Androgynous culture is all around us. From the 80s glam-rock styling of David Bowie to current gender-ambiguous high fashion; even metrosexuals, urban men who spend a great deal of time and money cultivating themselves aesthetically, are blurring the formerly rigid gender roles. Despite the saturation of androgyny in popular culture, Western mainstream thought still maintains a gender binary system, especially in regards to the one percent of the population who is born with sexually ambiguous genitalia. In the West, androgynous, or intersex, people are surgically converted at birth to become either male or female, sometimes with crippling detriments. And, most of the medical community concurs that these patients should be ‘normalized’ to avoid ostracism and harassment. Further, it is a widely held opinion that one must be clearly male or female to function in society.

Whereas in Western thought intersex babies are seen as abnormal, other cultures not only accept these androgynous individuals but view them in awe, reflecting a spiritual androgynous tradition. The Hijras of India are castrated in a religious ceremony called nirvan, or rebirth, to mirror the androgynous Hindu deity, Ardhanari. They wear dresses, yet consider themselves members of a third sex. Similarly, the Dogon African tribe esteems their intersex children after a creation myth which venerates androgyny as perfection. It is the harmonization of the masculine and feminine within the individual both physiologically and psychologically that intrigues many. In a time where identity is more and more discovered and defined by the individual, s/he ultimately has the ability to baffle and mutate society’s dictation of gender role. With the sexuality laden 1960s, the Cockettes, a psychedelic drag queen troupe, inspired the “genderfuck” revolution. These vivacious performers probed audiences’ conception of gender identity when they took the stage in outrageous costumes sporting breasts and long beards.

Recently, an aging British rocker, Genesis P-Orridge, and his second wife, Lady Jaye ( Jacqueline Breyer), have taken gender conceptions a step further. Both claimed to have felt constricted by gender implications, and in general P-Orridge explains that he “just felt trapped in a body.” The pair underwent many plastic surgeries to create physical similarities and ultimately form the gender neutral being: Genesis Breyer P-Orridge. The process P-Orridge has coined ‘pandrogyny’ “ is not about defining differences,” he says, “but about creating similarities. Not about separation but about unification and resolution.” The couple began the process on Valentine’s Day three years ago, when they simultaneously got breast implants. After many more painful surgeries, including a face reconstruction, the couple is slowly creating the perfected androgynous state, concurrent to the spiritually pure level held in many non-Western communities. The couple has literally fused their disparate sexes and identities to form a perfect union.

However, with the creation of this gender-bending identity, some might argue that they have lost their individual and most basic identities. Critics of androgyny and transgenderism would argue that this is an abnormal procedure that counters nature by obstructing reproduction. However, the overarching postgenderism movement offers a solution to this rebuttal. This diverse political, social, and cultural movement was influenced greatly by Donna Haraway’s A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late 20 th Century. She proposes gender liberation in the form of a cyborg, a partly synthetic human whose creation with biotechnology and assistive reproductive technology would be able to forego sexual reproduction in its classic form. Ultimately, the androgynous being would be able to both mother and father a child. Haraway and the movement she helped bolster combat the dangers and oppressiveness of current gender conceptions and schisms. In this way, the fusion of the feminine and the masculine in the individual is the only way to achieve true equality in a genderless society. This movement, along with the groundbreaking body modification of Genesis Breyer P-Orridge and other genderfucking individuals, confront our gender schismatic thinking and challenge society to reconsider the way it views and defines gender.

As P-Orridge and Lady Jaye contort their own gender identities through body modification, is it more adaptive to undergo similar reconstructions of gender notions and understandings in the realm of the psyche? Dr. Sandra Bem thought so. An influential psychologist, she began to examine sex roles in the early 1970s concluding that individuals who integrated both masculine and feminine traits, in other words psychologically androgynous individuals, were “truly effective and well functioning.” In her research, Bem argued that the most adaptive individuals were psychologically androgynous when they combined stereotypically female and male qualities instead of existing somewhere midway between the two extremes.

In current contexts where one must be malleable to succeed in gender-neutral jobs, androgynous thinking seems a great advantage. Further research into how a sexual dichotomy affects individual’s mental health suggests that the presence of gender roles in a society negatively affects one’s mental health by straining personal conceptions of gender incompatibility with certain life circumstances. Contrasting research has found that masculine traits found in both sexes, such as independence and assertiveness, lead to greater self-esteem. Even some feminists have rejected Bem’s androgynous model because the androgynous ideal is measured by stereotypical gender traits thereby constricting individuals to current gender labels and furthering gender biases.

Not everyone, however, sees the gradual “androgynization” of society as a positive and natural progression. Many conservatives still intensely believe that women and men naturally diverge in important characteristics. Addressing the problem of the “Annie Oakley view of women as able to do exactly what men do (which obviously they can’t),” Kenneth Minogue, a conservative political scientist and author, argues that this liberal mindset has instigated a “wimpish sentimentality” in the political sphere. He concludes that the ‘Annie Oakley problem’ has “[sold] everything valuable about female distinctiveness down the river in exchange for an absurdity.” In politics, assets such as aggressiveness and even ruthlessness are deemed necessary and advantageous. These stereotypically male traits alienate and contradict stereotypically female traits such as compassion and submission. Following Minogue’s logic, it would be imprudent for women to enter into a profession so contrary to their natural affections.

Further, the muddling of gender identities and roles puts nature’s organic balance of men and women, in particular concerning sexual reproduction, at risk. And many see the neutralization of gender as a dangerous process, even beyond basic biological concerns. As Phyllis Schlafly, right-wing activist and lecturer, describes “the dramatic coarsening of women” in the military as one grave effect of encouraging androgyny. Her conclusions that “the flight from the home is a flight from yourself, from responsibility, from the nature of woman” predict that social and political androgyny threatens society’s innate and opposing gender balance.

Is physical and psychological androgyny the next logical step in gender equality? In a postgenderist’s ideal world, gender biases disappear. But does this mean that the combination of our most basic differences could threaten to definitively destruct natural identity? In a society where differences in race, gender and sexuality are continually creating and manipulating formerly staunch spectrums, perhaps it is simply an easy out to destroy these spectrums in unification.

The body modification of Breyer P-Orridge and Dr. Sandra Bem’s revision of society’s gender definitions all succeed in forcing us to personally define our own gender definitions within our individual psyches and bodies and ultimately in the context of the larger society.