Hermaphrodite

The best of both worlds (hopefully).

For most fictional purposes, a hermaphrodite is an individual that's both male and female; specifically, one that has both male and female genitals. Biologists don't use the word that way, but this is fiction, not biology. In real life, however, a human that has fully developed male and female genitals is unknown (there's never been an actual confirmed instance). Humans with sexually ambiguous genitals and/or incompletely developed ones (or other biological ambiguities between male and female, such as mixed glands, hormonal balances, or chromosomal sexes) are called intersex or hermaphrodites (chiefly in older literature; now considered a slur in the intersex community).

Intersex people usually identify as either a man or woman (although some are non-binary), and being intersex does not automatically make them both "a man and a woman". In fact, genetically speaking, they would still be considered one or the other depending on the presence of a Y-chromosome, even if their phenotype is in between. Fictional depictions of intersex people are often inaccurate and full of Unfortunate Implications.

The word Hermaphrodite comes from the Greek deity Hermaphroditus. This child of Hermes and Aphrodite was born a hermaphrodite, according to Diodorus Siculus (1st century BCE). According to Ovid, he was a very handsome young man with whom the nymph Salmacis fell madly in love. He rejected her advances, but Salmacis clung to him and prayed fervently to never be parted from him. The gods granted her prayer by merging the two of them into a single being, half-male and half-female. Be Careful What You Wish For.

Hermaphrodites tend to pop up in hentai anime and manga (where it's called futanari, literally "dual form" — futa, as anime fans call it for short, is a very well-known fetish), western erotic comics, and Science Fiction and fantasy erotica (almost Always Female in appearance save for the obvious extra appendage). Sometimes entire alien species or fantasy races are hermaphroditic One Gender Races, thanks to Bizarre Alien Sexes. Hermaphroditism is also a popular way to explain Mister Seahorse situations.

See also Fetish, Gender Bender, Wrong Genetic Sex, No Biological Sex, Otherworldly and Sexually Ambiguous, and Intersex Tribulations. If said character is highly sought after, see Everybody Wants the Hermaphrodite.

For characters that can actually change their sex (better fitting the biological term that shares this trope's name), see Sex Shifter.

---

Examples:

Anime & Manga

• The protagonist Mashiro Ichijo of After School Nightmare possesses a body with the upper half being male and the lower half being female. Ultimately a subversion, as the setting turns out to be some kind of metaphorical realm and "Mashiro" is not actually an individual but a pair of unborn male/female fraternal twins together in their mother's womb.
• Adam Kadmon from Angel Sanctuary represents Primordial Man, being God's first creation who existed before "duality" of gender and power emerged. Apparently, replicating a more obedient version was part of YHWH's master plan; several angels and demons are His failed experiments in doing so.
• In Astra Lost in Space, Luca Esposito is eventually revealed to be intersex, specifically a true hermaphrodite genetically engineered to have "perfect androgyny". He identifies and presents as male, but has breasts and both male and female working reproductive organs.
• Makoto, the main character of Boku no Futatsu no Tsubasa, is a fully functional hermaphrodite thanks to her alien heritage. While she generally identifies herself as a girl, in part due to her boobs, she decides she likes sex with women using her male genitalia better.
• The three-chapter ecchi manga Boy meets Girl, Girl meets Boy (a.k.a. Boy Girl) by Amazume Ryuta (of Nana & Kaoru fame) is about a teenage boy and girl who are gradually transforming into the opposite sex. It was published in Change H, an anthology of similar Gender Bender stories.
• Also by Amazume Ryuta, Bra Girl^note This is actually a mistranslation due to the Japanese homophone bura; a better translation would be "Swing Girl". is about a girl who had grown a penis (but explicitly no testicles) during the process of puberty, as part of an in-universe phenomenon that gave rise to the "third sex/gender". This example, however, is just an ecchi romantic comedy instead of outright hentai; at no point do we actually see her naked genitals, with the most that we get being the bulge of her morning erection through her pajama pants, and... uh, how it "looks" while she's wearing "third sex-compatible" panties.
• Satan is portrayed this way in Devilman due to Satan being an angel, who are often considered sexless. Lan Asuka of Devilman Lady gets the same treatment. However, Satan is mostly referred to as a "he" rather than a "they" because his human disguise, Ryo Asuka, is male, which implies that Satan identifies himself as a male rather than a female.
• Word of God confirmed that the Namekian race (including Piccolo) in Dragon Ball are hermaphrodites with a male-ish physique. They are actually based, by the way, not on human hermaphrodites but gastropods. Their name is probably taken from namekuji (slug) which heavily explains not only their antennas but their reproduction from eggs. We never actually see their reproduction, but if it's anything like this...
• Futaba-kun Change!: The Shimeru clan, from which the titular protagonist comes, are all Sex Shifters who may change gender at will, when excited or from certain substances. They are Human Aliens stranded on Earth millennia ago. Nobody knows they can crossbreed with regular Earthlings and hybrids may be able to change gender too. Even the word "shemale" is actually derived from the name of the clan.
• Interspecies Reviewers:
  • Crimvael is an angel with both sets of genitalia, though he identifies as "male" for convenience (and in part because he doesn't want his friends to get any weird ideas if they learn about his female parts). At a Gender Bender themed brothel, he drinks a Gender Bender potion, and while his male friends all turn into women, he just loses his penis until the potion wears off. Later in the manga, other angels appear, and it seems they are all hermaphrodites.
  • Episode 3 reveals that hyena girls, like real-world hyenas, have pseudo-phalluses as well as vulvas.
• Knights of Sidonia features Shinatose Izana, a "Third Gendered" human created through bioengineering. This Third Gender is sometimes called "intersex" or "middlesex" due to possessing both male and female characteristics, but it isn't a true hermaphrodite. Instead, when one of these Third Genders falls in love or otherwise subconsciously decides on a mate, their body changes into the sex opposite that of their intended, which is implied to be permanent. No word on what happens if two Third Genders fall in love with each other.
• Kira from Marginal can switch between being male and female due to being the outcome of a really messed up experiment by their father.
• Baron Ashura from Mazinger Z is a strange being formed from the halves of two lovers, sewn together down the middle. What his/her genitals look like is a mystery, though, and that's probably for the best.
• Apos, the Big Bad of Mnemosyne, is intersex (self-identifies as male), which is very handy as it gives him immortality (a female-only ability) as well as the powers of an Angel (male only ability) upon ingesting a Time Spore, though it does come with Great Insanity and an unnatural pleasure from prolonged torture of his victims.
• Monster Musume has Licchii, a member of a leech-based extraspecies. Like real leeches, Licchii has fully functional sexual organs for both sexes.
• Kanzeon Bosatsu from Saiyuki, a reference to the fact that Guan Yin from the manga's inspiration Journey to the West was originally portrayed as male, but eventually became portrayed as female in China.
• Berg Katse from Science Ninja Team Gatchaman. Katse's even more messed up; born after Sosai X fused fraternal twins into one being, Katze switches between male and female forms.
• In the third series of Tenchi Muyo! Ryo-Ohki, it is revealed that one character started out female but assimilated with a prototype male body to become intersex, but eventually ejected the female part into the separate form of a little girl.
• In Violence Jack, Blue Mad Saulus' lover appears to be female on the outside but has a man's voice and a huge penis.
• Nataku from X/1999, who is said to be a "created being" with both female and male genes. Even though he looks more like a guy now (because his father gave him some body parts), his base is a little girl.
• Yubel, the Yandere villain of season 3 of Yu-Gi-Oh! GX. They are never referred to with either male or female pronouns even in their past life, and while they speak in a feminine voice slightly more often, they refer to themself using male pronouns ("boku", to be specific). It's not even clear what they themself identify as. The 4Kids Entertainment dub, however, makes Yubel completely female. In contrast, the character designs◊ imply that Yubel's past life incarnation was male.

Comic Books

• Cerebus the Aardvark: Cerebus, while considered male in the overall story, is a hermaphrodite, and would have been able to impregnate himself had his uterus not been irreparably damaged by being stabbed in the belly as a youth.
• Negative Man or Rebis of Grant Morrison's Doom Patrol run is a fusion of Larry Trainor (white male test pilot, original magic-word-transformation superhero Negative Man), Eleanor Poole, (black female, his doctor) and the Spirit Mercurius, an Energy Being that glows green, heavily referencing Carl Jung, on the moon.
• In Druuna: Clone, Druuna encounters a bio-robot who is trying to understand human nature through experiments in pain and pleasure. It's somehow able to change into both female and male forms to pleasure Druuna.
• Steinbeck of Mystique being one of these is a case of Fanon, as Prudence, able to possess any woman, turned out to have possessed him at the moment he "killed" her, and she, not him, was the Big Bad of the Quiet Man arc. However, there have also been numerous cases of mutants exceeding the known limits of their powers in extreme situations — Jean's transformation into Phoenix being such a case before retcons - and Prudence-as-Steinbeck was entirely Ax-Crazy, so it's more likely that she can possess a man when it really counts, but doing so has consequences.
• In The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Virginia Woolf's male-to-female Gender Bender character Orlando is intersex during his/her transition periods.
• Desire, one of the Endless from The Sandman (1989), is a hermaphrodite in the sense that Desire is androgynous (in appearance and otherwise) and can be either sex, depending on what an individual who sees Desire "desires" at a given moment. An example of this is a survivor of an explosion in a strip joint seeing it as an angel. Desire is always referred to as a concept, an "it" in narration, rather than talking about it as a person like the other Endless. The other Endless usually refer to Desire as their "Brother-Sister" and avoid the whole pronoun mess.
• Shaalis, the main character of Michael Manning's Spider Garden erotic graphic novel series, is a true hermaphrodite, and is more commonly referred to by the titles of "Sacred Androgyne", and "mastress". Although the series revolves around a far-future clan-based society of genetically modified "metahumans", s/he seems to be the only true hermaphrodite.
• Wonder Woman (Rebirth): Aphrodite's child Atlantiades, the Trope Namer also known as Hermaphroditus, makes their first appearance in The DCU and is physically both sexes just like in Classical Mythology.
• In Phil Foglio's XXXenophile story "Rule of Three", a human couple end up welcoming an alien named Snixor into their bed. Snixor's race are true hermaphrodites:
  "My race doesn't have separate sexes. Each of us can be 'male' or 'female' as required. It usually depends on who buys dinner."

Fan Works

Examples by source:

• Structurally hermaphroditic biology is common for trolls in Homestuck fanfic, though that has some canonical basis with the given knowledge of their Bizarre Alien Biology; both male and female trolls deposit their "genetic material" into buckets for shipment to the egg-laying Mother Grub, and gender has no bearing on which pairs can reproduce together.
• There are many My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic fanfics that turn characters into this to get around the fact that the mane cast is six/sevenths female. For whatever reasons, Rainbow Dash, Fluttershy, and Princess Celestia seem to be given male organs most often. Queen Chrysalis often gets a wing-dang-doodle as well, though it only debatably counts as it's typically used for giving her "mate" a Face Full of Alien Wing-Wong.
• Some Soul Eater fanfictions use this as a method of explaining Crona's Ambiguous Gender. It may or may not be used for Fetish too, depending on what kind of fanfiction you're reading.
• In Touhou Project fanfiction, yukkuris are biologically hermaphroditic, their only restriction being that two yukkuris of the same type can't have a baby together (unless they're Rinnosuke-types). However, they are always referred to by the same pronouns as the characters they're based on —which 99% of the time would be "her".
• In Not Safe for Work Transformers fanfiction, Cybertronians are usually portrayed as having both types of genitalia, although mechs are portrayed this way more often than femmes.

Examples by title:

• And Shine Heaven Now: As eventually revealed, Heinkel is this trope. One of the reasons ze joined Iscariot (namely the regenerator program) is in hopes that it would 'fix' hir and put hir into a 'normal' body.
• In the Not Safe for Work fanfic The Futanari of Yuragi Inn, Kari, the Original Character who replaces Kogarashi as the main character of Yuuna and the Haunted Hot Springs, is a lesbian with both types of genitalia.
• In the Victorious fanfic Glorious, supporting the Cade and Jori pairings, Tori wakes to find that Cat is one. But it's not just Cat...
• Variant in Hivefled; both "males" and "females" have a tentacular penis and a vagina, but only in the females does said vagina lead up to a womb-analogous pouch for storing genetic material, and only females have Non-Mammal Mammaries. It's also considered taboo for females to favour using their penis or males their vagina over the opposing parts, and most trolls don't find this a problem as they find it various levels of uncomfortable to do so.
• Hopeless Love explains Yugi's slightly effeminate appearance by making him a hermaphrodite.
• In Kataang Island Adventure, Aang and Katara encounter one of these named Aratak... who looks like Katara except for some other details. She turns out to be the leader of an island tribe who don't worry about appearances.
• League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: Tempest Rewrite: After being transformed into Futura, Orlando can now change gender at will, as well as take an intersex form.
• Lost in Camelot: Hinted at when Kenzi wonders if the troll who married Uther in the guise of Lady Catrina is a female troll or a male one.
• In the My Woman doujinshi series by Egoneri (of JoJo's Bizarre Adventure: Battle Tendency), Caesar is a futanari. She has boobs and a vagina and identifies herself as female, but also has a fully functional dick, which she uses to peg Joseph. And in book 3 of the series, a mysterious artifact cause Joseph and Caesar to swap sexes, turning Joseph into a futanari as well, but he still identifies as male in his case.
• The Return: Succubae reproduce two ways. One is turning that results in a succubus regardless of what gender they were as a human. The other is one succubus impregnating another. Tails are implied to be involved.
• Rose Lily Potter -- Metamorphmagus Who Lived: Metamorphmagi are considered a third sex due to their ability to develop fully functional male or female reproductive organs.
• Codex Equus: Ancalagon is a sequential hermaphrodite, capable of changing his physical sex in response to environmental conditions. This is how the protodragon race got started — since he and Glaurung were both male, Ancalagon became female and they bred to produce the rest of the species.

Films — Animation

• Futurama:
  • In the movie The Beast with a Billion Backs, the creature from another universe Yeevo is said to be neither male nor female, and rather than using "he" or "her", they are referred to by the terms "shkle" or "shkler".
  • In Bender's Game, Hermes Conrad's double in the fantasy world generated by Bender's imagination is a centaur with breasts named "Hermaphrodite".

Films — Live-Action

• The Xenomorphs from the Alien films. According to H. R. Giger, the guy who pretty much created the aliens, they're neither male nor female but rather a horrific blurring of both sexes. Yes, this even includes the Queen. (Try not to think about it too hard. These are aliens, after all.) Giger's new Xenorotica Portfolio is essentially Rule 34 based around them, much to the joy of Nightmare Fetishists everywhere.
• Big Top Pee-wee features a hermaphrodite in the circus' side show named Shim who has a male left half and female right half (or possibly the other way around). Said, by the circus announcer, to be the only person who can marry "shimself".
• Tie-in material for District 9 on Christopher's blog states that the prawns are all fully functional hermaphrodites.
• Bernard Phillips from God Told Me To was born looking like his genitals hadn't developed yet. His mother referred to him by male pronouns, and the doctor followed suit. He does have fully functioning alien genitals, which are on his side.
• Hedorah from the Godzilla films is simply referred to as an "it". However, the mobile game Godzilla Defense Force states that Hedorah does in fact have separate sexes (the 1971 one is female, the 2004 one is male).
• The dinosaurs in Jurassic Park (1993) are sequential hermaphrodites as a result of frog DNA being used to fill the gaps in their own deteriorated helixes. All the dinosaurs were engineered female, which obviously was just the sort of population imbalance needed for some of them to turn male and start breeding. This is possible because neither amphibians nor reptiles have sex-specific chromosomes.
• Referenced in The Lair of the White Worm when the characters discover some cave art depicting a figure with large breasts and an erect penis. Subverted, as it turns out to be a sketch of the film's immortal villain, a lesbian snake-woman who likes to perform Human Sacrifice with a sharpened ritual strap-on.
• In Never Too Young to Die, Gene Simmons of KISS fame plays one dressed in a dominatrix outfit. He also has a scene where he sings a song titled "It Takes a Man Like Me to Love a Woman Like Me".
• In Predestination, Jane is revealed to be one. She had internal male genitalia discovered during a cesarean section, and complications forced the doctors to supersede her external female genitalia with them. This forces Jane to become a man for the remainder of her life.
• In The Sex Life of the Polyp, the lecturer has to tell his audience that polyps can be either male or female at will. He is clearly very uncomfortable saying this.
• In Tremors 2: Aftershocks, the resident scientist sees the Screamer stage reproducing and says they're "hermaphrodites", but they're actually just the opposite in that they have no genitals and reproduce asexually by vomiting up a new one after gorging. She says immediately afterwards that "They reproduce asexually", so whether it's a case of the writers not knowing the difference or just her (being a geologist, not a biologist) is never brought up... unlike the phrase "pre-Cambrian".

Jokes

• A classic Take That! against your "favorite" female sports heroine is told this way:
  Mrs. Insert Name Here, what do you say to the rumors that you take steroids?
  Suck my dick!

Has been true to a certain degree way back in the starter days of doping... but surely not to that degree.

• A member of the East German women's athletics team goes to the team doctor:
  Doctor, about those pills you've been giving...
  Yes? Have you noticed any side effects?
  Yes, two. I've been growing hair on places I've never had before.
  Okay, "unusual hair growth"... Where?
  On my balls, which is the other effect I wanted to talk about.

Literature

• The central character of —All You Zombies— had internal male genitalia discovered during a cesarean section, and complications forced the doctors to supersede her external female genitalia with them. Both sets of genitalia were fully functional; in fact, s/he's not only the mother, but the father and daughter as well, via Stable Time Loop orchestrated by the protagonist much later in life, making four distinct characters the same person.
• Roselle Pollard in The Bad Place is fully reproductively functional as both sexes, and by self-impregnation gives birth to a protagonist and the villain, plus two other children.
• James Reese's trilogy consisting of The Book of Shadows, The Book of Spirits, and The Witchery feature Herculine, a hermaphrodite with functional dual genitals. She/he is an unusual member of a Mage Species that normally gives birth to female witches and male humans. She/he has the powers of a witch, but is able to impregnate a human woman and father a witch daughter and a human son.
• In F. M. Busby's The Breeds of Man, genetic scientists searching for a cure for an infertility plague caused by an AIDS cure Gone Horribly Wrong inadvertently create "serial" hermaphrodites that alternate between male and female on a monthly cycle linked to menstruation: Three weeks of one sex followed by three weeks of the other with a one-week transition period in between. Fortunately, the menstrual trigger means any cohabiting couple will alternate sexes once their menstrual cycles synchronize. Unfortunately, they don't find out about it until the first test subjects hit puberty and the resulting collisions of sex and gender roles (to say nothing of the pronoun problems) pretty much knocks society for a loop. It does provide for some amusing subversions of traditional plot devices, like the revelation that the two formerly male schoolyard bullies had married each other and had Babies Ever After in the Distant Finale.
• The Aeyries in Laurie J. Marks's Children of Triad trilogy. They're also oviparous.
• The eponymous character of Thomas T. Thomas' novel Crygender (it stands for 'cryptic gender") is a former terrorist who elects to become a (surgically created) hermaphrodite in order to "hide in plain sight".
• A Dance with Dragons introduces "Sweets", the purple-haired violet-eyed intersex prized slave of Yunkish slaver Yezzan zo Qaggaz, who owns a grotesquerie of unique and deformed slaves. Though Sweets' place of origin is unknown, the books do reference that people born in the cities close to the devastated Valyrian peninsula are often born with deformities and alterations.
• Eight Worlds: Kenneth "Sparky" Valentine from The Golden Globe, is specifically not a hermaphrodite despite his trick reversible penis. He's just an actor who likes to play both male and female roles in a frontier society where virtually every production (including Shakespeare) includes sex scenes.
• The sixteenth-century story Filomena the Hermaphrodite, featured in The Facetious Nights of Straparola, features a young woman named Filomena falling ill after she joins a convent. When she is analyzed by doctors, they discover that she has grown a penis and testicles. At the end of the story, Filomena is revealed to have started dressing like a man.
• The Titanides from the Gaea Trilogy are... complicated. Genetically engineered to resemble the centaurs of myth, they, shall we say, divert from that model by having both genitalia on their horsey halves and nonetheless sort themselves into males and females based on the third set of genitals at the base of the humanoid torso. They also universally sport breasts, regardless of which humanoid genitalia they possess, since all of them can bear (and thus must nurse) children.
• Ralf Isau's novel Galerie der Lügen (translating to "Gallery of Lies") has a hermaphrodite protagonist and an ex-hermaphrodite Well-Intentioned Extremist on a Roaring Rampage of Revenge.
• The main character of Mary Gentle's Alternate History novel Ilario: The Lion's Eye is a realistically(?) portrayed hermaphrodite. Ilario becomes pregnant at one point.
• Pie O'Pah in Imajica is whatever his current sexual partner is most attracted to. Another main character who falls in love with "him" learns to see his true form, which rather than having two sets of genitals has one unusually shaped organ that can somehow fulfill both jobs.
• The entire planet of Winter in The Left Hand of Darkness is populated by humans who are hermaphrodites and androgynes. Most of the time, people are genderless, unless they're in heat. Two lovers in heat will assume genders at random (though some people have preferences, male or female) and if one gets pregnant, she remains so until the baby is born, then goes back to being an androgyne. This is explored in great detail — and made slightly complicated by the fact that the narrator translates pronouns as "He" most of the time (though a later book referred to all Getheniens as "she").
• When the Evilutionary Biologist villains of The Moreau Factor transform their victims into Half Human Hybrids, they also make many of them hermaphrodites, apparently just because they can — or so the protagonist initially assumes. He later learns that creating a fertile species of any kind is pretty much a fluke when you're Playing with Syringes, and the scientists weren't deliberately aiming for hermaphrodites so much as they were trying to create something — anything — that could reproduce.
• Thorn from Raptor is a hermaphrodite born during the last years of the Roman Empire. Thorn is remarkably convincing as either gender, and switches between them as needed. Unlike some fictional examples, however, Thorn is sterile.
• Sadako from The Ring counts twice. Her original body had Androgen insensitivity syndrome, an intersex condition that causes the woman affected to be born with a vagina, but with XY chromosomes, no uterus, and internal testes where the ovaries would typically be. After her rebirth in Spiral, she describes herself as a "complete hermaphrodite" with both a womb and testicles, fully functional.
• Melissa Scott's novel Shadow Man involves humanity becoming a five-sexed race as a side-effect of adaptation to Faster-Than-Light Travel. Of course, not everyone accepted it.
• Star Shards Chronicles: In Thief of Souls, the eponymous soul-eater Okoya takes a hermaphrodite body.
• Burgoyne 172 in Star Trek: New Frontier, a member of the fully hermaphroditic Hermat species. S/he (bear with us here) mates with a Vulcan, of all species, and the baby they produce (well, the Vulcan produces) is male. Originally the considered pronoun was S/he/it. Say it out loud and you'll see why it didn't catch on.
• In Star Wars Legends, Hutts are gastropods and therefore functional hermaphrodites (they can both impregnate others and themselves). A given Hutt is usually referred to as "female" when pregnant, otherwise it's a matter of personal preference whether they're called "he" or "she". Many other species also exist. Star Dragons/Duinuogwuin have only one sex and take on gendered pronouns for the convenience of bigendered species. Word of God states that Hutts have single sexes in the new canon.
• In H. Beam Piper's sci-fi novel Uller Uprising, the Ullerans are a race of silicon-based, vaguely reptilian Proud Warrior Race Guys who happen to be hermaphroditic. The rather imperialistic Terran colonists have gotten used to every army unit needing to have a few troopers assigned to baby-sitting duty.
• In Theodore Sturgeon's Venus Plus X, the Ledom, an "advanced" (what exactly that means is an important Plot Point in the novel) type of humans, are all hermaphroditic, peace-loving, and empathetic. Late in the novel, the protagonist (and the reader) finds out what's really going on.
• In the Vorkosigan Saga, Miles Naismith Vorkosigan's close friend and able subordinate Bel Thorne is a Betan hermaphrodite, one of an entire subspecies of genetically engineered people created as an ultra-egalitarian social movement. In-universe, "it" is considered the appropriate pronoun. Bel usually presents itself as a dashing, macho, bishonen officer but will vary its gender presentation (once in the middle of a conversation) in order to attract the attention of a potential love interest or just to mess with people. Bel is one of very few hermaphrodites to ever leave their hermetic subculture on ultra-liberal Beta colony and hints its preference for bi-gendered society may be considered a bit "queer" back home. A number of other characters have made comments about Thorne having romantic feelings towards Miles. Due to its deliberate ambiguity of gender, these feelings are often the subject of ridicule and disdain among some. Miles, who is relatively open-minded despite his very traditional upbringing, sometimes has trouble working through the ambiguities himself. Conversely Bel appears to be perfectly happy with its third-gender status since Betan technology is sufficiently advanced to allow any character to change genders at will.
• In The Warded Man and other stories in the Demon Cycle series, Leesha and Jardir's child is born with two complete sets of external genitalia. Leesha suspects this is result of overuse of magic while pregnant. After Amanvah foretells the child's future, they decide to raise her as a girl because it will keep the child safer.
• In the Well World series, the communistic states on some of the more hivelike planets have engineered humans to be full hermaphrodites to make everyone "equal". It doesn't work. The population of the Well World itself contains a variety of hermaphroditic species as well.
• In the Wraeththu series, 99.9% of the (many, many) characters are fully functional, half-and-half hermaphrodites. Also, magical.

Live-Action TV

• Desiree Dupree from American Horror Story: Freak Show is this, as well as having three breasts. Subverted: she finds out that the same hormonal imbalance that gave her three breasts also enlarged her clitoris to the extent that previous doctors mistook it for a penis.
• In one episode of Anna & Kristina's Grocery Bag, Anna and Kristina can't figure out which part of their lobsters is the coral, which part is the roe and which are the "intestine-y bit(s) one should not eat", and Kristina asks if lobsters are hermaphroditic. As it turns out, they need female lobsters for their recipe, but the cookbook they're testing does not divulge that detail.
• Babylon 5: Londo uses a statue of a hermaphrodite centauri goddess to explain centuari biology to Lenier. She has six prehensile penises, as centuari males do. Said statue is occasionally seen as a background decoration in Londo's quarters.
• In the Buffy the Vampire Slayer episode "Earshot", Buffy is touched by a demon, then learns she will take on an aspect of said demon. She relays the fears of getting a tail or scales to Willow, whose eyes go wide at a sudden thought she's kind enough to share and add to Buffy's fears.
  "Was it a boy demon?"
• The never-named Alpha Centaurian ambassador who plays a major role in the Doctor Who story "The Curse of Peladon" and its sequel "The Monster of Peladon" uses male pronouns, but is described as a hermaphrodite, looks like a penis in a cloak, was played by a male actor under the costume, and was voiced by a female actor trying to sound like a Camp Gay man.
• Lauren from Faking It, who has Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome.
• Friends: In high school, the "I Hate Rachel" club intentionally started a (false) rumor that Rachel had both male and female reproductive parts, and at birth her parents had flipped a coin and decided to raise her as a girl. Apparently, the rumor was so big that even Chandler's school knew about the "hermaphrodite cheerleader from Long Island".
• The Patient of the Week in the House episode "Skin Deep" turns out to be intersex. While House initially believes her to be a teenage girl, an ultrasound shows that she has testes where her ovaries should be, the result of a genetic abnormality, pseudohermaphroditism; she has XY chromosomes, but does not produce testosterone. (True hermaphrodites are chimaeras and have both XX and XY cells.) She has testicular cancer. House shares this information in his usual empathetic and caring style, causing her to run after him, throw away her clothes, and tearfully insist that she's a girl.
• The Orkans from Mork & Mindy may have shades of this, insinuated by Mork's appearance in Happy Days when Fonzie asks if a certain Orkan is a man or woman.
  "Hard to tell. Parts are interchangeable there."
• Mr. Show: "I'm Tatyana, the Weather Hermaphrodite."
• Passions: In the last years of the show, the characters of Vincent Clarkson and Valerie Davis were revealed to be one and the same, an intersex individual with fully functional male and female organs, and who had an affair with his own biological father that resulted in his becoming pregnant.
• Gene/Jean from Quark is a "transmute", meaning he has both male and female chromosomes. Whether he has both sex organs, however, is never revealed.
• Tribbles from the Star Trek: The Original Series episode "The Trouble with Tribbles" have no gender, and each reproduces on its own after it eats enough. Unfortunately, this can make them Explosive Breeders if their handlers aren't careful.

Music & Music Videos

• A "big, fat hermaphrodite with A Flock of Seagulls haircut and only one nostril" stole "Weird Al" Yankovic's lucky, lucky autographed glow-in-the-dark snorkel in the (not really) autobiographical song "Albuquerque".
• Singing comedian Stephen Lynch has the song "Hermaphrodite" (pronounced to be a pun with 'Aphrodite'), which is about him having a hermaphrodite "girlfriend".
  She wears lace and she wears flannel, she watches Football and the Lifetime Channel! What's that bulge under her nighty? It must be Hermaphrodite!
• Singing comedian The Rev. Billy C. Wirtz has the song "Honky Tonk Hermaprodite", about a "good ol' boy with the 38D's. The song ends with him meeting a fellow hermaphrodite who's "Jethro above the waist, but below, she's Elly May."
• The Genesis song "The Fountain of Salmacis" from Nursery Cryme tells the Hermaphrodite story.
• In the music video for the Rammstein song "Pussy", Flake Lorenz played a hermaphrodite. There's also their song "Zwitter", which translates to 'hermaphrodite'.
• In the Avantasia song "The Raven Child", the protagonist sings the following lyrics
  Am I awake or is it an evil dream
  Or maybe the ugly in between
  Like me... a weak hermaphrodite
• "S-E-X-X-Y" by They Might Be Giants is implied to be about this.
• In the She Wants Revenge music video "Tear You Apart", it's implied but not said for the girl to actually be intersex. It results in her being cornered and about to be stripped by a mob of high schoolers. Then the duo burst in and rescue her. Then it results in a Cliffhanger with them saying there much to talk about.
• UTAU: While resembling a female, Yokune Ruko is a hermaphrodite that is stated to be only 10% female.

Myths & Religion

• Many ancient cultures had gods (usually fertility gods, for obvious reasons) like this, such as the Trope Namer mentioned above.
• Hyenas were once believed to be hermaphrodites due to the fact that the genitalia of female hyenas bears a strong resemblance to male genitalia (a result of the high levels of testosterone female hyenas produce).
• The Bible: Some mystical traditions believe this with respect to Adam. It's argued that the line in the Book of Genesis, "male and female He created them", should more accurately read, "male and female They [the "elohim", a collective of ancient Semitic gods] created him [Adam]", and that prior to being split in two to create Eve, Adam was a hermaphroditic, two-headed giant.
• In the Babylonian version of Inanna's Descent to the Netherworld, the asexual creatures used to rescue Inanna (Ishtar) from the underworld become replaced by a Hermaphrodite being that confuses Ereshkigal, who eventually lets her sister leave.
• In Scythian Mythology, the Enarei, a class of priests led by Argimpasa, were described by Herodotus as males cursed with a "female" sickness that made them androgynous. Some have speculated this was nothing more than a fancy name for impotency. However, there's also some indication they were what now would be called transgender something similar, as they're described to cross-dress and act "like women" (in the Greeks' conception), with the commentators explicitly saying the Scythians had a fluid concept of gender. It's not impossible some were intersex as well of course. These individuals were also described among their laity.

Professional Wrestling

• Dwayne Johnson would frequently call interviewer Kevin Kelly "an ugly hermaphrodite", or "Hermie" for short. Whenever Kelly made appearances as a manager on the independent circuit, fans would chant "Her-Mie!" at him.

Tabletop Games

• In many editions of Dungeons & Dragons, elvish deities such as Corellon Larethian variously manifest as male, female, both, or neither.
• Exalted:
  • Marilaq A'Lam, Sister of Neomah, a Demon-Blooded turned more-or-less full demon, is an example of this. Fully functional at that; she's quite capable of impregnating herself. She does seem to maintain a female identity, despite her three sets of genitalia.
  • Another, non-fully functional example is Livillia, the actual goddess of prostitution. As befitting her nature, she's not nearly as Squicky as Marilaq — she looks like a Amazonian Beauty since she's supposed to be an example of both male and female attractiveness. Doesn't stop her from wearing a penis sheath.
• GURPS Bio-Tech mentions that 'Genetic engineering would allow the reliable creation of functional hermaphrodites. A "utopian" society might try to give everyone this trait to ensure sexual equality (no sexual discrimination if everyone is both sexes)'. This trait is a 0-point feature.
• Mage: The Awakening has a Legacy called the Daksha, whose members are all hermaphrodites (they don't start out like that, but are transformed by joining the Legacy). They have the ability to shapeshift between a male, female, and hermaphroditic form, though they tend to consider the latter their "true" form, regardless of their original gender.
• In Unknown Armies, one of the archetypes an avatar can follow (and described as one of the hardest to master) is that of the Mystic Hermaphrodite - a being that represents absolute paradox (which is the foundation on which magick is created in the game). When an avatar achieves greater levels of mastery over the archetype, he/she can change gender at will, but risks becoming a biological hermaphrodite if the roll is botched.
• Slaanesh, the youngest Chaos God in Warhammer and Warhammer 40,000, can be just as accurately referred to as "The Dark Prince" and "She Who Thirsts". Traditional lore portrays it as a rather unusual version of this trope; basically, cut a woman and a man, both exceptionally beautiful, in half vertically and then fuse the woman's right half to the man's left half to make a whole human being. That's what Slaanesh's "main" form looks like. Slaanesh's followers tend to end up rather distorted in terms of gender, but for male worshippers, having the right pectoral swell into a female breast is considered a high mark of favor, as it makes them more like Slaanesh itself. Of course, as a supremely powerful warp entity, Slaanesh can alter its form to appear male, female, hermaphroditic, or androgynous, but not matter how it appears, it is supremely seductive — so that yes, you'd hit that, and you'd sell your soul for the chance to do so.

Video Games

• Concept Art shows that The Prophet, Loptr/Aesir from Bayonetta 2, at one point was considered to appear as half male and half female right down the middle, in addition to being half light and half dark, although this concept was scrapped.
• As it turns out in Digital Devil Saga, Angel is a fully functional hermaphrodite and both the mother and father of Sera. At the end of the second game, Serph and Sera merge into a single hermaphroditic being, Seraph, whose Atma Avatar form is Ardha, who in Hindu Mythology was a fusion between Shiva and his consort Parvati.
• The Elder Scrolls:
  • Sload, the series' race of "slugmen" native to the archipelago of Thras to the southwest of Tamriel, are said to be hermaphrodites. It is believed that they absorb their sexual organs by the time they are capable of surviving on land, and indeed, there is never any mention of a Sload with a given sex.
  • Vivec from The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind is a hermaphroditic Physical God, though he is typically referred to as male. It's important to his mythic role as the Trickster/Stranger figure, where Sotha Sil is male (Clockwork King of the Three-And-One) and Almalexia is female (Face-Snaked Queen of the Three-And-One). Whether he was a hermaphrodite as a mortal is a source of debate amongst the fandom and is really only touched upon by developer written "obscure texts" not in the games themselves.
  • Vivec's "Anticipation" in the Dunmer religion is Mephala, a Daedric Prince whose sphere is "obscured to mortals" (but is typically associated with manipulation, lies, sex, and secrets). Mephala is stated to be a hermaphrodite as well, though opposite of Vivec, is typically referred to as female and speaks with a feminine voice. Her statues and other depictions also include female secondary characteristics.
• According to interviews with Daisuke Ishiwatariinvoked, this is the being that Testament from Guilty Gear became after being converted into a Gear, originally being male but gaining aspects of both traditional genders afterward. Officially, they are non-binary.
• In the Facebook game Happy Aquarium, one of your possible starting fish will have no gender indication, and be capable of mating with both sexes.
• Minogame from Hellsinker is a hermaphrodite. He was constructed that way in order to invoke the fusion of male and female into a godlike being.
• Kainé from NieR is confirmed from Japanese-only bonus material to be a hermaphrodite even before being possessed by a male shade, due to an error in the replicant system. The English localization of the game kind of dances around the issue.
• Subnautica: Scans and background material reveal that none of the life on planet 4546B is male or female, instead all of it is hermaphroditic or reproduces through parthenogenesis.
• The Liir from Sword of the Stars, as well as being psychic space-dolphins.
• The Father-Mother in Zeno Clash, the protagonist being one of her children — who also murdered her in cold blood. Not only does Father-Mother turn out to be alive after all, he turns out to be a male creature pretending to be both father and mother to the diverse population, after he stole them as babies.

Visual Novels

• In The House in Fata Morgana, Michel is born intersex and believed to be female at birth, but he suffers from gender dysphoria and eventually realises he's male when his body becomes more masculine and much more comfortable to him at puberty. Characters who don't see him as an abomination often consider him to be Otherworldly and Sexually Ambiguous.

Webcomics

• While most of the Gender Bender magic in El Goonish Shive involves binary forms, if Grace's comments in this strip is any indication, intersex forms are possible.
• The Aquaans in Harbourmaster are a fully hermaphroditic species. That said, they do have preferred pronouns per individual when interacting with Humans.
• Ame from Heartcore is a succubus and, as such, can grow a penis.
• Sonichu features Silvana, an evil villain who Count Graduon granted male and female genitalia along with shapeshifting abilities (intended as a reference to the Internet trolls who tease the author by falsifying their gender and spreading rumors about Rosechu being transgender).
• Ramona of Sticky Dilly Buns is intersex, announcing the fact just as Dillon is telling her how completely feminine she is. Actually, she uses the term "hermaphrodite", evidently being less worried by the terminology than many people (including her sibling Angel). Word of God on the comic's discussion boards is that she has 17-beta-Hydroxysteroid dehydrogenase III deficiency and XY chromosomes, but is effectively fully female apart from being infertile; she has a regular heterosexual sex life. Also, writer Gisèle Lagacé has noted on Twitter that Ramona reflects her own genetic circumstances.
• In Super Mega Topia, there is the Offenders' teammate She-Male.

Web Original

• Chakona Space: The centauroid Cat Folk known as chakats are a genetically engineered race intentionally designed with fully functional equipment for both sexes. Many of the other species in the setting are hermaphrodites. The pronouns "shi" and "hir" that he came up with are often used by furries with "herm" characters.^note Also, more rarely, "xie" and "xir". In general, the Furry Fandom produces many more hermaphroditic characters than your run-of-the-mill fandom.
• In Orion's Arm, humanity has six "normal" genders, two are intersex (Ferm, Merm), one is a fully functional Hermaphrodite (Herm), and the sixth has no genitalia (Neut). And that's just humans.
• The main character of The Saga of Tuck is eventually revealed to be intersexed, a genetic chimera with XXY / XX chromosomes, a functioning penis and one working ovary instead of testes. Assigned male at birth and initially unaware of his gender status, Tuck was already highly androgynous even before he started to develop female characteristics instead of male ones during puberty. The author has definitely Shown Their Work, with a detailed description of how intersexuality occurs in the chapter where this is revealed.
• In Supermarioglitchy4's Super Mario 64 Bloopers, both Bob and Fishy Boopkins have claimed to have male and female genitalia. Rule of Funny is in play.
• It gets complicated in the Whateley Universe because bilateral hermaphroditism can also be a (medical) transition state for a recently manifested mutant whose Body Image Template(BIT) has discordant sex and gender compared to their pre-manifestation sex and gender. Yes, Virginia, you might now self-identify as Virgil. How long it takes to get there is another matter altogether.
  • Lancer is introduced as a bilateral hermaphrodite, born female but becoming male as a result of his BIT: "I sort of have both sets of equipment. But the doctor also says that my female equipment is shutting down."
  • While Lancer is still physically transitioning to male, Vamp is happily bilaterally hermaphroditic, though she was born male, has a feminine appearance and uses feminine pronouns.
  • Transect is said to have been a hermaphrodite, whose secondary sexual characteristics were decidedly feminine, as was her self-identity. Trusting her teammates with this information ended horrifically.
  • Circuit Breaker became a bilateral hermaphrodite as a result of their mutation. Assigned male at birth, like Transect, their (clothed) outward appearance is more female than androgynous. To complicate matters, of their four personalities, one is female, two are male, and one is asexual. Given later complications, it's difficult to be certain whether Cyber-Kitty is a true hermaphrodite, in the medical sense, or not.
  • At one point, Heyoka's doctors informed him that she was a 'sterile hermaphrodite'. That's a bit of a misnomer, because in a male form he could probably father a child, but she wasn't likely to stay female long enough while pregnant to carry a child to term. Born female, Jamie's default form is androgynous, a true hermaphrodite, but after channeling a gendered spirit they may be very much male or female.
  • Halcon Peregrino was born female, but has developed into a bilateral hermaphrodite or a true hermaphrodite. Either way, she's now estranged from most of her family.
  • Wallflower was born with female pseudohermaphroditism, which was surgically corrected to match her genetic sex and later hormone levels.
  • After she manifested, Tennyo's parents told her that she had been born with some form of hermaphroditism, leading Billie to be surgically assigned male at a young age.
  • Phase appears to have acquired male pseudohermaphroditism when his mutation manifested, along with severe gender dysphoria. Resorting to biodevisor tinkering hasn't exactly helped, as the results enhanced mostly his female secondary sex characteristics.

Western Animation

• American Dad!: Roger's sexuality and biological sex are somewhat hard to discern due to Bizarre Alien Biology. He's generally seen as male, goes through a "female phase" in one episode and in another claims he has no genitals (but his human girlfriend of the week says that's okay because she has both). This is at some point lampshaded when Roger (in his "Jenny" persona) has sex with Steve's friend Snot when Steve asks "You're an alien, how is that even physically possible?!", to which Roger tries to explain how but is interrupted.
• Played for horror in Castlevania (2017). The main villains' plan involves bringing a Rebis, a homonculus which is a stitched-together corpse of half-man and half-woman, to the titular castle, where Saint Germain, opening a portal to Hell from Alucard's childhood room where Dracula was killed in Season 2, will not only be pulled back into the living world, but also with his wife Lisa. This was all because of Varney, who reveals himself to be Death who expects the insanity of them being in such a horrific form to cause The End of the World as We Know It. Luckily Trevor is able to destroy the Rebis before it gets any worse.
• Duckman's teddy bear secretaries Fluffy and Uranus from Duckman. They appear to be female and have feminine voices, but one episode implies that they have male genitalia.
• Family Guy:
  • Peter apparently had a "broster" growing up who once asked if he wanted to see their "paginis".
  • A Cutaway Gag has a suddenly quite masculine-looking Jo unwittingly out herself as one, to Mrs. Garrett's horror.
    Mrs. Garrett: You have both?!
    Jo: Well, yeah, doesn't everybody?
    Mrs. Garrett: No!
• The main character of Kaeloo is either a true or sequential hermaphrodite. Her friends seem to think she's female. It is actually part of a language joke: in her usual form, Kaeloo is a "frog" ("une grenouille"), which is a female word in French - but when she transforms, she becomes a toad ("un crapaud"), which is actually male. This is what started the references to her unclear gender.
• South Park:
  • Cartman's mom was infamously revealed to be Cartman's father, as she is a hermaphrodite (and had sex with basically the entire town). It was later revealed that the town was lying to protect the Broncos, as Jack Tenorman, Scott Tenorman's father had sex with Liane at the Drunken Barn Dance.
  • Cartman's cat, Mr. Kitty, has been shown as a cat in heat, then in a later episode as a fully functional tomcat. However, it could be possible that Mr. Kitty is a different cat in any episode he may have appeared in or that he doesn't really have a gender unless it's needed for any episode he appears in.
  • In "T.M.I.", one of the people angry about their penis size is a woman.
• In Steven Universe, Stevonnie is a fusion between the half-human boy Steven and the full human girl Connie. They are non-binary and use they/them pronouns, and their fused body is canonically intersex. Appearance-wise, Stevonnie is androgynous, and while generally leaning feminine (most notably having a female voice actor), they began growing facial hair after being fused for just a few days.
• Yuck of Yin Yang Yo! is the combination of all the bad stuff from Yin and Yang (a brother and sister team). Even when he was seen leaving a restroom, in between the boys' and girls' restrooms was a restroom labeled with a question mark.

Real Life

• Lots of invertebrate species are hermaphroditic, including such familiar creatures as earthworms and snails. One species that deserves special focus is C. elegans, a nematode worm, which have males and hermaphrodites; hermaphrodites can mate with themselves to produce more hermaphrodites, while males can only mate with hermaphrodites and have 1:1 sex ratio in their progeny.
• Some vertebrate species include certain fish such as Hamlets, Clownfish and Wrasses (although in the later two are sequential hermaphrodites. Meaning that they're usually one sex but will become the other under certain circumstances.)
• Very rarely an animal may develop as a bilateral gynandromorph. Where the individual develops male traits on one side of the body while developing female traits on the other side, leading to a chimera-like appearance, especially when there's a striking difference between males and females of the same species. So far this condition has been documented in insects, crustaceans, birds and reptiles, but is unheard of in mammals.
• A female anglerfish becomes this once a male fuses himself to her body and degenerates into a pair of testicles. This can occur an indefinite number of times, so a female anglerfish can gain an indefinite number of ballsacks.
• Freemartins are masculinized infertile female cows (and sometimes also sheep, goats, or pigs) with male twins. During fetal development, blood vessels in twin calves' fetal membranes become conjoined, and the twins wind up sharing hormones and genetic material. In the case of mixed-sex twins, the female twin receives testosterone through this connection from her brother, which results in a genetic female that behaves like a male and has nonfunctional ovaries. Sometimes, the term shows up in speculative fiction works like Brave New World or Foot Fall to refer to women that are sterilized and/or don't adhere to traditional feminine gender roles.

---