When I first encountered Hermaphroditus, I didn’t know quite what to make of them.

Born of Hermes and Aphrodite – hence the name – they were, at first, a stunningly beautiful boy. So beautiful, in fact, that the nymph Salmacis fell hopelessly in love with him. When he rebuffed her advances, she clung to him as he bathed in her pool, prayed to the gods that they would never be parted, and her wish was granted in the most literal and irreversible way: their two bodies were merged into one.

The result? A single figure with both male and female characteristics, and a myth that has unsettled, titillated, and fascinated for millennia.

Now, let’s be honest – the story is creepy. There’s no real consent, and the transformation is painted as a kind of tragic violation. But myths are rarely tidy. They are messy, monstrous, alluring, and uncomfortable – just like bodies, and just like gender.

What strikes me now is not the trauma of the myth, but the after. Because Hermaphroditus goes on – not just as a mythic oddity, but as a figure who straddles categories. Not male, not female, not both, not neither. Something else. Something divine.

And as a eunuch – a word which, like hermaphrodite, has its own tangled baggage – I find myself strangely drawn to them. Not because I think they are “like” me in some anatomical sense, but because they represent the disruption of binaries. The crossing of boundaries. The refusal to fit.

Hermaphroditus has been reclaimed in modern times by intersex advocates, and rightly so. But perhaps there’s also space for those of us who live in the queer hinterlands – the in-betweens, the not-quite-this and not-quite-that. Eunuchs, gender-nonconformers, anyone whose body or identity has refused to follow the script.

I sometimes wonder what it would be like if Hermaphroditus were reimagined not as a freakish punishment, but as a patron deity of beautiful in-betweenness. A queer little god of liminality. Of transitions. Of soft boyishness and strange serenity. Of not needing to choose a side.

A god for eunuchs? Maybe. A god for all who don’t fit? Absolutely.