Rediscovering My Relationship with Gender: Reflections on Louis Theroux's Inside the Manosphere

For a long time, I understood myself best through a non-binary or gender fluid lens. It gave me space to exist without the rigidity that once felt suffocating. It allowed me to explore softness, expression, and identity in a way that had been unsafe for me growing up. But lately, I've found myself settling into a different kind of comfort, one that uses he/him pronouns again, not as a rejection of what came before, but as a homecoming of sorts.

When I look back, I can trace this shift to a long history of pain around masculinity. As a teen and young adult, any time I showed something that could be read as "feminine," a gentle gesture, a softness of tone, a love of expression, my clothing choices, my makeup, my bisexuality, I was met with cruelty. Sometimes it was words. Sometimes it was physical. Those experiences carved deep grooves of fear and shame into my sense of self. I learned quickly that certain ways of being were dangerous. That to survive, I had to perform something stronger, tougher, more silent.

As I grew older, embracing a non-binary identity was both healing and protective. It allowed me to reclaim those parts of myself that had once been punished. It was a rebellion against the narrowness of "manhood" I'd been forced to swallow. And for a long time, it felt like freedom.

But healing is rarely static. The further I moved into self-acceptance, the more I realised I'd built not only a boundary, but also a kind of exile, keeping myself distant from masculine energy altogether. It was safer that way. Masculinity, in my experience, had meant aggression, domination, and danger. I wanted none of it.

Watching Louis Theroux's recent Netflix documentary, Inside the Manosphere, brought a lot of this back into sharp focus. The film follows Theroux as he gains access to the online world of ultra-masculine influencers, men who have built enormous followings among young boys by packaging a very narrow, very loud version of what it means to be a man. What struck me most, sitting with the discomfort of it, was how familiar that world felt in its underlying wound. Theroux himself reflects on this: many of these influencers, he suggests, are essentially evangelising a survival strategy, a suit of armour forged in their own pain, and then selling it to others as wisdom. The performance of dominance, the relentless branding of toughness, the insistence that vulnerability is weakness, all of it looked less like confidence and more like a very old fear dressed up in expensive watches.

It is not hard to see why young men are drawn in. As Theroux notes, there are a lot of lonely men out there, and a whole industry has grown up to meet them, not with genuine care, but with easy answers and someone to blame. When no one else steps forward to offer a different picture of what masculinity can look like, figures who shout the loudest fill the gap.

I know something about that absence. For a long time, I hadn't seen a different picture either. The shift, when it came, didn't arrive all at once. It has been slow, quiet, and mostly unannounced, unfolding across my adult life in the space between one version of myself and another.

Some of it came through close male friends, men who didn't perform or posture, who could sit with difficulty, who showed up without needing to dominate the room. Watching them, being held by them in the ordinary ways that friendship holds people, I began to revise something deep in my understanding of what men could be. Some of it came through my own counselling, the long and sometimes uncomfortable work of tracing fear back to its source, of learning to separate what I had experienced from what was inherently true. And some of it came through my training, and through the gradual, sometimes painful process of letting go, releasing the armour that had once kept me safe but had long since started to weigh me down.

Through all of that, I began to find something gentler beneath the surface. I met and witnessed expressions of masculinity that weren't about control but about groundedness, protection, and connection. It was as if I'd been seeing only one corner of the picture for most of my life, a corner shaped entirely by my own pain, and the rest had been there all along, waiting.

That's when something began to shift more consciously. I found myself no longer needing to reject masculinity wholesale. Not all men, not all masculine energy, is something to run from. I started to notice where it existed healthily in me too: the parts that take responsibility, that hold steady in chaos, that offer strength without suppression. It wasn't about returning to an old identity or abandoning a non-binary one, but rather integrating what I'd once been forced to split apart.

Inside the Manosphere confirmed something I've been sitting with: the conversation about masculinity is not going away, and the loudest voices in it right now are doing real harm. But the answer isn't to cede the territory to them. Part of what I want to do, in my work, in my writing, and in how I move through the world, is to be an example of what being masculine can look like differently. Masculinity that holds space rather than closes it down. That leads with curiosity rather than contempt. That isn't threatened by softness, by queerness, by nuance or by pain. There are young people out there who need to see that this version exists, not as a contradiction of strength, but as an expression of it.

So here I am, a man who is still shaped by fluidity, still tender, still in motion. My pronouns may have settled, but my relationship with gender remains alive, curious, nuanced, and healing.

Maybe that's the truest part of all this: that identity is less a fixed point and more a rhythm. Sometimes it moves away from something, and sometimes, when the world feels safe enough, it circles back.