Androgyne

The definition has never been narrow. A glossary in a 2003 anthology on the diversity of sex and gender gave androgyne as somebody who considers themselves both male and female, adding that it can also mean somebody who identifies as neuter. A 2010 encyclopedia used it as an umbrella close to what Non-binary now covers, filing Pangender, Bigender, Ambigender, Agender, Genderfluid and Intergender identities beneath it, and stating that androgyny may be physical or psychological, does not depend on the sex a person was assigned, and is not confined to intersex people. One source has the word naming a specific position between the poles; another has it naming everything off them.

Where the word androgyne came from

Greek andros, man, and gune, woman, reached English through the Latin androgynus. The Greek androgynos covered a range the English word inherited: a person both male and female, and also a womanish man, with an adjectival use applied to baths that were common to men and women. What the reference works do not agree on is when English took it, or in which sense.

Four centuries separate the top row from the second. What all three works agree on is the direction of travel: the word arrived describing a body, and the sense in which it describes somebody's own gender is the late arrival. Related forms cluster around the same period, androgynal from the 1640s and the derived verb androgynize. The non-human sense survives untouched in botany, where an androgyne is a plant carrying staminate and pistillate flowers in one inflorescence.

What androgyne meant before it named a gender

The oldest layer is mythological. Plato's Symposium has Aristophanes describe a humanity that began as three kinds, descended from the sun, the earth and the moon, the last of them male and female at once, spherical, with four legs, four hands and two heads, and powerful enough to threaten the gods, who split them and scattered them to search for their halves. The Greek myth of Hermaphroditus and Salmacis, two divinities fused into one immortal, supplied the other frame Western writing used for centuries.

The legal and rabbinic layer is more precise than the mythological one, and it is where the word does real work. The Mishnah uses androgynos thirty-two times, as one of four categories beside the ayelonit, the saris and the Tumtum, and Genesis Rabbah reads the creation of Adam in the same terms, as a single being both male and female. Rabbi Meir describes the Androgynos as a creation of its own type, which the sages could not decide whether is male or female.

The esoteric layer runs from late antiquity onward. Philo of Alexandria, Origen and Gregory of Nyssa treated androgyny as humanity's original and perfect state, and medieval theologians including John of Damascus and John Scotus Eriugena carried that forward while other clergy argued about how to treat the intersex people in front of them. The alchemical version is the most pictorial: a 1550 anthology, De Alchemia, printed the Rosary of the Philosophers, in which the masculine principle Sol and the feminine principle Luna marry to produce the Divine Androgyne. Jakob Böhme and Emanuel Swedenborg made the figure central to their systems, and Mircea Eliade read the whole set as a coincidentia oppositorum, the unity of opposites that creation myths place before things divide.

The word has also been used as an insult about fashion. When the macaronis, a subculture of wealthy young men in Georgian England, became conspicuous for their wigs and their manners, an Oxford dictionary of 1770 recorded the reaction: a kind of animal, neither male nor female, a thing of the neuter gender, lately started up.

Who has used androgyne in print

Jennie June published Autobiography of an Androgyne in 1918, a book since described as a centrepiece for queer, trans and gender studies of twentieth-century America. Around the same period the word was applied to feminine gay men, with gynander as the masculine-lesbian counterpart, and bisexual circulated as a loose synonym for androgynes and intersex people alike, a usage still audible in the Star Trek episode in which Dr McCoy applies the word to an alien species.

Literary use runs alongside. Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five describes a boy as a heavenly androgyne in 1969, and William Irwin Thompson wrote in 1981 of the yogi as the androgyne of prehistory reachieved. In press use the word attaches most readily to performers: Dictionary.com's examples run from Sylvester in the New York Times to Cher in the Washington Post, Hemingway's Catherine in Salon and Suede's Brett Anderson in the Los Angeles Times. All four are about presentation rather than identity.

The identity sense picks up a documentary trail from the 1980s. The Human Outreach and Achievement Institute, a trans-focused organisation, defined an androgyne as a person who could comfortably express either alternative gender role in a variety of socially acceptable environments. Lynn Wilson's 1992 book The Flock names androgynes in its preface alongside pan-gender and non-binary. By 2019 the New York Times was using androgyne in its now-standard gloss, a combination of masculine and feminine, in a report on nonbinary options on state documents.

How androgyne separates from androgyny

The distinction the sources work hardest at is between the identity and the look. An androgyne may not look androgynous, and a person who does look androgynous may hold some other gender entirely. Some writers reserve androgyne for the identity and keep androgynous and androgyny for presentation, and the coinage androgyneity was made for inner androgyny specifically, to hold it apart from the outward kind. A psychological androgyne is somebody with the identity and without the appearance.

The Nonbinary Wiki records the frustration running in both directions: people born with an ambiguous appearance who are not androgynes often wish they read unambiguously, so as not to be teased or mistaken, while androgynes born without that appearance often wish they read more ambiguously, so that what they feel inwardly showed outwardly.

Because the two senses are separable, androgyne stacks with other terms rather than replacing them. The wiki records Genderqueer androgyne and agender androgyne, built the way one might say genderqueer woman, and masculine androgyne and feminine androgyne for people who almost but not quite fit one side of the binary. Some androgynes do not consider themselves transgender at all; others transition physically to make the body read as androgynous.

Why androgyne and intersex get confused

The confusion is the older word still in service. Collins gives androgyne as another word for hermaphrodite, and Dictionary.com carries the sense of a person with the reproductive characteristics of both sexes while marking it as older use and often offensive. The Nonbinary Wiki warns plainly that using androgyne of a gender identity can be read as a claim about being Intersex, and keeps the two apart on the ground that intersex describes a physical sex and androgyne, in its current use, describes a gender.

The sources also draw a connection between the two. The wiki quotes the view that androgyny of identity, understood as intergender, is the psychological counterpart of a body that is sexually intermediate, and notes that some intersex activists hold that androgynes have intersex brains. It marks that as unsettled and does not adopt it. Wikipedia approaches the boundary from the other side, observing that androgynous is now rarely used as a formal description of mixed sex characteristics because its meanings about identity and expression have grown around it.

What androgynes have used as a symbol

Three marks are in circulation and they were arrived at differently. The oldest is ⚨, the Mars and Venus symbols combined, used for androgyne, hermaphrodite or intersex, and doubling as the alchemists' sign for iron sulfate. The most deliberate is the Necker cube, proposed in 1996 by the self-identified androgyne Raphael Carter on the grounds that the figure is either concave or convex depending on how it is looked at, which makes it a symbol about perception rather than about anatomy. The flag runs left to right: red for woman and blue for man at the edges, separated by purple for the mixture, yellow for being non-binary and grey for neutrality.

The Necker cube found an institution. A LiveJournal community founded in 2003 took it as an icon and defined androgynes as people who are neither female nor male in appearance but something else, both, neither, in between, or something else entirely, adding that some members find gender complex, absent, irrelevant or extremely personal. The Nonbinary Wiki counted 484 members and 399 entries there in 2024, with the most recent post dating from January 2023. When Facebook opened 56 gender options in 2014, androgyne and androgynous were two of them.

Counting is thin for a word this old. The Nonbinary Wiki lists a frequency of 0.7 per cent for androgyne and names no survey behind it, so at best the figure is a share of whichever community questionnaire about gender produced it.