Genderqueer and Non-Binary Identities & Terminology

While the term is new, many of the identities lumped under the genderqueer umbrella are not. “Androgyne” was originally synonymous with hermaphrodite (now considered a derogatory term for intersex individuals). As defined by Oxford Online, androgyne arose “mid 16th century (as a noun): via Latin from Greek androgunos, from anēr, andr‘man’ + gunē ‘woman’”. “The Greeks possessed a really astonishing notion of the double sexual (hermaphrodite) nature of the human being in the embryonic condition and of the androgynous idea of life generally,” according to Sexual Life in Ancient Greece (1974), though this notion was not at all limited to the Greeks. Many Native American tribes have long had an understanding of two-spirited people. From The Mythology of Transgression (1997):