Kayfabe, Round 2: Misogynists take the fight into the locker rooms

Some people will promote the fiction even harder after they're let in on the secret if they've got something to gain from upholding it.

Gabbi (né Gabe) Tuft is a retired WWE (formerly WWF) wrestler who competed under the ring name “Tyler Reks.” Post-transition, he plans to return to wrestling.

This is a continuation of my piece from yesterday about the immersive fiction roleplaying phenomenon of kayfabe. Read Part 1 here.

Kayfabe is a strange thing, because it doesn’t need to convince everyone in order for the illusion to succeed. In fact, it doesn’t need to convince very many people at all. It only needs to persuade a critical mass of people to believe it in order to make it not worth anyone else’s while to speak up and voice dissent. Once the lie gets a little momentum going — a little emotional investment from the “laity” (as it were) — it’s hard to stop it.

In this sense, kayfabe is a lot like a religion. It’s especially like the religion of gender identity.

In the ’80s it was so obvious that WWF wrestling was fake, but there was a lot of motivated reasoning and willful disbelief among its fans — even grown adults — because they enjoyed it so much! Thus, they had something to gain from maintaining the illusion.

If anything, the phenomenon of kayfabe in pro wrestling has gotten even more interesting, psychologically, in the aftermath of its official “breaking” following the 1989 New Jersey Senate testimony.

Counterintuitively, pro wrestling only got more popular after kayfabe broke — wildly so. The “fake reality” of the wrestlers’ characters got more elaborate, the staged fights moved out of the ring and into the backstage areas, and the actual President & CEO of WWF (since renamed WWE — the E is for Entertainment, you see), Vince McMahon himself became a kind of kayfabe persona, even stepping into the ring in his business suit and getting into brawls from time to time. The fact that the fans were let in on the secret only heightened their sense of personal investment in kayfabe’s upkeep.

Nowadays, wrestling is just reality TV for man-boys — the guy-world mirror image of Real Housewives.

Pro wrestling has leaned into kayfabe, taking the choreographed brawls and pretend feuds outside the ring and into the locker rooms.

The phenomenon of lay people becoming more zealously protective about the fiction once they’re let in on it, a kind of vicarious keeping of kayfabe, has parallels with trans activism, too: for every true believer who’s been sold the lie that, say, their child can literally become the opposite sex if they follow the gender affirmation protocol prescribed by their local gender clinic, there’s a dudebro activist who knows full-well that transwomen are men but who gets a misogynistic thrill out of playing along, and he doesn’t care who gets hurt.

And just as wrestling’s immersive fiction has moved into the locker rooms, so, too, has gender identity roleplay.

The Staniland Question

Helen Staniland has keenly observed, and expertly exposed by deploying her famous question on Twitter, that many activist men who purport to be concerned about trans rights consistently demonstrate in their language and behaviour that their primary motivation is in fact resentment of women. They have solidarity with transwomen because they know that transwomen are men who are undermining women’s rights.

The vicarious thrill of misogyny in so many men is the fuel that has sustained the momentum of gender fundamentalism for so long.