Could I be androgynous?

[Casey]

I know nobody can tell me that but me. And all a therapist can really do is say that what I'm telling them is consistant with being androgynous. What I'd like is feedback and information.

Until fairly recently I honestly felt like there were two people standing here but you could only see one of them. One was male (me, or those parts of me I could accept) and the other was female. Even when I was delusional for a short while years ago there was me and "not me" inside. When I take those COGIATI tests and other gender tests I tend to come out around 50/50. I know they're mostly for fun but the results always felt right.

As I said in another post I understand both Ward and June Cleaver. Just as one example, when a kid has been bullied mom is usually the one to comfort him and wants to make his world alright again. Dad tells him that what happened sucked and then gives him a pep talk to build his confidence to get back out there and grab onto the world with both hands. I want to do both of those.

In an odd way I don't consider gender when I'm considering somebody for something (a new doctor, a webmaster/webmistress, etc.). I guess it may be true in general that women tend to be better when certain traits are involved and men are better where others are involved. But I don't care about generalizations. I only really consider individuals. Does this person meet my needs or not?

I know this all is not applicable to just androgynes. But my therapist thinks I may be androgynous. I would never even consider identifying as something after just two sessions with someone. But it's a case of I just simply hadn't considered the possibility that I might be androgynous before. Now that I'm seriously considering the possibility I'm finding that so much of it fits.

So I'm asking two things.
1) Does what I've said so far seem to fit? Again, only I can say what I am or am not. I'm just looking for opinions. I've never really chatted with anyone who is androgynous so I don't really have a real world example to compare and contrast myself to.
2) Does anybody know of any good material/information about androgyne? I've read the Wiki and I did find one decent page. (Sorry, I can't remember what it is off-hand.) And by asking for good material I'm looking for a subjective opinion. What would you recommend I start with besides the Wiki?

[Melissa]

To answer the main question of your post, you could be.  What do you want to identify as?  I personally have no idea how androgyns make it in this world.  I mean, which restroom do you use in public? What gender box do you check when getting health insurance?  How should people who aren't familiar with transgenders address you?  To me it just seems easier to be one gender or the other, but I only identify as one gender, so my point of view may be blinded.

Melissa

[Nero]

Hello Casey.
I'm not up on all the current terminology, but I always thought the word "androgynous" was an adjective describing one's personality and/or appearance, dress, etc.
For example, I always describe myself as androgynous rather than butch or femme. However, being FTM, I'm an androgynous male, as I have both butch and not-so-butch traits. So one could be androgynous, yet identify as fully male or female. So yes, you could very well be androgynous, but so am I.
Also, one could be androgynous in appearance only - someone whose appearance is neither male nor female or both.
For these reasons, I think androgynous is a rather vague description. Terms such as "genderqueer" or "two spirit" are more specific to your situation. This may be the reason you haven't had much luck finding good material on androgynous. Look under genderqueer or two spirit.
To answer your other question: yes, feeling that you are two people or both genders sounds consistent with being genderqueer (androgynous is applicable as well, but also sometimes applies to those who identify as being one gender).

Nero

[Casey]

To me it just seems easier to be one gender or the other, but I only identify as one gender, so my point of view may be blinded.

Believe me, I've spent the last 20+ years wishing I was simply one or the other. But part of my journey involves coming to terms with the fact that if I were one or the other I wouldn't be me. Actually I do only identify as oner gender. Unfortunately "other" isn't usually listed on forms. Which gender box I check is an eassier issue. I just assume they are asking for my sex and I answer "male". What I want to identify as is me. I just don't know quite what that is just yet. But I understand what you're saying. Whatever feels right is what I'll identify as.

Also if you would like, I could share some links with you where I've been able to learn and talk with a few people regarding this subject, so PM me, and I will gladly share the info with you.

I'll do that. Thank you. And I'll definately check out what my library has to offer. Of course, my library still proudly displays the books that teach you how to use Windows 95.

Terms such as "genderqueer" or "two spirit" are more specific to your situation.

From what little I've read so far it sounds like androgynous, or more specifically androgyne, is a more concrete term than genderqueer. It sounds like it's common for androgynes to identify as genderqueer first and then find their androgyne identity as a more specific identity. But that was one person's opinion. And I've never been able to pin down what "two spirit" really means. Many groups seem to lay claim to that term. On one site I found for two spirited Native Americans everybody in the GLBT community was included. And yet it also sounds like it was used only for intersexed people. It's been very confusing.

[Julie Marie]

Casey, what you ask no one can answer except you and it's obvious you know that. When I first entered therapy, at the insistance of my now ex wife, I was given the explanation of fetichistic, crossdresser, transgender and transsexual. Then she asked me which one I felt I was. I answered transgender because I felt I needed to have both a male and female world. But deep down I knew the answer. I just couldn't admit it.

You say you felt there are two people "standing there". I'm sure there's dozens of explanations for that and one of them could be transgender. You like many things of both genders. Our myopic society has established there's only male and female and nothing in between. There's no law that says we have to subscribe to that mantra.  Be yourself. Find what makes you happy and as long as you are doing no one harm (but don't let others guilt you into thinking their problem is yours) keep doing what you need to do to make yourself happy.

[Nero]

From what little I've read so far it sounds like androgynous, or more specifically androgyne, is a more concrete term than genderqueer.

Well, Casey, I looked it up, and it turns out you're right.
From the wiki:

Androgyny is the state of indeterminate gender, or characteristics of that gender. Androgynous traits are those that either have no gender value, or have some aspects generally attributed to the opposite gender.
Physiological androgyny, dealing with physical traits, is distinct from behavioral androgyny which deals with personal and social anomalies in gender, and from psychological androgyny, which is a matter of gender identity.
A psychologically androgynous person is commonly known as an androgyne, although there is a politicized version known as genderqueer.

So genderqueer is the politicized version, and androgyne is the original term. I hear the term "genderqueer" so often, I thought that was the term for it. Learn something new every time I visit this site.

Believe me, I've spent the last 20+ years wishing I was simply one or the other. But part of my journey involves coming to terms with the fact that if I were one or the other I wouldn't be me. Actually I do only identify as oner gender. Unfortunately "other" isn't usually listed on forms. Which gender box I check is an eassier issue. I just assume they are asking for my sex and I answer "male". What I want to identify as is me. I just don't know quite what that is just yet. But I understand what you're saying. Whatever feels right is what I'll identify as.

Exactly. You can't force yourself into either a male or female box, just as I can't force myself into a female box.
Got to be who you are, whether that's male, female, or other.

Nero

[Kendall]

To answer the question of what you can do on things that require gender melissa, for those of mixed or no gender, leaving it blank is the common process, or both checked, creating a other box, whichever you feel dominate at the time or whatever you feel best depending on the situation.

[Casey]

I hate to muddy the waters any further Nero but from what I'm reading it's more complicated than that. It looks like:
1) Genderqueer may or may not come under the umbrella term usage of transgendered (the usage that includes TS, TG, TV, CD, and all the other identities).
2)Genderqueer overlaps transgendered when transgendered is used to mean not TS but not CD either, but neither is completely within the other.
3) Androgyny appears to exist in that overlap between genderqueer and transgendered.

So it looks like not all genderqueers are transgendered, not all transgendered people are genderqueer, not all transgendered genderqueers are androgynous, but all androgynes are genderqueer, transgendered, and transgendered genderqueers. Make sense? Not to me either. But I'm looking for information to personally be able to cvonfirm or refute this conclusion.

Oh, and just to make things more interesting it looks like androgynous is a way or dressing or thinking or both while androgyne is more of an identity. And this is all psychological as opposed to physical androgyny which is now properly called intersexed although some people still call it androgyny.

Like the Gumbys say in the Monty Python sketches, "my brain hurts!"

[Melissa]

Oh, and just to make things more interesting it looks like androgynous is a way or dressing or thinking or both while androgyne is more of an identity.

So if being an androgyne is being both genders, would identifying as neither gender be called an antiandrogyne?

Melissa

[Emerald]

Does anybody know of any good material/information about androgyne? I've read the Wiki and I did find one decent page. (Sorry, I can't remember what it is off-hand.) And by asking for good material I'm looking for a subjective opinion. What would you recommend I start with besides the Wiki?

I highly recommend this website despite the annoying popups: http://androgyne.0catch.com/
-Emerald 

[Casey]

Thank you Emerald. It turns out that's the site I had found before. That's two votes for the site, yours and Tinkerbell's. I see myself in the pages of that site. I still have some more reading I want to do, but it looks like it's time to do some soul searching too. Thanks again.

[Kendall]

Here is another few pages I just looked at, the second page is good, the links many are broken. But read the page after the intro page.
http://www.angelfire.com/biz/mereproject/androgyne.html

[elleane]

To answer the main question of your post, you could be.  What do you want to identify as?  I personally have no idea how androgyns make it in this world.  I mean, which restroom do you use in public?

The one that matches my genitalia!

What gender box do you check when getting health insurance?

The one that gets me the treatment my body needs.

How should people who aren't familiar with transgenders address you?

By my name.

To me it just seems easier to be one gender or the other, but I only identify as one gender, so my point of view may be blinded.

Time to upgrade the television set, my dear! I see the picture in colour, not black and white.

elleane
xxx

[Melissa]

Time to upgrade the television set, my dear! I see the picture in colour, not black and white.

A black and white TV still shows shades of gray.

Melissa

[Louise]

I would identify myself as (psychologically) androgynous.  This is one reason that I do not have a gender marker in my profile here at Susan's.  (If the gender markers could be updated to include androgyne, that would be great.)Physiologically I am male, but I have never been comfortable in the standard male gender role. 

Along with many feminists I would reject the notion of gender essentialism and gender determinism.  Our physiological sex does not determine our gender, and gender cannot be simply defined in terms of either/or.  The Cogiati test (and the BEM scale that is the grandmother of all these gender tests) works by identifying certain traits and behaviors as either masculine, feminine or neutral.  How does a trait qualify as masculine or feminine?--well the designers of the scale take the socially accepted stereotypes as the standard.  In the original BEM scale, for example, "athletic" was identified as a masculine trait.  This was the socially accepted stereotype thirty years ago, but times have changed.  Girls sports are now much more prominent in schools (thanks to Title IX and other factors).  When today's students rank themselves on this item today, just as many women as men will characterize themselves as "athletic".  This is just one example of the way in which our social norms of gender change.

Most people have personalities that combine both masculine and feminine traits.  As part of a course that I teach that includes a discussion of ethics and gender I have the students take a BEM survey; while they are not required to report their results, most respond by saying they have a mixture of traits although they tend to be either primarily masculine or feminine.  A significant number report that they are androgynous.  After we finish the exercise I tell the students that I score as androgynous; no one has ever told me that they were surprised.

[elleane]

Time to upgrade the television set, my dear! I see the picture in colour, not black and white.

A black and white TV still shows shades of gray.

Melissa

Exactly.

My point is - I don't see everything defined by two somewhat epheremal concepts of 'masculine' and 'feminine'
There is a whole universe of human expression, emotion and experience out there.

To take a crude mathematical analogy - I don't exist as a point on a one-dimensional gender scale - I exist as a
multi-dimensional vector

elleane
xxx

[seldom]

Time to upgrade the television set, my dear! I see the picture in colour, not black and white.

A black and white TV still shows shades of gray.

Melissa

Exactly.

My point is - I don't see everything defined by two somewhat epheremal concepts of 'masculine' and 'feminine'
There is a whole universe of human expression, emotion and experience out there.

To take a crude mathematical analogy - I don't exist as a point on a one-dimensional gender scale - I exist as a
multi-dimensional vector

elleane
xxx

I could not agree with this more. 
I don't know one of my favorite sayings is "The binary gender system sucks" or something like that.  Basically it is not descriptive when you consider yourself as a constantly moving target as far as gender identification. 

Androgyne is still a current term.  Alot of us still identify ourselves as Androgynes.  An Androgyne can relate to somebody who relates to both polarized genders on equal terms or niether.  While a androgynous can be an adjective to describe how somebody looks and acts, it also can be used as a way to identify ones personal gender.  The word is multifaceted, but at the same time specific.  I have been calling myself androgynous for years, and it had nothing to do with the way I looked.   

Genderqueer is a newer term, but even this term is a little more broad then just Androgyne. I am not sure I really like it.   Bi-gender may be more accurate for some androgynes, but not all. 

I never liked the term two-spirit.  It is way too culturally specific and way too broad.  I like to avoid native american terms like the plague to describe non-native american sub-culture.  This is not because I don't like native americans, it is because I respect them to much and I have worked with them as an activist.   I believe this term outside of the Native American community should be dropped completely. 

[Shana A]

Before finding Susan's Place a few days ago, I had only heard the term androgyne used occasionally, but as I've been reading this site and the wiki, as well as the above link, it certainly fits for me. 

Whenever possible, I make a new box for "other", "neither" or "none of the above", or leave it blank. If it's a government document such as my tax forms, I check the box that goes with how someone else identified me as on my birth certificate.

As far as which bathroom, I use whichever seems like the right choice to match my clothing and presentation at the moment. But I've had a number of times when people told me I was going in the wrong rest room (men's), even when I wasn't wearing any women's clothing. I'm often mam'ed at supermarkets and such, and enjoy watching the flustered response when I answer in my baritone voice.

I really get tired of having to conform to binary choices though. To me, gender is a continuum, and I live in my own gender space that is uniquely me.

Zythyra