The original definitions of the SSH profiles

ALPHA: The Alpha is the tall, good-looking guy who is the center of both male and female attention. The classic star of the football team who is dating the prettiest cheerleader. The successful business executive with the beautiful, stylish, blonde, size zero wife. All the women are attracted to him, while all the men want to be him, or at least be his friend. At a social gathering like a party, he's usually the loud, charismatic guy telling self-flattering stories to a group of top-tier women who are listening with interest. However, Alphas are only interested in women to the extent that they exist for the Alpha's gratification, physical and psychological, they are actually more concerned with their overall group status.

BRAVO: Bravos are the good-looking guys who aren't as uniformly attractive or socially dominant as the Alpha, but are nevertheless confident, attractive to women, and do well with them. At the party, they are the loud guy's friends who showed up with the alcohol and who are flirting with the tier-one women and cheerfully pairing up with the tier-two women. Bravos tend to genuinely like women and view them in a somewhat optimistic manner, but they don't have a lot of illusions about them either. Bravos tend to be happy, secure in themselves, and are up for anything their Alpha wants to do. When they marry, it is not infrequently to a woman who was one of the Alpha's former girlfriends.

DELTA: The normal guy. Deltas are the great majority of men. They can't attract the most attractive women, so they usually aim for the second-tier women with very limited success, and stubbornly resist paying attention to all of the third-tier women who are comfortably in their league. This is ironic, because Deltas would almost always be happier with their closest female equivalents. When a Delta does manage to land a second-tier woman, he is constantly afraid that she will lose interest in him and will, not infrequently, drive her into the very loss of interest he fears by his non-stop dancing of attendance upon her. In a social setting, the Deltas are the men clustered together in groups, each of them making an occasional foray towards various small gaggles of women before beating a hasty retreat when direct eye contact and engaged responses are not forthcoming. Deltas tend to put the female sex on pedestals and have overly optimistic expectations of them; if a man rhapsodizes about his better half or is an inveterate White Knight, he is almost certainly a Delta. Deltas like women, but find them mysterious, confusing, and are sometimes secretly a little afraid of them.

GAMMA: The introspective, the unusual, the unattractive, and all too often the bitter. Gammas are often intelligent, usually unsuccessful with women, and not uncommonly all but invisible to them, the Gamma alternates between placing women on pedestals and hating the entire sex. This mostly depends upon whether an attractive woman happened to notice his existence or not that day. Too introspective for their own good, Gammas are the men who obsess over individual women for extended periods of time and supply the ranks of stalkers, psycho-jealous ex-boyfriends, and the authors of excruciatingly romantic rhyming doggerel. In the unlikely event they are at the party, they are probably in the corner muttering darkly about the behavior of everyone else there... sometimes to themselves. Gammas tend to have have a worship/hate relationship with women, the current direction of which is directly tied to their present situation. However, they are sexual rejects, not social rejects.

OMEGA: The truly unfortunate. Omegas are the social losers who were never in the game. Sometimes creepy, sometimes damaged, often clueless, and always undesirable. They're not at the party. It would never have crossed anyone's mind to invite them in the first place. Omegas are either totally indifferent to women or hate them with a borderline homicidal fury.

SIGMA: The outsider who doesn't play the social game and manage to win at it anyhow. The Sigma is hated by Alphas because Sigmas are the only men who don't accept or at least acknowledge, however grudgingly, their social dominance. Everyone else is vaguely confused by them. In a social situation, the sigma is the man who stops in briefly to say hello to a few friends accompanied by a tier-one girl that no one has ever seen before. Sigmas like women, but tend to be contemptuous of them. They are usually considered to be strange, but cool. Gammas often like to think they are Sigmas, failing to understand that Sigmas are not social rejects, they are at the top of the social hierarchy despite their refusal to play by its rules.

LAMBDA: Those men who have quite literally no interest in conventional male-female sexual relations. They clearly have their own hierarchy of sorts, but I can't say that I know much about it other than it appears to somehow involve youth, free weights, and mustaches.

Now, it is important to keep in mind that it serves absolutely no purpose to identify yourself in some manner that you think is "better" or higher up the hierarchy. No one cares what you think you are and your opinion about your place in the social hierarchy is probably the opinion that matters least. There is no good or bad here, there is only what happens to be observable in social interaction. Consider: Alphas seemingly rule the roost and yet they live in a world of constant conflict and status testing. Sigmas usually acquired their outsider status the hard way; one seldom becomes immune to the social hierarchy by virtue of mass popularity in one's childhood. Bravos... okay, bravos actually have it pretty good. But the important thing to keep in mind is that you can't improve your chances of success in the social game if you begin by attempting to deceive yourself as to where you stand vis-a-vis everyone else around you.

We live in a culture that says you can become—and, in fact, are— whatever you think you are, so few people dare question the transgender person’s idea of reality.

Of course, it’s possible that nature may in some rare instances “cross-wire” a male by feminizing his brain before birth so he feels more like a woman. However, there is no way, at this time, to test that theory. In fact, psychoanalysts discovered the primary reason for transgenderism many years ago. But today’s political environment has buried that knowledge. We believe that for many—and probably most—men who feel trapped in an opposite-sex body, the origins of their conflict trace back to early childhood.

Therefore, no psychotherapist should simply accept at face value the man’s experience of himself as female, and recommend that he have mutilating surgery which will only make him into a crude caricature of a woman. Nature has previously settled the issue through his DNA: chemical castration and surgery will never make him truly female.

When we investigate the childhood of the man who believes he is a woman, we often see what attachment theorists call an “intense but insecure maternal attachment.” Mothers of gender-disturbed children usually report high levels of stress during the child’s earliest years. When the mother is alternately deeply involved in the boy’s life, and then unexpectedly disengaged, her erratic and unpredictable emotional engagement leaves the child feeling profoundly insecure.