Donald Trump is a real man, too

Way back in 2023, Caitlin Moran wrote a light-hearted if slightly odd piece in which she suggested that “Trump was America’s first female president”. “Think about it,” she wrote:

Trump is the most female president America’s had. The candy-floss blowdry. The mad, teenage girl fake tan. The copious use of Touche Éclat on his under-eyes. These are woman things.

Perhaps this was funnier before a) Donald Trump became president all over again, and b) idiots started thinking this was a clever response to the White House definition of “female” as “a person belonging, at conception, to the sex that produces the large reproductive cell”. Even so, the idea that it would annoy Trump to be considered more woman than man remains sound. 

We all know men like him — male supremacists, if the term hasn’t fallen out of fashion — really care about that sort of thing. Suggesting that the more Trump believes he is proving his alpha manhood, the more he is failing, is kicking him where it hurts.

This would explain many of the responses to horrifying clips of last Friday’s meeting between Trump, JD Vance and Volodymyr Zelensky. The scene, in which Zelensky was berated for not showing sufficient gratitude to the US and accused of “risking world war three”, smacked of planned, performative bullying. As Suzanne Moore wrote shortly afterwards, “watching Vance was like watching every domestic abuser”. To many, this attempt to humiliate seemed the perfect moment to emphasise the smallness — the vanity, the insecurity — of Trump and Vance, set against the dignity of Zelensky. What better way to do this than to emphasise Zelensky’s true manhood set against Trump’s counterfeit, fragile version?

I understand the attractions of this. Nonetheless, if the world is an extremely dangerous place due to the scrapping of a tiny number of extremely insecure men — men who really do seem to think the entire concept of “man” would fall apart, were women not kept in line — I wonder about the usefulness of joining in with their destructive game. Validating the “real man” concept — the idea that being biologically male is not enough to demonstrate one’s true manhood — panders to the very paranoias which fuel the right-wing misogynist. It reinforces the delusion that masculinity is both all-important and highly vulnerable, ready to be taken from you at any moment. This is true even if the framing and qualities of “real manhood” vary depending on which political side you are on. 

Apart from anything else, Trump’s manhood provides an opportunity for a certain type of man to showcase his own real non-fragile masculinity. Like advertising he/him pronouns, it’s a way of suggesting you defy gender norms — unlike those right-wing hard men, you’re totally comfortable with rejecting all that aggressive bullshit — while making a bid for superior status based on your identification with “proper” masculine values. You’re so manly you don’t need to declare your masculinity all the time, except you keep doing it, just to remind everyone that it’s of the confident, non-toxic variety. This is not a meaningful response to the chest-beating of the right; it’s just a way of trying to beat your own chest harder. 

The question of where this leaves women is rarely considered. Cis manhood / non-toxic masculinity necessarily implies that there are certain qualities — beyond producing small gametes, having a penis, being on at running fast and opening jars — which men possess and women do not. In What About Men?, Moran argues that “masculinity is not a bad thing — just as femininity is not a bad thing”:

If feminism can celebrate and adore a woman who drives around in a pink car with giant plastic eyelashes on the headlights, spends her time baking cupcakes and sings songs to her cats, then it should also celebrate and adore a massively ripped, bearded man who lives in a log cabin, roasts pigs with a blowtorch and builds tractors from scratch.

Except the feminist position is that there is nothing intrinsically female or male about any of these interests or activities. These are just stereotypes, and when it gets to more serious ones (showing emotion, caring for others, expressing anger) the “celebration” becomes increasingly limiting. In the case of Trump and Zelensky, one may well argue that the latter is more courageous, more disciplined, more principled than the former, but when this becomes gendered — Zelensky is more of a man than Trump — it is not just a statement about Trump. It’s also a statement about women (it reminds me of a football coach one of my sons had, who would tell the team they were “girls” if they played badly. Not “playing like girls”. Just “girls”. Because who wouldn’t want to be better than that?). 

The gendering of Trump’s relationship to Putin as “emasculating” and “unmanning” him plays on misogynistic and homophobic tropes. Even if those doing it claim to be targeting the misogyny and homophobia of these men – that they are going there precisely because this is what Putin and Trump would hate – their approach relies on the assumption that a shaming, submissive relationship is, well, a bit feminine, a bit gay. It relies on the assumption that one could be “unmanned”, but what would that even mean?

People of all political persuasions remain attached to the idea that manhood is something more than mere biological maleness

There is no female equivalent to “unmanning”. An interesting feature of the “gender wars” of the past few years has been encountering men who think gender critical feminists would be appalled to be called men or told they are “not real women”. Only we know we stay adult human females — women, stripped of the stereotypes, value judgements and cultural expectations — whatever we are called. It does not seem to be the same for men. Trump is as much of a man as Zelensky simply on the basis that both are adult human males, yet to make that claim involves relinquishing the belief that there is anything that is special and exclusive to “real men”, something quite apart from reproductive biology, some additional qualities that women do not share. 

People of all political persuasions remain attached to the idea that manhood is something more than mere biological maleness. This is good for scoring cheap points, but in the end it is dangerous. Terrible things are done in the name of preserving something fragile, illusory, something which in the end does not even exist. How can an attachment in such a thing not lead to violence and paranoia? All men are real men, whatever they believe, whatever they do. The important thing isn’t their manhood, but their humanity.