Ask someone whether they’re male or female and you’ve learned almost nothing about how they’ll vote on guns. Ask them how masculine or feminine they feel, on a scale, and you’ve learned something that actually predicts it. That’s the finding sitting inside Rethinking masculinity in politics: Measuring what matters, published in Politics and the Life Sciences by Claire Gothreau (Lebanon Valley College) and Amanda Friesen (University of Western Ontario), and covered Nov. 3, 2026 by PsyPost. Across three US samples, how masculine or feminine people rated themselves — not their biological sex category — tracked gun-rights support, death-penalty attitudes, and political engagement more reliably than male/female ever did. Judith Butler argued in 1990 that this shouldn’t surprise anyone, because gender was never a fact your body carries around. It’s a doing.

The Quick Verdict

Question	What we found
What was studied?	Whether continuous, self-perceived masculinity/femininity predicts political attitudes and participation better than binary biological sex
Who ran it?	Claire Gothreau (Lebanon Valley College) and Amanda Friesen (University of Western Ontario)
Where and when?	Politics and the Life Sciences, published online Sept. 15, 2026; covered Nov. 3, 2026 by PsyPost
Sample	Three US samples: 1,017 adults (2022), 1,043 adults (fall 2020), 1,200 adults via Prolific (May 2022)
Headline finding	Among men, higher self-perceived masculinity predicted stronger gun-rights support; lower femininity predicted higher death-penalty support. Among women, higher masculinity (not femininity) predicted lower death-penalty support
Mechanism	Masculinity and femininity measured as separate continuous scales, not a binary — so someone can score high on both, low on both, or anywhere in between, independent of their sex category
What Butler already argued	Gender Trouble (1990): gender is “performatively constituted” through repeated acts, not an essence a body expresses

The Quick Version

A new study surveyed over 3,000 Americans across three samples and asked them not “are you male or female” but “how masculine do you feel, how feminine do you feel” — as two separate scales, not opposite ends of one. Those self-ratings beat biological sex at predicting gun-rights support, death-penalty views, and political engagement. Judith Butler said in 1990 that gender was a performance, not a biological readout. A political-science dataset in 2026 just measured the performance directly and found it outpredicting the body it’s supposedly attached to.

What the Study Actually Found

Gothreau and Friesen weren’t out to disprove biology. They were testing a narrower, more useful idea: that political scientists have spent decades using sex as a stand-in for something else entirely — a felt sense of gender — and that the stand-in is a worse measurement than the real thing.

Across three separate samples, participants rated themselves on continuous masculinity and femininity scales, treated as independent dimensions rather than two ends of a single dial. That matters more than it sounds like it should. On a binary model, more masculine automatically means less feminine. On Gothreau and Friesen’s model, a person can score high on both, low on both, or land anywhere across the grid — and plenty of people did, regardless of whether they checked “male” or “female” on the same survey.

The first sample, 1,017 adults surveyed in 2022, looked at political participation. Binary sex dropped out as a significant predictor once continuous gender identity was in the model. Higher self-perceived masculinity or femininity, on their own, tracked more political engagement — being gendered strongly, in either direction, predicted showing up, not which direction you leaned.

The second sample, 1,043 adults from a fall 2020 online survey, is where the force-related attitudes show up, and it’s the part that cuts against a simple story. Among men, higher masculinity predicted stronger gun-rights support, which is the finding you’d expect if you’d never read past the headline. But among men, lower femininity — not masculinity — predicted higher death-penalty support. And among women, the predictor for lower death-penalty support wasn’t femininity. It was masculinity. The same trait, in other words, pointed in different directions depending on the policy and the sex of the person holding it. That’s not what a tidy “masculine people are punitive” story predicts. It’s messier, and the mess is the data.

A third sample, 1,200 adults recruited via Prolific in May 2022, tested right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation. Among men, higher masculinity tracked higher authoritarianism; higher femininity tracked lower. Among women, higher masculinity tracked lower authoritarianism — the opposite direction from men. Gothreau and Friesen’s broader argument is that researchers should stop assuming “masculinity” functions as one stable thing that means the same thing wherever it shows up. It doesn’t. It interacts with sex category rather than overriding it, and it does different political work depending on who’s carrying it and toward what.

What Did Butler Mean By This?

In Gender Trouble (1990), Judith Butler writes: “There is no gender identity behind the expressions of gender; that identity is performatively constituted by the very ‘expressions’ that are said to be its result.” Elsewhere in the same book: “Gender is the repeated stylization of the body, a set of repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time to produce the appearance of substance, of a natural sort of being.”

Butler wasn’t writing about questionnaires or logistic regressions. She was taking apart a specific philosophical move: the assumption that there’s an inner gender essence, and that behavior, dress, speech, and belief just express it outward, the way a thermometer expresses temperature. Her argument reverses the causal arrow. There’s no inner essence doing the expressing. The repeated acts — the doing — are what produce the appearance of an essence in the first place. Gender isn’t a noun you have. It’s closer to a verb you keep performing, so consistently and so early that it starts to look like a noun.

That’s a specific, falsifiable-adjacent claim, not a vague mood. And it predicts something a strict biological-essentialist model wouldn’t: that the performed trait — how masculine or feminine someone enacts and self-perceives themselves to be — should carry information a body’s chromosomes or genitalia can’t, because the performance is doing causal work the biology isn’t. Gothreau and Friesen didn’t set out to test Butler. They set out to fix a measurement problem in political science. But the fix they landed on — stop using sex as a gender proxy, measure the self-perceived, continuously varying thing instead — is a political scientist’s version of Butler’s exact move: don’t look for the essence behind the doing. Measure the doing.

Why the Study and the Philosophy Rhyme

The honest version of this comparison isn’t “a 1990 philosopher predicted a 2026 regression table.” It’s narrower than that, and it holds up better for being narrower: Butler’s specific claim was that gender functions as a performative practice rather than a biological readout, which means any measurement built on sex-as-proxy-for-gender should underperform a measurement of the performance itself. Gothreau and Friesen weren’t testing performativity theory. They were testing which variable does better statistical work. But the shape of what they found is Butler’s shape — the enacted, self-perceived trait outpredicting the body it’s supposedly attached to, on exactly the kind of politically loaded terrain (violence, punishment, participation) where Butler would expect the performance to be doing the most work.

It connects to the piece on Foucault and the policing of desire, which found young men narrating their own sexuality as something to manage and defend — a different domain, the same discovery that an identity gets produced by vigilant, repeated practice rather than simply existing underneath it. It rhymes with the piece on Mill and benevolent sexism, where a “protective” gender script got passed down through repetition long before any child could reason about it — Mill’s target was the content of the script, Butler’s is the mechanism by which any script becomes legible as identity at all. And it sits usefully next to the piece on Simone de Beauvoir and freedom: Beauvoir’s “one is not born, but rather becomes, a woman” is the sentence Butler is arguing with directly in Gender Trouble, and this study’s continuous, self-rated scales are closer to measuring a “becoming” than a “being.”

How Should You Think About Your Own Gender Identity?

1. Separate the category from the trait. Sex category (male/female/intersex) is one variable. Self-perceived masculinity and femininity are different variables, and this study treats them as such — not opposites on one dial, but two scales a person can score anywhere on.
2. Notice that the same trait can predict different things for different people. Masculinity predicted gun-rights support in men and lower death-penalty support in women. Don’t assume a trait has one fixed political meaning regardless of who holds it.
3. Ask what you’re performing, not just what you are. Butler’s framework suggests the useful question isn’t “what is my gender, underneath it all” but “what am I doing, repeatedly, that gets read as gendered” — a shift from excavation to observation.
4. Expect contradiction, not a clean story. Both the study’s results and Butler’s theory resist a simple “masculine = X policy position” narrative. The data is genuinely mixed by design. Mixed isn’t a flaw here — it’s the finding.

The Gap Butler Didn’t See Coming

Butler built her argument from feminist theory, psychoanalysis, and a sustained critique of other philosophers (Beauvoir, Wittig, Foucault) writing about sex and gender in the abstract. She had no reason to expect her claim to show up as a replicable predictor variable in a political-science regression decades later, measuring something as specific as death-penalty attitudes.

She also had no way to anticipate the asymmetry Gothreau and Friesen’s data surfaces: that the same self-perceived trait does opposite political work depending on the sex category of the person holding it. Butler’s framework explains why gender identity should matter independent of sex. It doesn’t, by itself, explain why masculinity in men tracks toward punitive and aggressive positions while masculinity in women tracks away from them. That interaction is an empirical wrinkle her theory makes room for but didn’t predict in this specific shape.

What This Study Doesn’t Show

Be precise about the size of this. The framing invites more confidence than the data earns in either direction.

Correlational, Not Causal

The study shows self-perceived masculinity and femininity correlating with political attitudes across three samples. It doesn’t establish that feeling masculine causes gun-rights support, rather than, say, both being downstream of something else — upbringing, regional culture, prior political identity.

Self-Report, Twice Over

Both the gender-identity measure and the political-attitude measures came from the same self-report surveys. That’s not a fatal flaw, but it means the study can’t rule out that people’s sense of how masculine they are is itself shaped by the political company they already keep.

Three US Samples, Not a Global Claim

All three samples were American adults, surveyed between 2020 and 2022. Whether continuous gender identity outpredicts sex category the same way in other countries, political systems, or time periods is a separate question this design doesn’t answer.

Not a Claim That Biology Doesn’t Exist

Gothreau and Friesen’s argument is about which variable does better predictive work for political attitudes, not a claim that biological sex is meaningless or unreal in every context. It’s a measurement critique aimed at political science specifically.

What Actually Follows From This

1. Stop treating “men vote this way, women vote that way” as the whole story. If self-perceived gender identity does more predictive work than sex category, then political commentary built entirely on the sex binary is measuring the wrong variable and then overclaiming about what it found.
2. Expect political persuasion aimed at “men” or “women” as blocks to keep underperforming. If the real driver is a continuous, self-perceived trait that cuts across sex categories, then messaging built for a binary audience is going to miss a lot of the actual variance in the room.
3. Read Butler’s performativity as a methods lesson, not just a theory lesson. The move from “what is this person’s category” to “what is this person doing and how do they experience that doing” isn’t just more sophisticated philosophically. Gothreau and Friesen’s results suggest it’s also, plainly, better science.

Butler never ran a regression and Gothreau and Friesen weren’t out to vindicate a thirty-six-year-old work of feminist philosophy. But a 2026 study built to fix a measurement problem in political science landed on the exact move Butler made in 1990: stop looking for the stable identity supposedly underneath the behavior, and measure the behavior — because the behavior was doing the identity-work the whole time.

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This post discusses “Rethinking masculinity in politics: Measuring what matters” by Claire Gothreau and Amanda Friesen, published in Politics and the Life Sciences (online Sept. 15, 2026), covered Nov. 3, 2026 by PsyPost, and Judith Butler’s Gender Trouble (1990). The study is correlational, relies on self-report measures for both gender identity and political attitudes, and draws on three US samples collected between 2020 and 2022; it does not establish causation or generalize beyond the American context studied.