That unspoken delight in androgynous boys

To be androgynous, Webster’s informs us, is to have both male and female characteristics. This means that there is a man in every woman, and a woman in every man. Sometimes this is recognised only when the chips are, brutally, down – when there is no longer any way to avoid this recognition. But love between a man and a woman, or love between any two human beings, would not be possible did we not have available to us the spiritual resources of both sexes – James Baldwin, Here Be Dragon

The Stranger in Her Feminine Sign

Everything has gender
in Arabic.
History is male.
Fiction is female.
Dream is male.
Wish is female.

Feminine words are followed
by a circle with two dots over.
They call it the tied circle,
knotted with wishes
which come true only when forgotten
or replaced by the wishes of others.

In the town of tied wishes,
people feel great anticipation
because a stranger will arrive
today in her feminine sign.
Someone says he saw her
two dots glittering,
refuting another’s vision
of a cat’s eyes hunting in darkness.
So scary, he says, how the moon
hides in her red circle.

Everyone is busy today
listing wishes on pieces
of paper they’ll give to the wind.
When the stranger finds them
on her way, she’ll collect them
and garland them to her circle,
tossing some old wishes
to make space for the new.
They say the dropped ones
will come true.

The stranger’s lateness
worries the waiting.
Someone says she’s searching
for a word to complete
a special sentence,
the gift she’ll bring to town.

Another wonders if she seeks
a verb or a noun,
offering to find her.
A third warns that the stranger
may turn him into a flower
with one touch, blooming
for only a moment,
before a withering death,
and her circle throbs with songs
causing sadness and elation,
and something so obscure
no one has a name for it.
Will she complete a verb
or a noun phrase — or give a solo,
a word complete on its own?
They wonder.

When they finally hear footsteps,
they know the stranger must be near.
Make sure the gate is open,
they remind one another.
They hear clinking — 
A bracelet? A chain?

Dunya Mikhail

What does total androgyny look like, when gender isn’t even anything to do with appearance and voice?  ―  Alice Oseman, Radio Silence

Recently I stumbled upon several studies that indicate women prefer “feminine” men as mates. A 2010 experiment conducted by Faceresearch.org, the online psychology laboratory of the Face Research Laboratory at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland, found that women in Europe and the U.S. rated men with feminine faces to be more attractive. That is — men with slender, softer features. According to Daniel Kruger at the University of Michigan’s School of Public Health, this could be because men with facial masculinity possess more testosterone. According to Kruger, there is mounting evidence that testosterone is related to domestic violence and cheating. Perhaps that’s why women like me intrinsically shy away from men with more perceptibly masculine features. Call it self-preservation. We don’t want to be beaten or cheated on, so we’ve developed an innate preference for more “feminine” men. I always believed I was unusual for preferring androgynous men over manly guys. I thought it was just a “me” thing.  —  Elle Silver, I’ve Always Preferred “Feminine” Men — Now I Know Why

The King of Venus Will Take Care of You

Two’s company, but three is an act of gross indecency –

Cute boy

The cuter the boy, the mushier your brain.

Jeanne Birdsall
The Penderwicks: A Summer Tale of Four Sisters, Two Rabbits, and a Very Interesting Boy