IRGIN IEWS by VIRGINIA

VIRGI

ANDROGENY-GYNANDRY: THE INTEGRATED SELF

Some of you will be familiar with the word Androgeny or Androgyne and some won't be. Few of you will be familiar with another word, Gynandry (or Gynander for the individual). Essentially, they refer to the same thing and differ only on the level or relative importance and therefore of primacy of the two roots. "Andro”— means man or masculine, Gyne (as in gynecology) means woman or feminine. Putting the two together implies a person with both qualities in the same individual. Androgyne is the most common to but to me it partakes of the same male chauvinistic flavor of his and hers, men and women, boys and girls, he and she, and other pairs in which the masculine is given dominance over the feminine-the kind of thing that had led women's liberation to promote the use of "person" over man as in chairman, policeman, etc. Since I (speaking personally) regard the feminine as more important than the masculine to me, I prefer to regard myself as being a gynander or of being gynandrous as an adjective by giving the feminine the honor of first place.

Now if one was to look these two words up in Webster's-as I have just done-one will discover that Webster is just as confused as most people about sex and gender. As a matter of fact, if you look up sex you find it defined as gender and if you look up gender, you find sex given as a synonym. Likewise when you look up Andro-and Gyne- you find them defined as pertaining to man or to woman and then you find something saying male or female and when the two are combined hermaphrodite is given as one definition and "having both masculine and feminine characteristics" as another definition so that sex terms and gender terms are under interchangeably. Now I mention the dictionary because I know there are some among our

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