Androgyny in culture

Literature

 * The character Desire from the graphic novel series The Sandman has physical characteristics of both sexes, and maintains the gender balance among the character's three brothers and three sisters. Furthermore, Desire is a hermaphrodite, shifting genders often.
 * The elven wizard Vaarsuvius of the webcomic The Order of the Stick has never had his/her gender genuinely identified as a running gag.
 * The Fool is a character from Robin Hobb's fantasy novels based in The Realm of the Elderlings. In the first and third trilogies The Fool is almost always referred to as a man. In the second, a woman named Amber. When asked his gender, The Fool says it doesn't matter.
 * In A Series of Unfortunate Events by Lemony Snicket, one of Count Olaf's accomplices is described as looking "like neither a man nor a woman", being very fat, and having a very plain face. This character is only addressed twice in the series; once as "Orlando" by Sunny Baudelaire and as "Liza".
 * In Shakespeare's Macbeth the three Weird Sisters look like women but have beards, in accordance with their role as equivocators.
 * Ursula Le Guin's novel The Left Hand of Darkness is set on a planet whose inhabitants are an androgynous humanoid race who have dual genitalia but are asexual for all but a few days a month.
 * Aristophanes tells the Greek myth about when there were three sexes: the all male, the all female, and the "androgynous," who was half man, half woman. His account is found in the Symposium (Plato).
 * Cal, the main character in Middlesex by Jeffrey Eugenides, can be seen as an androgyne, possessing both male and female personality traits. He is also considered a hermaphrodite.

Movies and television

 * The movie Orlando follows the young nobleman Orlando, who lives through four centuries in Britain and changes sex on the way, ending up as an androgynous being.
 * In the episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation entitled "The Outcast", the crew of Enterprise help an androgynous race.
 * In the episode of Star Trek: Enterprise entitled "Fight or Flight", the crew of Enterprise investigate the murder of a crew of an androgynous species.
 * Saturday Night Live's popular character Pat, played by Julia Sweeney, was deliberately portrayed with an indeterminate gender.
 * In Constantine, the archangel Gabriel was depicted as being sexless (as angels are usually thought as such) although played by Tilda Swinton, wearing a suit in one scene while wearing genderless clothing in hir next appearance.
 * Semiramis-Satan in Mel Gibson's film The Passion of the Christ is presented as genderless. The character was portrayed by a woman, Rosalinda Celentano.
 * In the Angel episode "Orpheus", Willow Rosenberg calls the eponymous main character's son Connor androgynous, saying, "You must be Angel's handsome yet androgynous son."
 * The movie Dogma directed by Kevin Smith features angels which appeared to be male (they are played by male actors, use the men's restroom, and are frequently mistaken for human men) but are anatomically neuter, and a muse played by Salma Hayek who appears female (and works as a performer in a strip bar) but is also anatomically neuter.
 * The character Switch from The Matrix is described as an androgyne in the screenplay, and it is rumored that she was originally a man while still trapped in the Matrix and switched genders after being freed and finding out her true gender.
 * The character Edward Wong Hau Pepelu Tivrusky IV from Cowboy Bebop.
 * King Xerxes in the movie 300.
 * Fernando Moronta from the Dominican TV show, Al Mediodia.
 * Katherine Moennig is famous for playing many androgynous chatacters in several TV shows and films. Her most famous roles are for Jake in Young Americans (TV Series) and Shane McCutcheon in The L Word.

Style
The Visual Kei movement often (but not always) includes an androgynous look in its style.

Holy Wood the 2000 album by Marilyn Manson is divided into chapters ADAM, A being in the shadow, D being the Androgyne, A being of red Earth and M being the fallen. The music video for the song Love Is A Stranger by Eurythmics plays with gender and androgyny

Lucy, from Across the universe tells her brother "Androgyne suits you, Max." when discussing his rebellious haircut with her parents and him.

In the documentary "Metal: A Headbanger's Journey", there was an interview with Rob Jones. He talked about the glam metal scene, and a photo shoot he had with Poison, where he was given women's fashion magazines, such as "Elle", "Vogue" and "Cosmo" and showed him how they wanted to look. When their debut album was release, Rob said "there were guys on the Strip who wanted to fuck the chicks in Poison"

The following musicians are well known for their androgynous look in style:
 * Michael Jackson
 * Yoshiki Hayashi and his band X Japan
 * Marilyn Manson
 * Queen
 * David Bowie
 * Marc Bolan
 * Alice Cooper
 * Suzi Quatro
 * Suede
 * Brian Molko of the alternative rock band Placebo
 * Davey Havok, lead singer of AFI
 * Mana
 * Prince
 * K.D. Lang
 * Bill Kaulitz
 * William Beckett
 * Klaus Nomi
 * Grace Jones

Songs

 * "Androgyny" by Garbage 2001
 * "Be My Human Tonight" by Norman Iceberg talk about the concept
 * "Androgynous" by The Replacements, and covered by Crash Test Dummies and Joan Jett

Anime and manga
Androgynous characters are readily apparent in anime and manga, possibly due to the concept of beautifully feminine boys known as bishōnen. Also, transsexual or crossdressing characters are relatively common when compared to Western media.

An example of this is in the anime/manga series Saint Seiya is the silver knight Lizard Misty. While Misty is a male character his hairstyle makes him look like he is feminine. Also, Haku from Naruto is presumed to be a girl, but it is later revealed that he is in fact male. he is shown in one scene wearing a women's style kimono and has a very feminine face. Examples include:
 * Many characters in the works of Clamp including the angels and Demons in Wish and Ashura from RG Veda

Video games

 * Birdo from Super Mario Bros. 2, Bridget from Guilty Gear XX, and Flea from Chrono Trigger all dress like girls but are said to actually be males.
 * Testament from the Guilty Gear series is also thought to be a woman at first by the fans, but has a clearly male, deep voice.
 * Raiden of Metal Gear Solid 2 was given an androgynous appearance on purpose so that both male and female players could relate to him and draw themselves deeper into the experience, though the character was later parodied in Metal Gear Solid 3 as Major Ivan Raidenovitch Raikov.
 * Similar reasoning was behind the choice to make Nights, the main character in the Sega Saturn game Nights into Dreams, androgynous.
 * Seraph from Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga is a literal androgyne, created from the fusing of a male and female character
 * Doctor N. Gin in Crash Tag Team Racing, in which Crash must retrieve a ballerina outfit for the character so that he can feel "pretty".
 * Endrance from the .hack//G.U. series is portrayed as an androgynous male character who seems to care deeply for the series' protagonist; Haseo.
 * Ron DeLite from Phoenix Wright: Ace Attorney - Trials and Tribulations
 * Sage Harpuia from the Mega Man Zero series is male, but his looks, voice, and name (derived from Harpy, a Greek monster that is half-bird and half-woman) have led some players to mistake him as female.