Watching cable news coverage of the tragic events in Ukraine, I hear again and again how brave the Ukrainian men who are staying to fight are. But we should be very careful about who we worship because fetishizing the masculinist and militarist response of war will hurt women and LGBTQ people for decades to come.

Putin is a madman, but his regime depends on these century-old notions of binary gender and “normal” sexuality. The way the U.S. mainstream media is covering the illegal invasion of Ukraine is doing similar cultural work.