Everybody Wants the Hermaphrodite

This trope is under discussion in the Trope Repair Shop.

"All you sexy hermaphrodite lady-man ladies
With your sexy lady-bits
And your sexy man-bits too,
Even you must be into you-hoo-hoo..."

— Flight of the Conchords, "Ladies of the World"

When a hermaphrodite, intersex, or otherwise androgynous character is so attractive that they inspire worship and desire in both males and females. Even those who are normally attracted to a single gender will make an exception for this individual.

The idea is that no matter what gender you like, this person has some characteristics of that. (Asexuals and aromantics aside.) Fetishism may also play into it. The character may even be Otherworldly and Sexually Ambiguous, their otherworldly nature factoring into why they are so revered and desired.

The hermaphrodite equivalent to Even the Guys Want Him and Even the Girls Want Her. There may be some overlap with Even the Guys Want Him or Even the Girls Want Her if they appear to be a female/male with extra bits. Shapeshifters count as Attractive Bent-Gender instead unless one alternate form is a bona-fide hermaphrodite.

Sub-Trope of Trans Chaser, which is the hypersexualization of a transgender character. Cousin of the Lad-ette, Bifauxnen, and Dude Looks Like a Lady. May play up the sexy side of Ambiguous Gender.

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Examples

Anime & Manga

• Boku no Futatsu no Tsubasa's title character, who looked like a boy as a child, but grew up to become a very gorgeous and buxom "woman". Turns out she's an alien and being intersex is normal for them.
• After School Nightmare: An AMAB intersex person (female on the bottom, male the top up) named Mashiro finds himself in a Bisexual Love Triangle between Broken Bird Kureha who, due to being raped as a five-year-old, has a very strong aversion to men until she finds herself falling for Mashiro; and Kou, who is intent on trying to protect him after discovering his gender and is big on stalking and a small hint of rapist undertones.
• Angel Sanctuary:
  • Adam Kadamon takes Angelic Beauty to its logical extreme, being regarded as the most beautiful entity in the entire universe. God created him/her before He chose to split all beings into male and female, and it is said that s/he "blinds both men and women alike". Literally.
  • Belial, too. S/he's physically female, but attempted to reject his/her gender with chemical suppressants. S/he gained the slim hips and flat chest of a man to compliment his/her female genitalia, and has since had little trouble attracting a wide swath of partners.
• Unsurprisingly, there are thousands of Hentai manga/doujinshi with hermaphrodite main characters. Those futanari girls are also almost always well endowed. A fairly popular plot point in these stories is taking a girl (Original Character or otherwise), making her a hermaphrodite (futanari or newhalf - the difference is that futanari have a penis but not the testicles while retaining the vagina, while newhalfs have a full set of male genitals without the female ones), and then see what happens next. Expect it to be girl on girl around 90% of the time. One particularly famous example (and arguably one that popularized futas amongst western hentai fans) was Bible Black, which had an antagonist that was able to turn her clitoris into a rock-hard (it's always rock hard) penis thanks to some dark magic, and proceed to have sex with literally every single female she could. The spear counterpart of this plot, following a male character turned into a hermaphrodite, is comparatively rarer and tends to play more into Seme/Uke dynamics.
• Mutsuki of Tokyo Ghoul is a transexual (designated female at birth, chooses to live as man and binds chest) and occasionally gets fanservicey scenes, one in which he dresses in girls clothing for an undercover mission and cleans up nicely as well as when he's in a Cat Girl illustration for the 2016 Calendar. In particular he attracts admiration from both genders, and an outright psychotic attraction from Torso.
• Tetsuo of Yuureitou is a trans man with a female body that is lusted after by people who either see him as a boyish Bifauxnen, a gorgeous Bishōnen or something in between.
• While his hermaphrodite body was treated as an oddity and a curse by his mother and many others, Richard III in Requiem of the Rose King obtains many love interests, both male and female. His retainer Catesby, Anne, Henry VI, Edward V, and especially The Duke of Buckingham have all taken to him at various points in the story, some even after learning the truth behind his body.
• The angel Crimvael, known as Crim to his friends, in Interspecies Reviewers, possesses both sets of genitalia, and is sufficiently adorable that both male and female side characters have expressed interest in him.
• Kimera is centered around an androgynous vampiric alien who is the object of desire for pretty much everyone they encounter.

Comic Books

• Shaalis, the Sacred Androgyne from Michael Manning's comics (The Spider Garden, Hydrophidian, In a Metal Web). Their body is depicted with two sets of genitals, BTW.
• Desire from The Sandman (1989), the embodiment of the idea of desire, is implied to be every sex at once, possibly based on whatever the viewer wants to see. Nobody ever calls Desire a hermaphrodite or intersex, presumably because even those labels would be too restrictive. People tend to talk about Desire with paired terms like "Sister-Brother" and careful avoidance of pronouns.
• Pepe Gonzalez (yes, that one) wrote "Herma". (Slightly NSFW, of course, and the trope is more an Informed Attribute here - futanari fans will be disappointed.)

Fan Works

• Oh poor Crona of Soul Eater. With Crona being a massive woobie with an Ambiguous Gender, is it any wonder that s/he is a Launcher of a Thousand Ships?
• The majority of fans of Envy from Fullmetal Alchemist seem to think this.

Literature

• The chieri of Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover series. In addition to being Space Elves, they are also able to physically change from male to female, or be somewhere in-between. Naturally, as they are an Inhumanly Beautiful Race, most people do not bother to check their current genitalia before finding them attractive.
• Earth's Children: Hermaphrodites (not that they're called that) are drawn to being mamuti (medicine people) statistically more than average, since they're already marked as "special" by the Great Earth Mother; and they're considered quite attractive by both sexes.
• Everybody Loves Large Chests: Kora is a demon that is mostly female, but has a certain male part she likes to use. Her favorite passtime is "Splitting a fat ass".
• The classical Swedish novel The Queen's Tiara by Carl Jonas Love Almquist (also made into a 1970 movie with the title Tintomara) is about a beautiful hermaphrodite, Azouras Lazuli Tintomara, who becomes involved in a love pentagon. It ends in death or madness for all involved.
• The Cornelius Chronicles: Cornelius Brunner, the bodily fusion of Jerry Cornelius and Miss Brunner and the proclaimed Messiah of the Age of Science, is this in spades.
• Okoya in Star Shards Chronicles. In the third book, s/he makes enough money selling hirself in the streets of Amsterdam for three days to buy first class plane tickets and rent a room at a luxury resort.
• Averted in Lois McMaster Bujold's Vorkosigan Saga: Bel Thorne, the Betan hermaphrodite, spends most of the books flirting with Miles, who never takes it up because he can't help seeing Bel Thorne as a man.
  • And yet brought into line again later when a somewhat older, more mature, and much more self-assured Miles briefly wonders if he shouldn't have taken Bel Thorne up on the offer at one point. Though by now the ship has quite definitely sailed, as both Miles and Bel are in committed monogamous relationships.
  • The hermaphrodites are rather popular in general on Beta, where you're welcome to any label you wish to claim, and any practice you desire as long as it's consensual and minimally safe. But people from every other world consider the Betans kind of bizarre on that front, except for when they're visiting as a form of legitimate sex tourism.
• The protagonist of Gary Jennings' novel Raptor is a hermaphrodite who lives as a male. Being a typical Jennings protagonist, he gets lots of action. Things get very interesting when he meets a female-identified hermaphrodite.
• In the Jacob's Ladder Trilogy, Mallory, the self-chosen hermaphrodite necromancer, invokes this when trying to talk Rien into having sex by insinuating that it's more interesting with a partner who is both male and female in one. It works on Rien, though whether this trope holds true for everyone else on their Small, Secluded World Colony Ship or Mallory is just starved for attention remains unclear.
• Sniper in Terra Ignota is an androgynous celebrity who is able to pose as both a man and a woman and deliberately keeps their gender secret as part of their appeal, selling sex dolls of themself of either sex. It goes so far that Sniper gets kidnapped occasionally by fans wanting more than just the doll. One character who does that during the story finds out that Sniper actually has both sexual organs and wonders if they were born like that or had had surgery to prevent disappointing fans, seeing as Sniper is not above engaging in the oldest profession for fun.
• Reign of the Seven Spellblades: The discovery in volume 2 that Pete Reston is a Sex Shifter leads to him being approached for dates by other students of all sexes—some of them being mage aristocrats hoping to breed his magical talents into their bloodlines. The propositions lead to his friends Oliver and Chela hosting a sex ed seminar for The Team.

Live-Action TV

• Vince of The Mighty Boosh claims this about himself:
  Vince: I'm the Confuser! "Is it a man? Is it a woman? Oh, I'm not sure if I mind..."
• On RuPaul's Drag Race, every season there are one or two contestants who are just as attractive as a man as they are as women. This article shows a few. As the article was made between seasons five and six, honorable mention goes to Milk and Courtney Act; both are frequently cited as being hot in both boy mode and drag.

Myths & Religion

• Classical Mythology: The Ancient Greeks believed in Hermaphroditus; a being with an ideal combination of male and female traits, son of the beautiful gods Hermes and Aphrodite. Yep, everyone wants him!
• In Mesopotamian Mythology, there was Asu-shu-namir, an intersex person created by Ea, who was sent to the Underworld to rescue the goddess Ishtar. They succeeded in doing so by seducing Ereshkigal, the Queen of the Dead. Subverted in that Ereshkigal cursed gender non-binary people to be outcasts in retaliation, and double subverted in that Ishtar gave them the gifts of healing and prophecy to counterbalance this.
  Red: So the lesson of this particular legend is if you're gender non-binary, you're magic, Ishtar loves you, and even the queen of hell thinks you're hot.
• Lots of other ancient societies had Hermaphrodite deities, too. Not surprisingly, they tended to be associated with fertility and sexuality, thus making this trope one of The Oldest Ones in the Book.

Tabletop Games

• In Dungeons & Dragons, invoked by Malcanthet, queen of Succubi, using a combination of shapeshifting, spells, and pheromones. Some people are aware that she is a hermaphrodite and seek her out because of it.
• This is one of the "gifts" that Slaanesh can apply to its followers in Warhammer 40,000. Heck, Slaanesh qualifies as well; alternately called "The Prince of Excess" and "She Who Thirsts", Slaanesh is either portrayed as half male/half female (split down the middle, his/her left side is female) or androgynous but stunningly beautiful. In truth, Slaanesh has no defined sex because of A Form You Are Comfortable With. Kind of helps being the Chaos God of decadence, his... her... its very PRESENCE puts out a psychic/pheromone blanket of utter bliss, and you will very happily be chanting its name as it invokes all the horrors that a living embodiment of Squick, fetish fuel and Sense Freakness can give.
• Arshea in Pathfinder is the androgynous Empyreal Lord of freedom, beauty, and sexuality, and is described as very beautiful in hir flavor text.
• Very possible in GURPS, by using the 0-point feature Hermaphrodite from Bio-tech, an appearance of Very Handsome, and the feature Androgynous or Universal on the appearance advantage.

Video Games

• In The Elder Scrolls III: Morrowind, the Dunmeri Tribunal deity Vivec claims that this is the case for himself. Though typically referred to as male, Vivec is a hermaphrodite. Thoughout his 36 Lessons of Vivec book series, he has sex with numerous men and women, as well as his fellow divine Tribunes (one male and one female), and even the technically genderless Daedric Prince of Domination, Corruption, and Rape, Molag Bal. That said, Vivec is a notoriously Unreliable Narrator and is known to bend the truth to serve his goals, so these claims should be taken with a grain of salt.
• Naoto Shirogane from Persona 4 ends up winning her school's female only beauty pageant despite being the least feminine looking contestant. This is because her androgynous appearance helped her get some of the male students vote, which was heavily spilt between the female contestants but also the vast majority of the female vote since she was the only contestant that had appeal with them.
• Played with by Seraph in Shin Megami Tensei: Digital Devil Saga. People don't explicitly want them but they are made up of the two player characters Serph and Sera: both of whom are lusted over by a couple of characters.

Web Original

• The late Doug Winger was famous for his "Girls", Pup and Pandora, as well as his Minevera Mink look-alike. He was seldom asked to draw single-sex characters because people like his hermaphrodites so much. This cartoon◊ (titled "centaurporn" but absolutely worksafe — the website itself possibly not) almost certainly refers to his work.
• Chakona Space: Very, very common with Chakats and their mono-gendered lovers. At most they tend to be momentarily surprised. Possibly because of their mild empathic abilities.
• Whateley Universe:
  • Phase; he looks like a hot girl with male privates. Not only was his first girlfriend (Vanessa 'Vox' Jackson) at Superhero School Whateley Academy hot, but some hot guys on campus have hit on him (which he hates).
  • Circuit Breaker has both sets of genitals, breasts, and looks like a girl. At one point, she manages to impress an entire tribe of werewolves by getting pantsed. Apparently, everyone liked what they saw.

Western Animation

• The Futurama movie Beast with a Billion Backs involves a massive extradimensional being named Yivo. "Shkle" has no gender and winds up in a relationship with every organic being in our universe at once.
• Steven Universe: When Steven and Connie first fuse into the nonbinary Stevonnie, all of the Beach City teens blush and stare at them, give them free stuff, and flirt with them. Stevonnie doesn't seem to understand why.

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