Beyond Gender

6th July 1972, Britain. Countless families sat gathered round their television sets, watching the BBC’s Top of the Pops.

Suddenly, a creature appeared on screen.

He had a shock of flame-red hair, gold paint smeared across his eyelids, and wore a skin-tight jumpsuit covered in geometric patterns that looked as though it had been stolen from some futuristic laboratory. He draped his arm around guitarist Mick Ronson’s shoulder, fixed the camera with a gaze so ambiguous it bordered on provocative, and sang that song: Starman.

That was David Bowie. Or more precisely, that was his phantom: Ziggy Stardust.

In that moment, parents across Britain felt a certain unease, a sense of threat. But those children watching, the ones who felt stifled, who didn’t quite fit in, felt under the gaze of those mismatched eyes, an unprecedented freedom.

People cried out: “Is he a man or a woman?” “Is he an alien?” This panic proved precisely that Bowie had struck the most sensitive nerve in human civilisation: gender.

When we discuss Bowie today, we inevitably mention one term: “androgyny”. But half a century on, this word has been rather overused. For Bowie, it was never simply about “cross-dressing”, nor was it a publicity stunt designed to grab headlines. It was a war to reclaim “complete humanity”, an archaeological dig into the very essence of human existence.

To understand the profundity of this beauty, we cannot merely flip through fashion magazines. We must turn to philosophical fragments from over two thousand years ago.

In Plato’s Symposium, the ancient Greeks left us with a deeply romantic yet tragic hypothesis: humans were not always as we are now. Originally, people were “spherical”, with four arms, four legs, and two faces. Most crucially, they were unified in gender.

Because these spherical beings were so powerful, they even dared to challenge the gods. Zeus, in his fury, split them in two. From that moment, we became lonely semicircles. We spend our entire lives jo…