Should Gender-Affirming Care Be Given to Looksmaxxers?

By Mujtaba

According to Google AI overview, “Gender-affirming care is a holistic range of medical, psychological, and social support to help individuals align their life, body, and identity with their gender, including counselling, hormone therapy, puberty blockers, and surgeries, all aimed at improving mental health and well-being for transgender and gender diverse people. It’s a personalized approach, from social affirmation (pronouns, expression) to medical interventions like hormones or surgery, and aims to reduce distress (gender dysphoria).”

For many, when understanding someone has gender-based issues of self-perception leading to mental health problems we may seek to aid their troubles in some-way-shape-or-form. Yet this simplistic understanding (yet not necessarily incorrect) outlook of Gender Dysphoria may apply to the looksmaxxing community and thus the question arises whether gender affirming care should be given to such a demographic.

This question was not thought of by me, but was the joking/not-joking product of far-right Tik-Tok provocateur Neo-Coom who put this question forward. Whilst I do not share his attitudes, views or outlook on anything – it was a good and interesting question to put forward.

Yet the question of gender affirming care is rather less pertinent due to the underlying question of whether looksmaxxers suffer from Gender Dysphoria. The title of this essay may lead you to believe that I would like to focus on the political and financial questions of gender affirming care. However, I will leave this highly politicised concept up to you. Rather the more interesting question to put our attention to, is as to whether looksmaxxers suffer from Gender Dysphoria.

To maintain a motif, Google AI overview defined Gender Dysphoria as “the significant distress from a mismatch between one’s gender identity (internal sense of self) and their sex assigned at birth, often causing anxiety, depression, and discomfort with one’s body or social role”.

This is of course not the same thing as gender non-conformity since one can have dysphoria without wanting to stop conforming to their societal gender norm. Similarly, it is possible (yet not probable) that someone would want to change gender for reasons other than Gender Dysphoria. Thus Gender Dysphoria need not be about being Transgender, but is simply about the mental distress of gender-based ideals not corresponding to one’s physical state.

Now let us dive into the looksmaxxing community which prima facie has an obsessive need to fix flaws in their appearance, or in other words looks-max. This may seem to simply be a case of collective Body Dysmorphia, yet if we clarify the complexities of gender and the deep-seated ideology of the looksmaxxing community, we may come to find that it is also Gender Dysphoric rather than simply Body Dysmorphic.

Let’s start by looking at the ideology of the looksmaxxing community. It believes first and foremost in “objective standards of beauty”. Yet as we know, whilst some objective measures of beauty exist i.e. clear skin, facial symmetry and harmony, the totality of the pure notion of beauty is extremely theory-laden. Looksmaxxers are blind to this, and from their alt-right, incel, black-pill and red-pill origins base their so-called “objective beauty standards” in highly patriarchal contemporary western standards of beauty.

Objective beauty standards do exist and have been empirically shown to cross race and culture due to how Homo Sapiens implicitly select for evolutionary advantageous features in people. The looksmaxxer accepts this and is oddly in a more informed and educated mind-set than most of the population. They know the objective benefits of height, strong bone structure, good smiles, clear skin and good hair. Such aspects are undeniable and should be uncontroversial to accept, hence why most of the population implicitly accepts this.

Yet the looksmaxxer goes beyond mere implicit acceptance for the salience of this information is far too great. Detached from the real, they live in a simulation of romance where clicks replace conversation and phantasies of attraction subsume basic biological attraction (which involves much more than mere looks). This simulatory existence where phantasy permeates their experience results in a normativity of disappointment.

Disappointment not in their looks, but disappointment in themselves as men. This phantasy of attraction, is predicated upon such assumptions:

• One can only be a real, whole person as a man iff one is a “real man”

• One is a real man iff “women want to date” said man

• It is jointly necessary and sufficient for a woman to date a man iff the man is greater than or equal to their level of attractiveness.

• The jointly necessary and sufficient conditions for a man to be attractive, are universal factors + androgenic factors of physical attractiveness.

And herein lies the main issue at hand, that the looksmaxxers sense of self is not predicated upon a need to look “better” (like those who work-out or try to cut down on sugar) but a need to become a “man” via looking more “like a man”.

Because consider the four different categories of sex – chromosomal, gonadal, hormonal and phenotypical. The looksmaxxer, assuming they were born a conventional cisgender male, is well aware that they are a man in the normal sense of the word, and thus biologically is a man in all four categories - XY Chromosomes, penis and testes (which does not necessarily have to be visible or functioning), male-patterns of hormonal development (i.e. estrogen for androgenic brain development and testosterone for bodily development) and looking “like a man”.

Yet we ought to give greater credence to the concept of looking “like a man” since such a category can, as we know, be delineated further. And it is in this further delineation in which we find the conceptual backbone for the structure of Gender Dysphoria. This is due to the phantastical notion that looking “like a man” is equivalent to “being a man”.

For the looksmaxxer, amongst many other terms, they have categories of manhood due to the perverted synthesis of patriarchal values, attractability and gender identity. These categories are present implicitly through the PSL scale which “objectively” measures attractiveness via analysing Facial Harmony, Balance, Symmetry, Sexual Dimorphism. Here are the perverted categories below:

• 2 PSL - Subhuman

• 3 PSL – Low Tier Normie (LTN)¹

• 4 PSL – Mid Tier Normie (MTN)

• 5 PSL – High Tier Normie (HTN)

• 5.5 PSL - Chadlite

• 6 PSL - Chad

• 6.5 PSL - Giga Chad

• 7 PSL - Adamlite

• 7.5 PSL - Near perfection/Nearly a True Adam

As one can discern through the nomenclature of the categories, such ranking is not merely based on attractiveness, but also on a sense of fundamental dignity which exists in a depraved persephonic matrimony with androgyny.

Evidently, the simple sense of human self-worth for the looksmaxxer is unfortunately tied to this scale, and is based upon a deeper, yet not necessarily valid, understanding of the male gender. Thus their dysphoria is not merely based upon superficial looks, but in the sub-genders of ‘man’.

Through the simulacrum of attractiveness embedded within the hyperreal simulation - paired with deep ideological thought – the looksmaxxer sees ‘man’ not as a basic ostensive signifier but an identity that holds deeper complexity with greater meaning than it should merit. He sees ‘man’ as being predicated mostly upon looks, which creates sub-genders of ‘man’ that each hold “objective” worth based upon attractiveness. When his sub-gender does not match with the sub-gender of desired “objective” worth, he is not merely upset but dysphoric.

To alleviate this dysphoria, the looksmaxxer engages in a variety of remedies that focus not only on the phenotype, but the underlying hormonal factors that aid in determining the phenotype of the sub-gender. He will bone-smash, work out, mew, get surgery, take peptides, inject steroids, get leg-extension surgery – all in the name of alleviating his dysphoria. Such alleviation can only really be considered as gender affirming care.

It seems odd and counterintuitive to think of such a thing, yet to all those who do not experience gender dysphoria the underlying notion of gender dysphoria is a concept that is utterly foreign and counterintuitive to us. Whilst I am aware of what is culturally “manly” and what features (physical or personality-wise) are attractive, I have never thought of or considered my status as ‘man’ in a perilous state. And it is this experience, or lack thereof, that puts such a line of discussion in the realm of queerity². So now I leave it up to you the readers to determine whether or not gender-affirming care should be given to looksmaxxers, for I remain agnostic on such a point due to my uncertainty and unfamiliarity with the looksmaxxing state of mind.

1. Anything below 3 PSL is in the truecel range where one’s features are so “ugly” that they are determined to be an incel and take the blackpill. This idea is even further evidence that looksmaxxing is much more than body dysmorphia, but an ideological experience on what it means to be a ‘man’.

2. No pun intended.