Our Androgynes, Ourselves: Trans Allegory in Coleridge’s Aids to Reflection in the Formation of a Manly Character

Abstract: What about sex is chosen, and why are trans people made to pose the question? This article reads Coleridgean androgyny as an instance of “trans allegory”: the use of trans figures to exemplify how sex and gender work. It demonstrates the centrality of the will to Coleridge’s ethics of sexual differentiation and to figurations of the historical trans categories—androgyne, transvestite, transsexual—that literary critics have used to interpret androgyny ever since. Considering trans people have long served as intertexts for studying androgyny, cis Romanticists can hardly shy away from transness now that we are joining the conversation.