Hermaphrodite - TV Tropes

• 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.
• Also by Amazume Ryuta, Bra Girl^note  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.
• 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...
• 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.
• 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.

• 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.
• 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: In Wonder Woman (2016), 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.

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:

• 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 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.

• 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.

• 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.
• 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".
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.

• 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.
• 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.
• 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".
• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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 Ishiwatari, 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.
• 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.
• Monster Musume TD: Tantal is a Cute Monster Girl version of an incubus, which is a male-only species. This means that she posseses both male and female sex organs.
• 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.

• Wonderful Everyday: Some of Takuji's sexual daydreams in which he gets lost include Magical Girl Riruru and Ayana having both sets of genitals. He's upset that it's not the case for Ayana in real life.

• Harbourmaster: The Aquaans are a fully hermaphroditic species. That said, they do have preferred pronouns per individual when interacting with Humans.
• Runaway to the Stars: Both the bug ferrets and the tailed spacers possess fully functional male and female reproductive organs. This was specifically engineered in the latter as a way of permitting smaller populations to reproductively stable.
• 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).

• 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 the creator came up with are often used by furries with "herm" characters.^note  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.
• 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.

• 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.

• 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.