Explore the ancient roots of androgyny, and learn how our modern eyes see gender presentation that breaks the binary.
One of the first things I said to my mother when I began learning how to talk was “no more pink.”
I was far too little to put my feelings into words. But, every time she clipped a pink bow in my hair or some distant relative insisted on sending an itchy pink frock as a Christmas gift, something deep in my chest squirmed to get away.
I’ve since gotten over my dislike of pink—it’s actually one of my favorite hair colors now—but in the intervening years, I finally started to figure out what felt so strange. Wearing that itchy dress—with my long blonde hair clipped up in a bow that always jabbed me in the scalp—was torture, and not just because of the physical discomfort.
Little me deeply resented the idea that someone would look at me in these contraptions and assume they knew anything about me as a person.
As I got older and gained more autonomy over how I expressed myself, I began experimenting. Skirts felt fun and bold when I shaved my head.
I grew out my hair to my waist, and suddenly button-down shirts (in plaid flannel, of course) felt comfy and right.
Everyday makeup was never my thing, but when I amped it up to drag-performer levels? Heck yes, that’s the stuff. If I’m going to be performing a gender, I may as well make it a show.
That flexible, undefined area between conventionally male and female is a haven for those who don’t fit into either category. It’s where the androgynous can finally feel at home.
Two Halves of a Whole
We get the term androgyny from the Greek word androgyne, which itself refers to a story from Plato’s Symposium.
In this tale, the poet and playwright Aristophanes explains how humans were once spherical creatures made of two bodies back-to-back. These humans came in three sexes—male-male, female-female, and the male-female, or androgyne.
Eventually, these humans rebelled against the gods, and in typical Greek god fashion, Zeus devised a punishment for the humans’ hubris. He split the humans in two, dividing each sphere into two halves that could never be whole again.
As these halves perpetually seek out one another in hopes of reuniting, they couple up in (male or female) homosexual and (male and female) heterosexual relationships.
Keeping with our Greek lesson, we commonly see historical androgynous people referred to as hermaphrodites. The term comes from the name of a Greek deity, Hermaphroditus, whom the ancient Greeks often portrayed as having a feminine body with male genitalia.
As the embodiment of male-female fusion, Hermaphroditus was eventually associated with heterosexual marriage and with the perfect, un-sundered male-female human of Aristophanes’ fable.
Hermaphroditus also gave his moniker to the scientific world to describe the various plant, animal, and insect species where individual specimens display both male and female characteristics.
Today, the term has largely fallen out of use outside of scientific circles due to its clinical nature and dehumanizing tone. A snail can be a hermaphrodite. A tree can be a hermaphrodite. A human being, however, is an intersex person.
Defining the Spaces In-Between
Human gender and human sex don’t always align, and they don’t always do what parents or medical professionals expect. When we’re born, the attending doctor or midwife takes a peek and declares “It’s a boy!” or “It’s a girl!” depending on what they see.
However, when the bouncing baby is intersex, the visible organs may not be clearly one sex or the other. Or, they may not match the baby’s internal reproductive organs. Or, the baby’s chromosomal sex (XX or XY) may not correspond to their body’s physical traits.
Heck, they may even have an extra chromosome there to crash the gender reveal party.
Intersex people aren’t the only ones redefining the relationship between a body’s physical traits (a person’s sex) and how a person expresses their gender (the behavior and social expectations we associate with being a man, a woman, or a gender diverse person).
For instance, trans people have a sense of gender identity that doesn’t align with the sex listed at their birth. Our media likes to sensationalize medical transitions—those that involve hormone therapy or surgery, but especially surgery—but the truth is that many trans people don’t transition medically, or even want to.
Whether they undergo medical treatment or not, trans people simply seek to live authentically.
Non-binary and genderfluid people likewise reject their assigned sex. Instead, they may embrace an identity that fluctuates from one end of the binary to another, or that exists outside of the spectrum as we know it.
Likewise, agender people opt out of the male-female dichotomy altogether.
Gender Play: Disrupting the Binary
Most of us are taught from a young age that there are boys, girls, and nothing in-between (or to the left, or right, or entirely off the board, for that matter).
Our gender identity writes the script for large portions of our lives—how we’re raised, what we wear, which careers are open to us, who we marry. Most of us don’t give our role in these scripts a second thought.
Some, however, find that the role they’re given isn’t quite right for them.
Between .5% and 1.8% of the world’s human population is intersex, and another 2% self-identifies as transgender, non-binary, or otherwise gender-nonconforming.
On top of that exists an uncountable number of people who simply don’t fit within social norms of gender expression—either intentionally or because societies tend to have a narrow view of what gender should look like.
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The thing about a binary is that when you have a coin with two sides, there’s actually a small, thin rim connecting the two. This narrow margin is where we find drag kings and queens, the genderfluid and genderqueer, those who are unsure or who simply like to test the boundaries of the status quo.
It’s where we can take the elements that our culture tells us signifies gender—body and facial hair, items of clothing, body configuration, and a myriad of other things we may not even realize we assign a gender to—and throw them in a metaphorical blender to see what comes out.
Portraying Androgyny
There’s an enormous misconception that the face of androgyny—like the “idealized” face of so many things—is thin, white, and within a narrow range of what society deems conventionally attractive.
In actuality, there are as many ways to be androgynous as there are androgynous people. Social norms play a large role in how men, women, and the rest of us express gender identity, and what reads as masculine or feminine in one place may not read the same way elsewhere.
The past 10 to 15 years have seen a rise in celebrities coming out as nonbinary or genderfluid, or otherwise embracing an androgynous aesthetic.
What’s more, the days of binary gender are seemingly numbered. Gen Z, in particular, is moving toward a looser definition of gender presentation.
Thirty-five percent of Gen Zers know someone who goes by they/them pronouns, and a full 59% believe gender options on official documents should be more expansive than male and female.
That isn’t to say that the face of androgyny is necessarily exclusively young. The internet brought the world closer together and helped people of every generation find the language to share their fully realized selves.
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Other communities grew in order to support and spread awareness for Indigenous Two-Spirit people, hijira people across the Indian subcontinent, and X-gender people in Japan.
As more third-gender communities step onto the global stage, it turns out the gender binary was never really a binary to begin with.
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