Androgyny

Androgyny is the possession of both masculine and feminine characteristics. Androgyny may be expressed with regard to gender expression. When androgyny refers to mixed biological sex characteristics in humans, it often refers to conditions in which characteristics of both sexes are expressed in a single individual. These are known as intersex people, or those who are born with congenital variations that complicate assigning their sex at birth, as they do not correspond entirely to the male or female sexes. Both intersex and non-intersex people can exhibit a mixture of male and female sex traits such as hormone levels, type of internal and external genitalia, and the appearance of secondary sex characteristics. On the other hand, when androgyny is used to refer to physical traits, it often refers to a person whose biological sex may be ambiguous at a glance because of their mixture of male and female characteristics. Because androgyny encompasses additional meanings related to gender identity and gender expression that are distinct from biological sex, today the word androgynous is rarely used to formally describe mixed biological sex characteristics in humans.