[5] For a GREAT rant about this from a scholar other than me, please do listen to the Ronnie Kray episode of Bad Gays, in which they go off about how the coverage of the bad behavior of gay men is used as a smokescreen to distract from straight men doing exactly the same bad things. It’s brilliant.
[6] So, caveat: Oscar Wilde wasn’t nearly as much of a misogynist as a lot of his contemporaries. He had a decent amount of respect for women and had female friends, which is more than a lot of Victorian Men could say. But he’s the example most people know so he serves a purpose here, if (again) massively oversimplified.
[7] PS. They’re doing this now too. I recently say a facebook ad from a gay magazine’s facebook page that was something along the lines of “These Superheroes have been redesigned to look like Greek Gods”. And the front page image was Homelander of all characters, shirtless and beefcake-like. I desperately need my cis gays to realize that this is fascist propaganda. Please, I beg you.
OMG WTF did I just read???? What even is this timeline?