Androgyne

Why androgyne sits at the edge

The words in this category are built on a single refusal. Juxera is a whole gender near female rather than a fraction of one. Aporagender defines itself as separate from male, female and anything in between. Maverique is set by its coiner against male, female and neutral alike. Androgyne makes the opposite claim, and it is filed here to mark where the claim stops: its definition needs the binary in order to work, whether the wording is between man and woman, between masculine and feminine, or simply in between.

A second sense complicates the filing. A 2010 encyclopedia used androgyne as an umbrella close to what Non-binary now covers, listing pangender, bigender, ambigender, nongendered, Agender and Genderfluid identities beneath it. That reading survives in places. It is one reason the word is hard to pin down: one source has it 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 dating disagrees across the reference works on file. Etymonline puts the English noun at the mid-twelfth century in the sense of a hermaphrodite, Dictionary.com records it first at 1545 to 1555 from Middle French, and Wiktionary dates the sense of an androgynous person from the mid-sixteenth century. What all three agree on is that the word arrived describing a body rather than an identity.

The older uses are physical or mythological. Plato's Symposium has Aristophanes describe a primordial male-female human, and a 1550 alchemical anthology, De Alchemia, printed the Rosary of the Philosophers with its Divine Androgyne, the union of a masculine and a feminine principle. Collins still gives androgyne as another word for hermaphrodite, which is why the Nonbinary Wiki warns that using it of a gender identity can be read as a claim about being Intersex.

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. In the same period the word was applied to feminine gay men, with gynander as its masculine-lesbian counterpart. The Human Outreach and Achievement Institute, a trans-focused organisation, defined an androgyne in the 1980s 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.

Raphael Carter, a self-identified androgyne, proposed the Necker cube as a symbol in 1996, on the grounds that the figure reads as either concave or convex depending on how it is looked at. A LiveJournal community founded in 2003 took the cube as its icon and defined androgynes as people who are neither female nor male in appearance but something else. The Nonbinary Wiki counted 484 members 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.

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 have some other gender entirely. Some writers reserve androgyne for the identity and keep androgynous and androgyny for presentation; the coinage androgyneity was made for inner androgyny specifically, to hold it apart from the outward kind. The Nonbinary Wiki records the frustration running in both directions, from people read as ambiguous who would rather not be and from people whose gender is not visible on them at all.

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, which at best makes it a share of the people who answered a community questionnaire about gender rather than a share of any general population.