In an era of digital polarization, radical online spaces have become key arenas where ideology, identity, and belonging intersect. Despite the growing acknowledgment of gender in radicalization research, it remains absent from the core models and theories that explain radicalization. Without a gender-conscious approach, existing frameworks risk overlooking how masculinities, femininities, and gendered power structures shape extremist recruitment, group cohesion, and ideological framing.

To address the lack of gender integration in radicalization theory, this study advances two main goals. Empirically, it investigates how gendered narratives are mobilized to construct communities within far-right and Islamist online spaces, based on six contrasting Telegram case studies that vary across ideological (far-right vs. Islamist), gendered (male- vs. female-centered), and religious dimensions. Theoretically, it contributes to radicalization research by extending uncertainty-identity theory (UIT) with a gender perspective, demonstrating how gendered meaning-making operates as a mechanism of uncertainty reduction and collective cohesion.

Through qualitative analysis of administrator posts, the research identifies narrative strategies that mobilize gendered ideals of strength, purity, and moral order to delineate group boundaries and reinforce collective belonging. Across groups, these narratives resolve gender-related uncertainty through appeals to clarity, obedience, or nostalgia, sustaining belonging grounded in shared ideology and reduced identity uncertainty.

By extending UIT with a gendered perspective, this work demonstrates that the theory provides a useful framework for examining how radical groups construct communities that offer stability amid gender-related uncertainty. The study also shows how these meaning-making processes become politically charged in times of social instability. Thus, the paper contributes to theoretical psychology across disciplines by linking the social-psychological concept of identity uncertainty to the cultural and political dynamics of radicalization in contemporary online environments.

This project is funded by the European Union’s Horizon Europe research and innovation programme. Project: 101073440 — VORTEX — HORIZON-MSCA-2021-DN-0

In this paper, we present the findings of a qualitative research project that examines how psychotherapists reflect on their own gender identity. In doing so, we depict reasons for a research focus on cis genderism. We propose an understanding of studying cis identities as a paradigm comparable to Men’s Studies and Critical Whiteness Studies: focusing and analyzing the dominant norm, its conditions, and psychosocial functions. This perspective is not only productive in the fields of psychology and psychotherapy but is also apt in the study of current social formations in which trans-hostility, homophobia, and anti-feminism are relevant.

The study focuses on how the biographical development of therapists’ gender identities and sexualities affect their work with queer and trans* patients in Germany. Psychotherapists’ biographical narratives and professional relationship experiences were collected through narrative interviews, which we analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis and the psychoanalytic method of in-depth hermeneutics. This enabled us to reconstruct not only manifest attitudes, but also latent meanings, embodied relational experiences, fantasies, and defense mechanisms in the context of gender identity.

Perpetrators of mass harm and life-risking rescuers often use the identical narrative to explain their actions: “I had no choice.” This paper explores this striking paradox, analyzing the subjective, phenomenological, and theoretical meanings of "no choice" in these morally antithetical contexts. Drawing on testimonies from Holocaust-era perpetrators and rescuers, and contemporary Israeli cases, the analysis shows that discourses of “no choice” are not merely excuses; they reflect distinct forms of subjectivity. The paper moves beyond social psychological explanations of conformity or ideology by positing the human moral core as central to identity. It examines this claim via free will, values, and moral identity, questioning what it reveals about human agency and the role of moral identity.

Building on Émile Durkheim’s concept of homo duplex, this paper advances a homo triplex model of human motivation. This model distinguishes between three conflicting layers: the individual will, the collective (group) will, and the moral ideal. The perpetrator's "no choice" is theorized as a surrender of individual agency to the collective, a merging with group power that dissolves moral responsibility. In contrast, the rescuer's "no choice" is revealed as a narrative of profound self-knowledge, where personal identity is indivisible from a core moral ideal. For the rescuer, acting otherwise is not a possibility because their freedom is their values.

In dark times, the concept of "choice" becomes a critical site of theoretical and political struggle. This paper argues that a “no choice” narrative reveals its political entanglement—as submission to ideology or resistance via an inviolable ideal. It reframes the free will debate, moving it from abstract metaphysics to a question of political and moral identification, with implications for education.