Bright and early the morning after the vice presidential debate, Republican Congressman Mike Collins of Georgia shared a puzzling picture from his X account of GOP vice presidential candidate Senator JD Vance. At first glance, the image masquerades as a conventional political headshot. It features Vance delivering a steely gaze, sitting before a soft blue backdrop framed by an American flag and the state flag of Ohio. Vance is wearing the Trumpkin uniform of a blue suit, crisp white dress shirt, and shiny red tie, the conservative political drag that links the wearer to the MAGA political project by imitating the boss’s sartorial style. The only text Mike Collins’s account included with the image was “gm.”—a very-online way of saying, “Good morning.”
Except what Collins posted was in fact a substantial digital modification of one of Vance’s real headshots. A.I.-powered software had made Vance appear more masculine than his flesh and blood self. It subtracted a few dozen pounds from the real Vance’s mug, making him look more muscular and toned. (The real Vance has also lost weight recently, which he attributes to diet and exercise, but the algorithm went still further.) It made his forehead larger, and it lengthened his face. His hair appears to have been volumized, its strands thickened and glossed as if they were slathered with bear grease. With A.I. assistance, Vance’s fuller lips now sat above a jaw so sharp you could slice ham off it and a chin just a notch below Habsburg. Gone were Vance’s boyish cheeks, which his recently adopted beard inconstantly shrouds. The A.I. software instead inserted the high and defined cheekbones of a male model. Vance’s eyes were wider, clearer, and more deeply set, his brows sharpened.
Internet denizens let out a collective chortle, many people claiming that the app had “yassified” Vance’s mug—i.e., glammed it up. But it’s probably more accurate to say that Vance was “Chadified”: Vance’s digitally recontoured facial features now aligned with a fantastical idealization of masculinity that the very online know as “the Chad.” The Chad first entered public consciousness via incel culture, which furnished a baroque taxonomy of psychosexual types for both men and women. In that taxonomy, the Chad is a muscular alpha male so confident in his masculinity that he embodies it without pretense or premeditation, unlike his neurotic, feckless counterpart, “the Virgin.” The Chad is powerful, instinctual, authentic, natural, unbothered, and a happy warrior.
The alterations Collins’s image made to Vance’s face match the quintessential Chad’s facial features—heavy brow, impossibly chiseled jaw and chin, cartoonishly thick hair—closely enough that Collins was, intentionally or otherwise, visually quoting the meme. (I suspect intentionally; Collins’s official X bio includes the line “Come for the memes, stay for the policy.”)
The hypermasculinist reimagining of conservative political characters is not unique to Vance or Collins; it is a signature of the MAGA online style and its keyboard warriors. Perform a Google Image search for “buff Trump,” and you’ll see a collection of a swollen, oiled-up Donald Trumps flexing, posing, aiming weapons, and riding battle elephants. During his first term, Donald Trump even tweeted one such image that reimagined himself, the poster in chief, as a hunky Rocky Balboa, shirtless in his short, short boxing trunks. (If that wasn’t stomach-churning enough, a similar genre of images has sprung up around Elon Musk to accompany his rightward tilt; decency forbids me to link.)
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) November 27, 2019
And then there are the ubiquitous online right-wing bit players, like RawEggNationalist and BronzeAgePervert—right-wing influencer-authors who assume online personas that are quite a bit more ripped than the irl versions. And just as sewage runs downstream, 15 minutes on X will expose you to several thousand posturing, preening anonymous right-wing tough guys, all of whom are buffer and more masculine than whomever they’re ridiculing—although you’ll just have to take their word for it.
In short, performing Chadness online, where no one can witness the embodied vulnerability that is a nearly universal element of the human condition, is the very-online right-wing style par excellence, an absurdly maximalist masculinity that runs from the top to the very bottom of the movement. It’s a campy parody of masculinity without any of queer camp’s leavening humanity, as I previously put it. To be clear, these online fantasies of masculinist power are serious-not-serious winks. Sure, they’re the product of jokey, knowing, and intentionally hyperbolic meme-smithing.
But like all political propaganda, hypermasculinist memes are simultaneously intended to distill a deeper truth—in this case, the very-online right’s belief that there is some kind of feedback loop whereby conservative ideology hardens and strengthens men’s bodies. This is a defensive fantasy that distances those men who entertain it from the inevitable reality of bodily vulnerability, suggests Grace Lavery, a professor and literary critic at the University of California at Berkeley. Right-wing digital remasculinizations of Trump, for example, may be a “prophylaxis against grief, as the mass-movement struggles not to realize that its central figure—an old and seemingly sick man, whose face screams, sometimes literally, the opposite of YAS—is clearly exhibiting a male frailty of a new and potentially final sort.”
If I were to perform an academic close reading of Collins’s post according to right-wing internet semiotics, it would be this: The previous night’s debate performance revealed the truth of Vance’s inner Chad over and against that of the Virgin Walz. Vance’s performance had been so powerful and dominating that it was now “crystal clear,” to quote a very aroused Rod Dreher, that Vance was “the future of American conservatism.” Vance had—pardon me—manhandled Tim Walz to show how a true alpha debated. (And here I had always thought that true alphas were on the football, not debate, team.) Sure, Vance’s body might not be muscular and powerful, his jaw not quite so lantern-like, his brow a far cry from Neanderthal—but Collins’s image wiped those quibbles away. Vance always had an inner Chad waiting to get out, no matter what his visibly vulnerable body may have previously suggested, so much so that Chad Vance rendered the image of the real Vance obsolete and redundant.
As is often the case with conservative gender discourse, this message raises more questions than it answers. Vance, Dreher, and Collins are all part of a reactionary political project that demonizes transgender people for laying claim to gendered categories that diverge from their assigned sexes. Transgender people, according to many conservatives, are either lying about their sexes or they are simply delusional and don’t understand that sex is an objective and immutable bodily characteristic, not a social identity to be taken off and put on like a blue suit and red tie. Of course, conservatives themselves disagree about what those defining bits are—whether sex is defined by gametes, gonads, genitals, or something else is a matter of some controversy—but pay this complexity no mind, for conservatives certainly do not. Instead, ponder this: If all of that is true, what does it mean for Collins to fantasize that JD Vance can be technologically remade to be more of a man? What is the relationship between Chad Vance in Collins’s fantasy and the real JD Vance you saw on your screen?
Collins is demonstrating something about sex that his reactionary movement insistently tries to suppress: However we map the tangled relationships among flesh, identity, and sexed categories, there will always be some gaps, some mismatches, between the bodies we have, the social meanings they enact, and our desires for both. After all, it wasn’t the contours of Vance’s body on the debate stage that made him more of a man in Collins’s reckoning (or the reckoning of whatever staffer approved the post). To the contrary, Collins’s image suggests that Vance’s masculine (debate) performance transformed the wanting sexual contours of Vance’s face. Vance’s actions changed his sex.
Transgender and queer writers and intellectuals have a useful concept to help us understand Collins’s fantasy. Collins was fantasizing—and digitally enacting the fantasy—that Vance is what you might call an “MtM transsexual,” a man undergoing major bodily transformations that help him to better approximate his felt sense of gender and his masculine identity.
“Transsexualism means changing one’s sex,” Dr. Zavier Nunn, a historian and theorist at Columbia University, explained to me over email. “If we understand sex change as an intervention in the sexed body with the express aim to change the body into a (more) desired sexed form, then sex change isn’t something only transgender people do.” After all, sex change is not a one-shot, all-encompassing operation that flicks the sex switch, man to woman. It is a composite of processes that can encompass a variety and combination of somatic modifications—some medical, some not—to subtly shift the sexual contours and meanings of the body. From this perspective, a man assigned male at birth can also pursue serious bodily modifications such as “muscularization, exogenous hormones, face contouring, hair transplants, [and] penis enlargement to affirm his (hypermasculine) gender,” Nunn added. In short, MtM transsexuals “change sex to become the men they desire to be.”
Vance, of course, didn’t actually get facial masculinization surgery. Collins’s picture was a digital fantasy. But it elegantly illustrates the contradictions of modern conservative thought: Collins digitally “changed” Vance’s sex to affirm the hypermasculinity that Vance’s actual body lacks. This confirms the claim, usually associated with what conservatives sneeringly dismiss as “gender ideology,” that the meaningful social enactments of gender (Chad Vance) are not reducible to just the fleshy bits (Real Vance). Right-wing gender ideology is more postmodern than Judith Butler, but regrettably a whole lot stupider.
The specter of an MtM transsexual summoned by Collins’s post may make you giggle, but it is deadly serious stuff. Conservative ideologues are skilled at turning the political struggles of transgender people into inane semantics exercises. These tactics do more than trivialize the seriousness of the issue; they work to distort and deflect, making what is at its core a profound struggle for material bodily self-determination into an abstract parlor game about how many angels can dance on the head of a gamete. The stakes of the struggle are not about which theory of gender is correct; the stakes of the struggle are about who will have the resources to make a life with the sexed body they desire and, by contrast, who will be denied those resources and punished for ever reaching for them.
Most people, after all, who engage in the collection of practices that makes up “sex change” are not in fact transgender. There are vastly more middle-aged men taking testosterone to put the spring back in their step than transmen taking it for gender affirmation. Indeed, what is called “gender affirming” care for transgender people is, for most patients receiving the same treatments, just plain old medical care. This was the original idea behind the term MtM transsexual, according to Ben Miller, a historian and early popularizer of the term. The term, Miller told me, was “a provocation to think more about how even the most seemingly gender-normative among us are also partaking in the technological and sociological remaking of the sex-gender system.” The middle-aged men taking testosterone, Miller reminds us, “do not experience transphobia or anti-trans violence” even as they “seek to use the same technologies to shape their bodies towards their desires” that conservatives work to deny to transgender people.
Seen that way, there is a dystopian glimmer in the spectacle of a GOP congressman using machine-learning algorithms to hypermasculinize his party’s vice presidential hopeful. It’s a ghastly premonition of where right-wing ideology, reinforced by technological modification, could take reactionary gender politics. As advanced biotechnology increasingly transforms what sex is and how the sexed human body functions, right-wing gender ideologists will gain the ability to hijack the technological means to change sex in the service of reinforcing and deepening sexual difference well beyond what old-fashioned analogue patriarchy ever accomplished. That would mean a total abandonment of the aspirational project of egalitarian sexual self-determination advanced by many transgender activists and intellectuals, but it would not mean an end to sex change. Instead, right-wing gender ideologists may yet remake sex in the image of an extreme and hyperbolic sexual binary that was, much like Chad Vance, heretofore merely the sick stuff of their fantasies. More immediately, if Vance, Collins, and Trump have their way, transgender people seeking, say, testosterone will be denied access, according to this dictum of right-wing gender ideology: masculinization for me, but not for thee.
