"It is fatal for anyone who writes to think of their sex. It is fatal to be a man or woman pure and simple; one must be woman-manly or man-womanly. It is fatal for a woman to lay the least stress on any grievance; to plead even with justice any cause; in any way to speak consciously as a woman. And fatal is no figure of speech; for anything written with that conscious bias is doomed to death. It ceases to be fertilized. Brilliant and effective, powerful and masterly, as it may appear for a day or two, it must wither at nightfall; it cannot grow in the minds of others. Some collaboration has to take place in the mind between the woman and the man before the art of creation can be accomplished. Some marriage of opposites has to be consummated. The whole of the mind must lie wide open if we are to get the sense that the writer is communicating his experience with perfect fullness."
- Virginia Woolf, A Room of Ones Own, 1929
I adore this quotation, not just as a womanist feminist, not just as a writer who seeks to write about experiences other than my own, but as a transandrogynous person, who understands the beautiful, natural creativity and empathy that mental androgyny lends me access to. The word is bipartite, dichotomised into a binary, where one must be better than the other. It is not in our nature to just hold two states, two things as equal. There will always be a victor and a failure. A better and a worse. But to choose to marry those two things into one, to force both to coexist in one life, to consciously (because as humans, it's in our nature, but consciously choosing this path is different) combine aspects of both into your everyday reshapes the mental experience into an androgynous one, with the ability to debinarise and marry every single little binarised thing; from the manner of blinking to the theory produced on the human condition and the science of life and creation.
In a world of binary dichotomies, to exist in a mental state that incooperates all aspects of the binary, to marry all of its silly divisions, to live as proof you dont have to lock your mind into "one or the other" brings forward the capability to expand ones own thinking long beyond what was previously thought, to access the "whole mind." To live as an androgynous, or at least as a being unaffiliated with the gender binary, shows an incredible ability to break away from the notion you must perceive, experience and live in the world only one way; it is the realisation that you are locking up half of your human experience. It is the realisation that you are falling into a pit of "pure simplicity." The death of new thought, the death of unity and the death of the complexities of human expression is surely inbound if not for beings of androgyny redefining the human experience out of these unmarriable dichotomies; man-womanliness and woman-manliness allows access to new perspectives on old concepts, and the birth of new ones. Birth that cannot happen in a mind confined to the rigidness that is binary thought. This is evidenced in real life, through people who live outside the binary, present outside the binary, transitionwithin the binary offering new perspectives to those who don't, and to all others who resist the binary.
This is the birth of new, beautiful, creative and expansive minds and communities. The breaking down of the rigid colonial capitalist thought that permeates all of society. Seeking empathy across false borders, the unity of all people, and the understanding between the man and the woman. Helping people realise that they are capable of androgynous thought despite being binary, by being someone who is a unification or a disassociation with it. Androgyny is universally understood in binary individuals, it helps them understand the opposite from their perspective. Helping them see that they are more similar than they think, but it will take active mental androgyny to help realise this fact. Helping the creativity, the empathy, the understanding "grow in the minds of others." Mental androgyny is radical in the sense that is the realisation of shared humanity, with baseless binarisation being a detriment to society. Below is my personal favourite quote on androgyny, ever.
"The androgynous mind is resonant and porous; that it transmits emotion without impediment; that it is naturally creative, incandescent, and undivided."
- Virginia Woolf, A Room Of Ones Own, 1929