Quote from: Steph on November 21, 2007, 06:52:05 AM
Quote from: Seshatneferw on November 21, 2007, 06:39:00 AM
The way I see it, androgyne is one of the genders in a non-binary system.
Just my 2 cents but I believe that the term Androgyne refers to "The person" a person who is genderless, between genders, non-gendered etc. If the word androgyne is to be considered one of the genders in a non-binary system, doesn't that contradict the definition?
It's more a matter of viewpoints.
If you want to describe
androgyne in terms that originate in the gender-binary, 'a person who is genderless or between genders' is a pretty good description. If, on the other hand, you subscribe to a trinary gender system,
androgyne is 'a member of the gender that is neither male nor female'. Neither of these views is ultimately better than the other; it's just a matter of how you look at the gender variation and divide it into concepts.
Quote from: Alison on November 21, 2007, 04:26:36 PM
The word "Androgyne" at it's roots means "male/female" (Andro/Gyne) So it doesn't seem to cover null/neutrois/non gendered just by the roots of the word.
Not etymologically, no. Still, etymology is not everything -- for example,
woman goes back to Old English
wífmon, which is a compound of
wíf 'woman; wife' and
mon 'man; human' and thus pretty similar to
androgyne. What a word means nowadays is more a matter of how it is currently used than of how it came to be originally.
Whether
androgyne covers the null-gendered in addition to the intergendered is really a matter of how many genders one wants to have. Personally, I'd understand
androgyne in a three-way system to cover them, but all in all I think three genders are too few to be useful over here. Mostly I'd prefer a five-gender system that has male, female, null-gendered, bi-gendered and intergendered. Still, that's just the way
I have been looking at genders lately.
Nfr