Transandrogynous
You're trans, and the place you're heading is the middle — held on purpose, not passed through on the way to somewhere else.
- One of seven Transgender identities
- Verified flag
- 15 min read
What it is
Transandrogynous means you're trans and the destination is androgyny itself. Not man. Not woman. The middle, on purpose, indefinitely.
For most binary trans people, the ambiguous stretch is weather to get through. Something to survive until strangers stop hesitating. For you, the hesitation is the point. That's the whole difference, and it's a big one.
Now the honest part about the word. It's niche. It comes out of online glossaries from the 2010s — one flag posted in 2017, another in 2021, definitions never settled. Some people use it for a gender that is androgynous. Others use it only to describe a transition aimed at androgyny, whatever the person's gender underneath. Both uses are live. Nobody owns it.
Keep reading
So expect blank faces. Most doctors haven't heard it. Most trans people haven't either. Older, wider words — androgyne, non-binary — will get you further in a clinic or a form.
The word is thin. The lives underneath it are not. People have been transitioning towards the middle for as long as transition has existed. They just called it something else, or nothing at all.
You don't need this word to want what you want. If it helps you say it out loud to a nurse or your sister, take it. If it doesn't, put it down.
Pronouns
They/them is the most common here, but it isn't a rule and plenty of people who fit this word don't use it.
Some use he or she deliberately. A man's pronoun on an ambiguous body is its own kind of statement, and some people want exactly that friction.
Some take both and don't correct anyone. Some use neopronouns — ze/hir, ey/em, xe/xem. Some ask for their name only, every time, which is more work for everyone and worth it to them.
"Any pronouns" quietly becomes "whatever people guessed at first glance". If you say it, know what you're agreeing to.
And if you speak a language where every adjective is gendered, this is harder than English makes it look. People manage with plurals, impersonal phrasing, or by picking whichever form costs least that day.
Does this sound like you?
Take the test
Twenty questions, about four minutes, nothing leaves your phone. It suggests. You decide.
An ordinary day
You do the maths before you're properly awake. Which shirt. Which shoes. Whether today has the energy for questions.
Coffee. "Morning, mate." You let it go. Two hours later, "ladies". You let that go too. Neither is right. Neither is worth the twelve minutes.
The toilet decision isn't an identity question, it's a risk calculation. Who's in there, how loud your shoes are, how far the next one is.
Work is a costume with rules. Someone new joins and you decide in about four seconds whether they get the sentence or not.
If you're not out, all of this still runs — just underneath everything instead of on top of it. The shirt still matters. Nobody knows why. That's its own kind of tiring.
At night you tally it without meaning to. Read as one thing twice. The other thing once. Two people who clearly couldn't tell.
That last number is the one that decides whether it was a good day. No one you live with would guess that.
What people get wrong
How it actually plays out
Love
Apps sort people into two shelves and then ask which shelf you're shopping from. You get surfaced to people looking for a category, and you are not one.
If you're already partnered, the wobble usually isn't about you. It's about them. "Am I still a lesbian." "Does this make me straight." Some people work it out in a fortnight. Some never do.
The ones who leave usually leave over the label they'd have to wear, not over you. That's worth knowing, and it doesn't make it hurt less at the time.
Watch for the person who calls you the best of both worlds. They've bought a concept. When the concept needs a dentist or cries at a wedding, they tend to lose interest.
Also watch for the opposite — the friendly, careful person who treats you as a lovely neutral object. Being desexualised is quieter than being fetishised and lasts longer.
What good looks like is boring. Someone who doesn't need to resolve you. Someone who uses your word in front of their mother without a run-up.
If you're somewhere marriage is family business rather than a private decision, the negotiation involves more people than two, and you already know that better than any page does.
Desire
The difference you're listening for: wanted as ambiguous, or wanted despite it. It shows up in about ten seconds and you can't unhear it.
Most people here end up handing a partner a map. These words for this, that word never, this area is fine on a good week. It feels clinical to explain and it isn't, it's just admin done early.
Some days a hand lands somewhere ordinary and the room goes cold. Nobody did anything wrong. It's still over for the night.
Lights, mirrors, shirt on, shirt off — most people work out a setup that holds, and then a body change moves it and they work it out again.
Hormones change what feels good. Sensation, timing, dryness, how long anything takes. Nobody warns you properly, and it's the thing people are most embarrassed to ask about.
Then there's the porn category problem. There are whole shelves built out of slurs for bodies like yours, and people who've only ever met you as that shelf. It's grim and it's common and it isn't a comment on you.
And if you're asexual, none of this is the entry fee. Wanting the middle and wanting sex are unrelated appetites.
The body
Nobody prints a stop line on hormones. You get a package with a rough running order, and your genetics decide the rest. That's the honest version.
Some changes don't come back. Voice, facial hair growth, some bone and face change, breast tissue. Some do, mostly slowly — fat distribution, skin, hair on the body. Knowing which is which before you start is worth more than any dose plan.
Low dose is real and people do it. It is not a menu. You can't order the jaw and decline the voice. You're steering a slow boat, not picking features.
Stopping is also real. Plenty of people stop after the one change they came for. If you stop everything, ask about bone density — dull, unromantic, actually important.
The surgery lists here rarely match a pathway. Flat chest and nothing else. Reduction rather than removal. Hysterectomy for the periods and nothing further. Hair removal on half the face. All of that is stuff people have asked for and got.
Getting it is another matter. Some services want a story with a binary ending, and people have written themselves that story to get through the door. It's a reasonable answer to a badly built door, and it costs something to do — usually years of being slightly unknown to your own doctor.
The two fears are opposite and both real. Overshoot, and living with the change you can't return. Undershoot, and losing four years to waiting lists while nothing happens at all.
Then ageing, which nobody shows you. There are very few pictures of old androgynous people. That absence is a gap in the pictures, not proof it doesn't happen.
Work
Uniforms come in two cuts. Dress codes have two lists. Someone hands you the one that matches the box on your file.
Service and customer work is the worst of it — "sir", "ma'am", forty times a shift, delivered fast by people who don't have time to look twice. You'll develop a face for it.
Wards, warehouses, sites, kitchens: the changing room is the whole problem, and it's a safety question, not a politics question. Judge it by the actual room and the actual people.
HR systems are two-box machines. Your name may go through in an afternoon; the title on the payslip may take a year and three emails.
If you're the only one, you'll get quietly appointed the educator. You can decline that job. You are allowed to be someone who just does the work and goes home.
Interviews carry a specific two minutes — walking in, before you've spoken, watching someone try to file you. Some people talk first and fast for exactly this reason.
Freelance and self-employment show up a lot in these lives, and not always by choice. It's the version where nobody gets to have an opinion.
And in some jobs, some countries, this simply isn't survivable openly. Staying quiet there isn't a failure of nerve. It's an accurate reading of the room.
Family
"My son" is a word they have. "My daughter" is a word they have. "My child" is not a phrase most parents use in a sentence, and that gap is where a lot of the trouble lives.
The first question is almost always "so you're becoming a man?" — or a woman. You say no. It lands as nothing, because in their head no means unchanged.
What often helps is one concrete thing to do rather than a concept to understand. A name. A pronoun. One sentence they can repeat to an aunt.
Parents sometimes grieve a wedding they'd already pictured. It's daft and it's real and it isn't about you at all.
Extended family, neighbours, congregation — the calculation is different again, because there you're not managing one relationship, you're managing what people say about your parents.
Children in the family tend to be untroubled. They use your name and go back to what they were doing. It can catch you off guard.
Some families come round in eighteen months. Some come round when a grandchild arrives. Some never do, and at some point you're allowed to stop auditioning for people who've already decided.
And in many countries the paperwork has two options and no third. That's a wall, not a personal failure, and plenty of people live full lives on the wrong side of a document.
Coming out
This is a harder pitch than the binary version, and pretending otherwise doesn't help you. There's no film about it. No one has a template to reach for.
So give them one. Something like: "I'm not becoming a man or a woman. I'm going somewhere in between, deliberately. Here's my name, here's the word to use for me."
Name, pronoun, one sentence. People manage instructions far better than they manage concepts.
Expect to do it more often than binary friends do. Their bodies eventually announce it for them. Yours won't — every new colleague, every locum, every desk at the airport starts from zero.
Being out in some rooms and not others is a strategy, not cowardice. Different words for the pharmacy, the family group chat and your closest friend is just competence.
Some places, some families, some countries — this is dangerous. If your read is that it isn't safe, that read is probably right, and nothing on this page is asking you to test it.
One practical thing. Don't do it at 2am to someone who's already had a terrible day. Not for their sake. For yours, because you'll take the bad reaction personally for months.
Nearby identities
The distinction is the useful part.
The near twin, and older. Androgyne names the gender — masculine and feminine at once, or between them. Transandrogynous puts the weight on being trans and moving towards androgyny. Many people use the two words interchangeably. If you want one clean noun that people have actually heard of, this is the one.
Compare Transandrogynous and Androgyne →The umbrella: transitioning towards a non-binary gender of any kind. Wider net. Androgyny is one destination under it; neutral, null and fluid are others.
Compare Transandrogynous and Transneutral →The target is null or neutral — often fewer sex characteristics rather than a mixture of both. If what you want is less, not both, start here instead.
Compare Transandrogynous and Neutrois →No gender at all. From the outside the presentation can look identical. The inside is absence, not blend. Test it on yourself: is the middle full of both things, or empty?
Compare Transandrogynous and Agender →Broader and often with a political edge to it. Not necessarily about a transition target at all. Some people use it precisely because it refuses to specify.
Compare Transandrogynous and Genderqueer →The target moves. Some weeks masculine, some weeks not. Transandrogynous sits still, in the middle, and the stability is part of the description.
Compare Transandrogynous and Genderfluid →Two genders, often taking turns or switching by context. Androgyny is usually both at once and mixed, or neither — not alternating.
Compare Transandrogynous and Bigender →A lean towards one side while not fully being it. That's a position off-centre. This one is the centre.
Demiboy → · Demigirl →Used by intersex people about their own experience of gender and their own bodies. Widely held not to be for perisex people. If you're intersex and looking for a word for your body, start there rather than here.
Compare Transandrogynous and Intergender →Direction of travel with a lean. Plenty of people are both — transmasc in direction, aiming at androgyny rather than manhood. These stack rather than compete.
Transmasculine →Presentation, not gender. If your gender is settled and it's only the clothes and the haircut in question, this is your neighbourhood, and it's a big and long-established one.
Butch → · Masc → · Gender nonconforming →It might not be you if…
- Your gender is settled and it's the clothes you like. Wearing the suit is not the same as wanting the jaw.
- Androgyny is a phase you're counting down. If you're waiting for the day nobody hesitates about you, you're heading somewhere binary and this word will only slow you down.
- What you want is empty, not mixed. No gender rather than both. That's agender or neutrois territory, and the words there fit better.
- Your target moves. If where you want to be depends on the week, look at genderfluid before this.
- You picked the middle because you're afraid you wouldn't pass. That fear is extremely common and worth taking seriously, but it's fear, not a gender. Sit with which one is actually talking.
- You're intersex and hunting for a word for your body. Intergender was built for that and this wasn't.
- You like it on other people. Wanting to look at something and wanting to be it are different appetites and get confused constantly.
- The whole thing came out of one aesthetic you found online and none of it survives you being alone in a room with no phone.
- You get read as your assigned gender most days and it costs you nothing. Not being thrilled about it isn't the same as it being wrong.
On the hard days
The worst one is overshoot. A change arrives, it's one notch past where you wanted, and nobody told you that was the last reversible week. There's no undoing it, only getting used to it, and getting used to it takes a lot longer than anyone admits.
Then there's the explaining. You've said the same sentence four hundred times. Some days you'd rather be misgendered than say it again, so you are, and then you're annoyed with yourself.
Being illegible has an admin cost. Pharmacy counters. Security queues. Receptionists who read the file, then your face, then the file.
The one that stings most comes from inside. Other trans people telling you you're diluting it, confusing the public, making things harder for them. Strangers you can shrug off. That one you can't.
And there's the quiet loneliness of no elders. Very few people ahead of you on this road are visible. You're guessing at what fifty looks like.
Some days you'd trade the whole thing for being ordinary. That isn't betrayal. That's fatigue, and it usually lifts.
What actually helps is small and unimpressive. One person who uses your word without being asked. A shirt that works. Getting off the internet for a week.
If tonight is worse than tired — if you're doing sums about whether to still be here — tell one person before you sleep. A friend, a helpline, a night line, anyone with a pulse. Nothing else has to be decided tonight.
Questions people ask
What's the actual difference between transandrogynous and androgyne?
Androgyne names the gender: both at once, or between. Transandrogynous puts the emphasis on being trans and heading towards androgyny — for some people that's a whole identity, for others it just describes where their transition is aimed. The overlap is enormous and plenty of people use them as the same word. Practical note: androgyne is older and far more recognised, so it's the one to reach for in a clinic or on a form.
Will a doctor prescribe hormones if I don't want to look like a man or a woman?
It depends entirely on where you are. Under informed-consent models it's often straightforward. Under assessment models it can be much harder, because some clinicians are still working from a binary script. Ask directly whether the prescriber has worked with people on low or stopped doses — some have plenty of experience, some have none and won't say so. Write your target down before the appointment and be blunter than feels polite. And know that people do routinely say the expected sentences to get through the door; it's understandable, and it has a cost in how well your own doctor ever knows you.
Do I have to be non-binary to use this word?
Most people who use it are non-binary, and the community genuinely disagrees on whether that's required. One camp treats it as a gender in its own right. The other treats it as a description of a transition target that anyone trans could have, including people who identify in binary terms but want an androgynous body. Nobody has authority over this, so both usages are out there and neither will get you corrected everywhere.
Isn't this just being gender non-conforming?
No, and there's a clean test. Imagine everyone read you correctly as your assigned gender and simply admired the outfit. If that's fine — good, even — you're gender non-conforming, which is an old and solid place to be. If that's worse than being read wrong, the clothes were never the point.
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