Hermaphroditus Art: How Were They Viewed?

What is a myth? 

A miserable little pile of secrets. 

No, it’s a type of story cultures tell themselves. 

Some of them are a lot of fun. 

Others can be deeply harmful. 

But sometimes, they’re both. 

While reading about Hermaphroditus recently, I found some scholarly research analyzing some paintings depicting them. 

These analyses seemed to be viewing them through the lens of trans women tricking straight men into being attracted to them. 

I’m not a fan of that reading of transgender mythology, in the ancient or the modern world. 

Let’s take a closer look at why. 

Play

Chapter I: A Primer on Hermaphroditus

Hermaphroditus received a full treatment on this channel a long time ago. 

In fact, I started doing the research for this video while writing the Dionysus one.

RELATED: Dionysus God: The Nonbinary God of Greek Mythology

You’ll see the connection by the end of this one, I’m sure.

The more I explored, though, the more I realized this was worth its own video. 

If you’d like to know more about their mythology in detail, check out that video.

But we’ll give a quick overview here, so you don’t feel like you have to do your homework before watching a video like it’s an MCU movie. 

Like all mythologies, their story varies. 

But from a literary perspective, the best-preserved story we have comes from Ovid’s Metamorphoses. 

In it, Hermaphroditus was born the son of Hermes and Aphrodite, hence the name. 

He was considered an exceptionally handsome young man, and when he turned 15, he wandered around the world for a while.

Sort of like how rich kids go backpacking through Europe during their gap year to find themselves or whatever.

Eventually, he came upon the Salmacis fountain at Anatolia’s southwestern tip, in modern-day Turkey.

There, she cried out, “O grant me this, may no day ever come to separate us” (372-374).

The gods answered her prayer, and united the two into a single body, which Ovid tells us was “no longer man and woman, but neither, and yet both” (378-380). 

Ovid isn’t specific about what they look like, other than that they have soft limbs and a higher voice.

Neither do the other written sources we have for them.

But in visual art, they’re usually depicted with feminine curves, breasts, and an aubergine emoji. 

They were related to the worship of Dionysus, were a fertility symbol, helped ward off evil, were related to marriage, and were sometimes associated with theatre as well. 

That’s that on that. 

The Name Hermaphroditus

Their name was used in the past to refer to intersex people, and is broadly considered stigmatizing, misleading, and offensive today.

The last syllable of that word rhymes with write, but I pronounce it Hermaphroditus, both because it’s closer to the original Greek, and because I hope it takes some of the sting away for any intersex folks who might be listening. 

Now, I’m not trying to appropriate Hermaphroditus as a transgender history figure.

They’re very closely associated with the intersex community already, and that’s where they can stay, as far as I’m concerned.

I don’t want to take things that aren’t mine to take.

But there are clearly some parallels we can find, just like there are parallels between the transgender and the intersex communities.

I don’t know exactly what the Venn diagram between us would look like specifically, but it definitely wouldn’t be two circles. 

This is part of the fun when it comes to analyzing art from different cultures and time periods through our modern perspective.

If you look at Hermaphroditus through an intersex lens, you’ll find a lot to relate to. If you look at them through a transgender lens, you will too.

Because the truth is, Hermaphroditus is neither transgender nor intersex in the way we understand these things to be today. Not strictly. 

That’s also true for the other figures we’ve explored on this channel before.

Are the Gallae transgender women in the way we understand them to be today? Is Hypsikrates a transgender man in the way we understand it today?

Of course not. But are they still clearly displaying gender nonconformity within their respective societies? Of course. 

So, I’m going to just sidestep all of that for now, because there are bigger fish to fry in this video. 

Chapter II: What Is a Myth?

Let’s put myth aside for a moment, and talk about myth. 

Wait, what? 

But not all the hysteria was based on this. 

Early on in the AIDS pandemic, patients were kept in isolation, out of fear of spreading the disease. 

By 1987, we understood that HIV and AIDS don’t spread that way. You can’t acquire the disease just by being near someone who has it. But there was still a lot of public fear around it.

People saw the photos of AIDS patients in their final days. They knew how bad it could be. 

So, the myth — get it? – of AIDS being an airborne disease continued, in spite of all evidence to the contrary. 

So when the widely beloved Princess Diana publicly shook the hand of a man with AIDS, it marked a significant point in breaking the stigma around it. This wasn’t the only time she did so either.

They’re not the usual myths we talk about on this channel, of course. Usually, we talk about gods, demigods, and the people affected by them. Teiresias, Siproites, Kybele, Dionysus, Venus, the list goes on.

These types of myths aren’t true stories, but they can still tell us a lot about the people who wrote them. 

The AIDS myths, too, can tell us a lot about the attitudes of the people of the 1980’s.

At this point, I hope they’re well and truly dead, like Jerry Falwell. Improved diagnosis, treatment, and education around AIDS have helped decrease mortality by 73% from its peak in 2004.

That’s amazing. 

But these aren’t the only myths around queer people that exist today. Let’s take a look. 

Chapter III: Are Traps Gay?

There’s no need for that. We’re not retreading the same ground as a Contrapoints video from seven years ago. I get enough comparisons to her as it is. 

Instead, I’d like to talk about a more personal story. 

These days, trans people are everywhere. We’re a well-known quantity in the world, for better and for worse. 

But on the bright side, it helps normalize us. We’re all over the place.

I live in a pretty progressive city in a pretty progressive country, but even when I visit my much smaller hometown, there are trans people everywhere. At the mall. At the café. On the bus. At the library. At the shawarma shop. At the left-handed store. Everywhere. 

That means eggs and baby transes have something to look to. The next generation of trans folks don’t have to stumble through the forest, blazing their own trail.

The trail I followed was well-worn before me, and I like to think I’ve tramped it down a bit more for those who come after. 

But that wasn’t always the case. 

One of my earliest memories of gender nonconforming feelings comes from the sixth grade.

I was maybe 12, and hanging out with some other kids at recess playing foursquare. At some point, the other kids started teasing each other about getting a “sex change”.

Innocent stuff some kid probably heard from an episode of Jerry Springer or something. A forgettable moment for most of them, I’m sure. 

But that was the first time I’d ever heard of the idea that you could change your sex. 

Around the same time, my childhood best friend Jake “got the internet.” Do you remember when you first “got the internet”? If not, you’re a lot younger than me. Once upon a time, the internet was a wondrous place, full of potential for human connection. 

That was before the Epstein class gentrified it and made everything political, of course, but I digress. 

I went over to Jake’s house one day, and he told me about this website with all this weird, messed-up stuff. It was mostly p*rn, but not entirely. I won’t say the name here, but it was full of some pretty intense fetish stuff that no child should have ever seen. 

Among all that, though, I caught my first knowing glimpse of a trans woman, baring all. 

That’s how I learned trans people exist. 

For the longest time, I only ever saw trans women in internet porn, or on trashy daytime talk shows when I stayed home sick from school. 

As a result, the two archetypes I saw were “p*rn star” or “mentally ill man in a dress”. And I never saw myself in either of them, so I figured I must not really be trans. 

Now look, I’m pro s*x work, but like any form of labour under capitalism, it’s subject to exploitation. 

And there’s a particularly exploitative subgenre of transgender erotic moving pictures that I often found. The “tr**ny surprise”. 

These videos always followed the same framing. A guy picks up a girl; they go back to a hotel room or an apartment or something; things get hot; and all of a sudden, surprise! She has an aubergine emoji! The guy makes a big show of his surprise, freaks out for a moment, and then they get back to it. 

This is rough stuff, to be sure. But it’s emblematic of a much broader issue – straight men feeling “tricked” by trans women. As though we’re trying to make them gay or something. 

This, too, is a myth. And it only works if you see trans women as men. 

It’s also one of the reasons why transmisogyny is a self-defeating ideology.

Because eventually, if you’re a straight guy, you’re going to find a trans woman attractive. Maybe it’s me, maybe it’s another girl. I don’t know. But it’s going to happen.

And when it does inevitably happen, you’re going to find yourself spiralling into an identity crisis. You’re going to freak out about being gay and thinking we tricked you into it. But the truth is you just saw a cute girl and checked her out, which is a normal thing for straight guys to do. 

Anyway, I, for one, have never been interested in tricking a straight guy into being attracted to me, and I’m sure nearly every trans woman feels the same.

But this mindset is what gets trans women – mostly trans women of colour – murdered. 

What does all this have to do with Hermaphroditus? 

I’m so glad you asked. 

Chapter IV: Hermaphroditus and Satyrs

Their bestial nature was best exemplified by their goat ears, goat tails, and colossal chubbies. 

We find plenty of examples of this in both Roman frescoes and Greek vase painting. They were into women, and if there was a woman nearby, they’d go after her. 

Usually, the satyrs depicted are nameless, but we do know at least a few of their names. Pan is probably the most famous one, but for our purposes today, there’s one particular satyr I’d like to discuss: Silenus. 

Though he’s sometimes depicted as more satyr-esque, he’s usually shown as more human-looking than most satyrs. Here he is holding baby Dionysus, and it’s really only his ears here that give up the goat. 

He was usually drunk, too, which I guess fits Dionysus’ dad pretty well. 

He’s part human, part animal. That means he’s both civilized and wild. 

He was old, but like most satyrs, he was also sexually active. 

That last bit is key here. 

He’s also often depicted with Hermaphroditus.

But of course, there was a whole lot more to their relationship than just partying. 

Chapter V: Desirability in Hermaphroditus Art

The Greek Anthology, sometimes called the Palatine Anthology, is a compilation of about 4,500 Greek poems from the ancient and early Medieval world by about 300authors. It’s a wonderful and important source, since most of the works within it survive only because of it. 

Of particular interest today is an anonymous poem from book 9, number 317. It’s pretty short, so I’ll just read the whole thing, quote (Anth. Pal. IX.317): 

“Gyne, hunc ter inivi”. What does that mean? 

It’s a bit that was left untranslated. But that’s because my copy is from 1917, back when the Loeb Classical Library either didn’t translate filthy bits or sanitized them. 

But I translated it for you, because you deserve to know the truth! Unless you’re an innocent Victorian maiden. In that case, better cover your ears. 

Gyne, hunc ter inivi. Woman, three times I have entered. 

According to Silenus, he had sex with Hermaphroditus three times, but Hermaphroditus denied it. 

Now, we understand that it’s not gay for a man to sleep with a trans woman. It’s a guy with a girl; how could it be gay? Unless you’re one of those guys who thinks anything other than five missionary pumps is gay, I guess. 

Not that Hermaphroditus is a trans woman, of course, but again, obvious parallels. 

So the question is, would the Greeks or Romans have seen this as gay? 

Nassae cinaedi est? I’m so sorry. 

From the perspective of Roman logic, no, so long as Silenus was the top. And he was, if he’s to be believed. But even though Hermaphroditus denies it, Silenus insists on it. 

Why would he do so if this were something shameful? 

Because he was drunk? Maybe. But then he brags about it later, so that doesn’t make much sense. 

Few written sources on Hermaphroditus survive. In the original Hermaphroditus video, we explored the stories from Theophrastus, Diodorus Siculus, and Ovid, but none of them give us much to go on about their sex life.  

Now, I know what you’re thinking. It’s not the most fun painting at first glance.

From a modern perspective, it looks a whole lot like Hermaphroditus is “tricking” the ostensibly heterosexual Pan into being attracted to them. Pan sees their aubergine emoji, and then refuses what he previously desired. 

But is that actually the case here? 

Katharine T. von Stackelberg seemed to think so.

In her work, “Garden Hybrids: Hermaphroditus Images in Roman Art,” she notes that representations of the god often appeared in gardens. This is true. But she also argues that these representations may have been a sort of elaborate joke played on the visitors to a Roman house (399–400). 

She offers the Borghese Hermaphroditus as an example of this, also known as the sleeping Hermaphroditus.

You’d walk in, see a beautiful lady’s butt, then walk around it and HAHA! Surprise! I fooled you!

Then we’d all have a good chortle and move on with our day. 

Now look, I’m not hating on von Stackelberg here. She was even woke enough to use neopronouns for Hermaphroditus – ze/hir – all the way back in 2014. But I’m not alone in thinking there’s more to this. 

Let’s take a closer look at that “hands up” pose. It might seem to modern eyes to be a representation of disgust, but we have to be mindful not to let our modern sensibilities cloud our view of what’s happening here.  

Nicholas Brady-Garnand points out in his work, “Close Encounters of the Third Gender”, what an incredible name, that the “hands up” pose actually shows up quite a bit when we’re looking at paintings of satyrs chasing tail.

Anyway, that satyr also has his hand up, but it’s pretty clear that he’s not repulsed by what he sees. Quite the opposite, in fact; he’s found what he’s looking for.

So, why do we think the satyr isn’t interested in the original painting?

I mean, to be fair, it does kind of look like that at first, doesn’t it? But when you compare it to the broader canon of Roman depictions of satyrs and Hermaphroditus, that idea quickly falls apart. 

I’d like to offer another interpretation.

Pan is actually all about what he finds, which is why we see the “hands up” pose.

But he also knows he’s being sneaky, so he stays alert and looks over his shoulder. 

Which interpretation is true?

Well, as far as we know, the artist of this piece never wrote anything about it, so we can’t really know.

But it aligns closely with other artistic and literary depictions of Hermaphroditus and satyrs. 

Again, this is not a call-out video. But I think von Stackelberg may have seen this painting and interpreted it through her modern preconceptions.

She’s drawing, perhaps unconsciously, on the same idea that makes people think of trans women as tricking straight men into being gay. 

But as we’ve seen, that’s a myth. 

Chapter VI: What Does This Tell Us?

Trans women aren’t interested in “tricking” straight men, and anyone who says otherwise is lying or a bot.

But if you’ve been exposed to a bunch of media that revolves around such an idea, it’ll inevitably work its way into your brain without you realizing. 

In the work of doing history, there’s a concept called “presentism”.

It’s the idea of letting one’s modern-day biases creep into their historical analysis. Of using 21^st-century Western shorthand to interpret art made well outside a 21^st-century Western context.

It’s generally acknowledged as a bad thing to do, and one should do one’s best to avoid it. 

But it’s also considered largely unavoidable. 

I’ve been accused of presentist bias fairly often because of my interpretations of transgender history. But let’s consider Susan Stryker’s definition of transgender in a historical context, quote:

I use it… to refer to people who move away from the gender they were assigned at birth, people who cross over (trans-) the boundaries constructed by their culture to define and contain their gender.

– Susan Stryker – Transgender History, 1

I know I mention that in almost all of my videos, but that’s because if I don’t, a bunch of people will start ranting in the comments about it. 

Then again, maybe I should leave it out. More comments are good. 

In that regard, it makes perfect sense to interpret historical figures as transgender, even if they lived in a context that predates our modern definition of transgender.

Are the Gallae the same as modern trans women? Of course not. It would be silly to say so. But are they people who crossed over the boundaries of gender in their culture? Clearly, yes. 

And are they more analogous to modern trans women than to modern cisgender men? I think so. 

So, this is a presentist bias I’ve closely examined and worked through. 

But I think von Stackelberg let her presentist bias creep into her analysis of the Hermaphroditus painting we looked at earlier. Because it doesn’t seem to be true that any of the characters who pursued Hermaphroditus were disgusted or disturbed by what they found. Quite the opposite, in fact. 

But while Hermaphroditus is, again, closer to an intersex character, I think their depiction offers us a lot from a transgender perspective as well.

As we gaze upon their beauty, we DFASY U YUI9,0. 76T5R4.

Oh, sorry. Cat walked across my keyboard. 

As we gaze upon their beauty, we don’t have to do so while reproducing the toxic attitudes the modern world does for people who may look like them.

We can find much more in their mythology and depictions than that.

We can find evidence that sex, gender, and sexuality have always been more fluid than the fascist-enforced binary under which we’re forced to live today. 

Because we have always existed. 

And so long as humanity continues to endure, so too shall we. 

Modern Works Cited:

►Brady-Garnand, Nicholas. “Close Encounters of the Third Gender: Hermaphroditus, the Welcomed Guest of the Cult of Dionysus”. The Pennsylvania Communication Annual 79.2 (2024): 22-37. 
►Fornés Pallicer, M. Antònia, and Puig Rodríguez-Escalona, Mercè “La gestualidad de la barba y el mentón en la Antigüedad romana.” Revista de Estudios Latinos, vol. 5 (2005): 175-192. 
►HRC Staff. “White House, Falwell Consultation Ignores Americans’ Desire for Consensus”. Human Rights Campaign press release. 13 July 2005. Accessed 3 August 2026.
►UNAIDS. “Global HIV & AIDS Statistics – Fact Sheet”. 2026.
►Von Stackelberg, Katharine T. “Garden Hybrids: Hermaphrodite Images in the Roman House.” Classical Antiquity, vol. 33, no. 2 (2014): 395–426. JSTOR. Accessed 21 July 2026.