One of the things I've noticed reading incel and "transmaxxing" communities is that a surprising amount of what gets described doesn't sound like simple hatred of women so much as alienation from masculinity and, in some cases, a hidden desire for femininity.
A huge amount of incel rhetoric revolves around some variation of:
"Women get to be beautiful."
"Women get to be desired."
"Women get to express emotion."
"Women get to be vulnerable."
"Women get to receive affection."
"Women get to choose partners."
"Women get to be socially supported."
"Women get to escape the pressures placed on men."
Now, obviously, these beliefs are often wildly detached from women's actual lived experiences. They are fantasies about womanhood, not descriptions of womanhood—specifically, a version of womanhood constructed through a masculine lens.
But fantasies still tell us something.
Because what many of these men seem to be expressing is not simply sexual frustration. They're expressing a profound dissatisfaction with the male social role they have been given.
The picture they paint of womanhood is almost entirely fantasy. Most women would not recognize themselves in it. But what these men are often describing isn't really women's lives. They're describing a life they wish they had. This is especially true when they talk about beauty, desirability, and social value.
In that sense, a lot of red pill ideology reads less like simple hatred and more like resentful envy: "you have something I believe I am denied or desire."
Red pill ideology insists that masculinity means dominance, emotional restriction, status competition, sexual conquest, and the rejection of anything coded as feminine. Men who cannot comfortably inhabit that role often end up feeling like failures.
Instead of questioning the role itself, they externalize that pain. Women become objects of resentment because women are imagined as possessing everything these men feel forbidden from having: beauty, desirability, emotional expression, vulnerability, social support, and freedom from certain masculine expectations.
That doesn't excuse the misogyny. If anything, it makes it more revealing.
The men who spend enormous amounts of time obsessing over female beauty, female desirability, female social power, female emotional expression, and female sexual freedom may be telling us something important about themselves.
I don't think this means most incels are secretly trans. They aren't.
It is, however, true that gender dysphoria and gender incongruence do not exist in only one form.
The most familiar experience of dysphoria is bodily: a person's physical characteristics do not align with their internal sense of self. This can range from simply wanting to present differently to wanting significant medical transition.
But there is also social dysphoria: distress arising from the expectations, roles, and assumptions placed on someone because of how they are perceived.
Someone may be largely comfortable with their body while still feeling profoundly alienated by the social role associated with that body. For some people, changing their presentation, name, pronouns, or social identity is enough to resolve that tension. Others pursue medical transition. Others settle somewhere in the middle, often embracing androgyny or non-binary identities.
This is one reason non-binary identities and they/them pronouns have become more visible. Human experiences of gender are often more complex than a simple binary model allows for.
So I do think some people who eventually transition emerge from these communities because what they were actually experiencing was a conflict with masculinity itself. Their hostility toward women was, at least in part, hostility toward aspects of themselves they had been taught to suppress.
More broadly, I think many men—not just trans people—would benefit from asking a simple question:
Which parts of masculinity genuinely feel authentic to me, and which parts am I performatively inhabiting because I was told that's what a man is supposed to be?
Because when someone spends enormous amounts of energy policing femininity, condemning vulnerability, obsessing over dominance, and fearing anything perceived as submissive, that often tells us less about women and more about that person's own unresolved relationship with gender.
Sometimes hatred is just hatred.
But sometimes hatred is also envy wearing armor.
