Feminist scholarship has demonstrated that, in the Middle East and elsewhere, ‘womenandchildren’ become the central and uncontroversial objects of humanitarian care and control in contexts of conflict, disaster, and displacement. Yet very little scholarly work has attempted to understand the place of men and masculinities within humanitarian work in the Middle East. Through an analysis of the Syria refugee response in Jordan, this paper investigates how humanitarian workers relate to Syrian refugee men, how they understand refugee masculinities within Syrian communities, and how they conceptualize their responsibilities towards a demographic not typically thought of as ‘vulnerable.’ It argues that Syrian refugee men are read by humanitarian actors in gendered and racialized ways as agential, political, independent, and at times threatening, and that Syrian men are thereby understood to disrupt humanitarian understandings of refugees as passive, feminized objects of care. These understandings of refugee men as somehow outside of humanitarianism’s ‘beneficiaries’ can be traced to humanitarian understandings of what ‘gender work’ involves; the ways in which gender has been mobilized as a grounds for intervention in the societies of the Middle East; and how Syrian men disrupt the ostensible binary, on which humanitarianism relies, between the ‘political’ and the ‘non-political.’ Humanitarian actors’ insistence that their work relies on ‘objective,’ ‘global’ standards simultaneously sidelines refugee men within important aspects of the refugee response, and is used to justify and legitimate the control humanitarians exercise over refugee women. In putting forward these arguments, the paper contributes to the growing debates on men and masculinities in the Middle East and the emerging literature on the Syria refugee response, and offers a distinct contribution to them both by analyzing humanitarian understandings of Syrian refugee masculinities. This paper is grounded in feminist and postcolonial scholarship on gender and interventions in the Middle East, as well as critical scholarship on humanitarianism. It draws on primary fieldwork in Jordan, which was undertaken over 12 months in 2015 and 2016. During this time, the author conducted extensive participant-observation with non-governmental organizations in Za‘tari Refugee Camp, the largest camp for Syrians in the Middle East, and conducted over 60 interviews with Syrian refugees and humanitarian workers, in both camp and non-camp settings.