Is there any interesting research or studies regarding what ancient people or cultures pre monotheism did in regards to gender or sexuality?
I have old friends who take the Joe Rogan tribal view of like eating meat all the time and I just want to challenge them about the whole alpha male thing.
Not related to your title question but you can challenge them on the "alpha male" idea by saying it's a debunked concept based on studies of animal social structures in captivity, and no such alpha/beta/etc hierarchy exists naturally. Even the original author of the text that popularized the term says it's incorrect.
For your actual question I don't have anything concrete to link you but from what I've heard there were societies in which gender non-conforming or intersex people held a third position outside M/F roles, or were even given respected positions as priests—The Baklâ identity in the Philippines is an example of both these situations, although I don't know much about it beyond what you can find on Wikipedia, and it seems to have complexities beyond what I've described it as here.
Re: alpha males - there have been a lot of studies on modern hunting and gathering, gardening, and semi nomadic cultures. The Kung! People are a great place to start. To be very general, modern hunting and gathering people get like 60+% of their calories from plant sources. For the Kung! At least hunting and foraging are broadly gendered on man/woman lines - men do more hunting of large animals, women do more foraging. But it was recently found that a significant portion of the animal calories came from women and other foragers opportunistically taking small game they encountered while foraging. Basically if they came across a small edible animal they'd whack it with a stick and add it to their forage. This called in to question long standing beliefs about the separation of hunting and foraging behaviors and the belief that hunting was an exclusively man activity.
Important to note, though; the handful of extent modern hunting and gathering cultures have as many differences as similarities. Also, they are not primitive relics of a distant time. Like all humans they are adaptable and have built techniques and cultural technologies suited to exploiting their environment in the here and now. Their activities reflect the climate, politics, and available resources of the 21st century and may not closely resemble earlier hunting and gathering cultures.