Androgyne

Androgyne names a gender that is man and woman at once. The at once is the whole of the definition, and the source of nearly every confusion the term attracts: an androgyne gender is a combination, not a midpoint, not an absence, and not a way of dressing.

Definition & scope

The distinction this entry mainly exists to make is between androgyne and androgyny. Androgyny is a matter of appearance and manner — how a person is read by others — and belongs with the vocabulary of gender expression. Androgyne is a claim about identity. A person can have either without the other: an androgyne who is read unambiguously as a man is not a contradiction, and a woman who dresses androgynously is not an androgyne. Even Facebook's 2014 custom gender list kept the two apart, offering Androgyne and Androgynous as separate options.

Within the non-binary umbrella it sits beside two terms it is regularly mistaken for. Bigender is two genders held or alternated as two; androgyne is one gender compounded of both. Agender is none. Both-as-one, both-as-two and neither are three different answers, and flattening them into a single "somewhere in between" is the reading all three reject.

History & origins

Alone among the terms in this part of the vertical, androgyne has a classical pedigree — and the pedigree is a mixed blessing, since much of what the word carries is myth rather than description.

• c. 385–370 BCE: in Plato's Symposium, Aristophanes describes an original third kind of human, "composed of both sexes and sharing equally in male and female", whose name survived though the thing itself had vanished. It is the first recorded use of androgynos in this sense, and it is a story about loss rather than a category anyone lived in.
• Antiquity to the Middle Ages: androgynus passes into Latin and thence into French and English, used chiefly of bodies rather than identities — an ancestor of the modern intersex vocabulary as much as of this one.
• From the sixteenth century: androgyne is attested as an English noun, with the adjective androgynous following and the abstract noun androgyny nominalised in the nineteenth century.
• 1974: Sandra Bem's The Measurement of Psychological Androgyny, in the Journal of Consulting and Clinical Psychology, introduces the Bem Sex Role Inventory and turns androgyny into a personality score held by ordinary men and women — decisively not an identity claim.
• February 2014: Androgyne appears on Facebook's custom gender list, its first mass-market outing as an identity option rather than a description.

In practice

The practical difficulty is that the word does double duty. Someone who says they are androgyne is usually heard to have described their appearance, and the correction has to be made explicitly every time — a burden non-binary does not impose, and a large part of why younger speakers reach for the newer word.

Pronouns follow the umbrella's usual spread, with singular they commonest and no strong convention specific to the term. Because androgyne is a compound rather than a rejection, some people who use it also use man or woman in particular contexts without feeling they have contradicted themselves.

Psychology

The largest body of research attached to the word is research about something else, and the confusion is worth naming because it is made often.

The Bem Sex Role Inventory scores masculinity and femininity as independent dimensions and classifies a respondent scoring high on both as psychologically androgynous. The construct concerns personality traits and self-description, was validated overwhelmingly on cisgender samples, and says nothing about gender identity; citing Bem's 1974 paper as evidence about androgyne people is a category error.

On the identity itself the clinical position is the vertical's standard one. The DSM-5 diagnoses gender dysphoria — distress — and not identity, and the ICD-11 removed gender incongruence from its mental-disorders chapter in 2019. Research recruiting androgyne people as a distinct group essentially does not exist.

Prevalence & culture

How common is androgyne identity?

No survey measures it, and the nearest available figure measures the other word.

The Trevor Project's 2021 research brief found 23% of 8,998 non-binary LGBTQ youth using androgynous among their labels — level with genderqueer and behind non-binary at 72%. That is the presentation word, and its high share almost certainly records people describing how they look rather than claiming androgyne as a gender, so it cannot be used directly.

The identity term proper is much rarer. It appears neither among the checkbox options nor among the leading write-in entries of the Gender Census 2025, whose 43,096 respondents produced 11,924 distinct write-ins reported down to about 1% — bigender and butch at 2.5%, demigirl at 1.5%, xenogender at 1.1% — which places androgyne below that band. Taking under 3% of the Williams Institute's 1.2 million non-binary LGBTQ US adults, about 0.46% of the adult population, gives roughly 0.013% of adults. That is a ceiling reasoned from an absence, the weakest kind of evidence, and the confidence is low accordingly.

Culturally the term now survives more as an aesthetic than as an identity — in fashion, in music criticism, in the shorthand used for performers whose presentation resists a quick read. That is precisely the sense the entry has been at pains to separate out, and the fact that it is the dominant one is why the identity claim so often has to be spelled out.