Androgyny

Androgyny is a term derived from the Greek andras (άνδραΔ—man) and gyne (λμνή—woman) referring to either the absence of any distinguishing masculine or feminine traits, as in the Hijras of India, or the combination of both masculine and feminine characteristics, whether spiritual, psychological, or physiological.

Most Western cultures presume a binary opposition between male and female. In the 1950s, June Singer revived a mystical interest in androgyny, reconciling the ‘masculine’ and ‘feminine’ aspects of a single human, restoring the balance between what Jung called animus and anima. Like Mircea Eliade and Carl Jung, Singer treated androgyny as archetypal, in which the divided self yearned for the complete reunion of male and female. This understanding of androgyny as a metaphysical ideal was implicit in shamans or deities like Buddha, Shiva, Kuan Yin, and Elohim. Even so, Singer believed that the sexes were naturally differentiated: that males are generally aggressive, dominant, hard, and logical, and women are passive, compliant, soft, and intuitive.

In 1974, Sandra Bem published the Bem Sex Role Inventory (BSRI), a self-test listing 20 socially desirable female traits, 20 socially desirable male traits, and 20 considered to be neutral. Male traits included ‘forceful,’ ‘analytical,’ and ‘self-sufficient’; female traits included ‘sympathetic,’ ‘loyal,’ and ‘compassionate’; and neutral items included ‘truthful,’ ‘sincere,’ and ‘friendly.’ Scores revealed the respondent's self-reported possession of socially desirable, stereotypically masculine and feminine personality characteristics. An individual who received high scores for both female and male traits was defined as androgynous, whereas one with low scores in both was described as undifferentiated. Gender traits had little correlation with the ascribed sex of participants. Like Singer and Jung, Bem believed that people who had androgynous psychological traits were the most effective and well-functioning individuals in society.

At this time, Constructivism claimed that gender was socially constructed and could therefore be changed at will. Resistance to gender binaries and heterosexuality took the form of transvestitism, or performances as drag queens or drag kings. Kate Bornstein, having performed as a cross-dressing performance artist and encouraged the self-construction of ‘who you are,’ used surgery to change herself in 1998 to a ‘male-to-female lesbian transsexual’ but has now settled into being neither male nor female, a gender outlaw.

To describe a born male as ‘lesbian’ indicates some of the conceptual change required by this new gender fluidity, but it did not necessarily accommodate androgyny. A medical category, gender identity disorder, was created to describe those who felt incompatibility between their felt identity and their anatomy. Improvements in surgical processes made it possible to normalize anatomies as normalized male or female, and medical research sought to explain sex ‘transgressions’ (gender identity disorder, cross-dressing, or homosexuality) physiologically in order to remove blame and effect a ‘cure.’ A few transsexuals, like female-to-male Jamison Green, rejected such normalizing ‘cures’ and accepted their androgynous status to the extent of having hormone treatment but not requiring a surgically constructed penis or denying their past.

Despite a relatively low level of sexual dimorphism in humans, Charles Darwin had naturalized the sex binary in The Descent of Man by referring to naturally selected sex differences between male and female in gonads, sex organs, body mass, amount and placement of body hair, intelligence, psychological traits such as aggression, and child-rearing practices. But he tended to overlook the high amount of androgyny in the natural world, for instance, in worms and snails. About 30% of the fish species on a coral reef start out as males and end as females, or vice versa, or are both male and female at the same time. Could humans be naturally androgynous?

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