Androphilia and gynephilia
sexual, romantic, queer- & platonic, sensual and another attraction to women/femininity or men/masculinity
In behavioral science, androphilia and gynephilia are sexual orientations: Androphilia is sexual attraction to men or masculinity; gynephilia is sexual attraction to women or femininity. Ambiphilia describes the combination of both androphilia and gynephilia in a given individual, or bisexuality. The terms offer an alternative to a gender binary homosexual and heterosexual conceptualization of sexuality.
The terms are used for identifying a person's objects of attraction without attributing a sex assignment or gender identity to the person. They may be used when describing intersex, transgender, and non-binary people.
Historical use
Androphilia
Magnus Hirschfeld, an early-20th century German sexologist and physician, divided homosexual men into four groups: paedophiles, who are most attracted to prepubescent youth, ephebophiles, who are most attracted to youths from puberty up to the early twenties; androphiles, who are most attracted to persons between the early twenties and fifty; and gerontophiles, who are most attracted to older men, up to senile old age. According to Karen Franklin, Hirschfeld considered ephebophilia "common and nonpathological, with ephebophiles and androphiles each making up about 45% of the homosexual population."
The terms androsexuality and androsexual are occasionally used as synonyms for this orientation.
Alternate uses in biology and medicine
In biology, androphilic is sometimes used as a synonym for anthropophilic, describing parasites who have a host preference for humans versus non-human animals.
Androphilic is also sometimes used to describe certain proteins and androgen receptors.
Gynephilia
A version of the term appeared in Ancient Greek.
“Androphilia and gynephilia” enters the record as sexual, romantic, queer- & platonic, sensual and another attraction to women/femininity or men/masculinity. Crown Archives preserves that source wording while asking what Androphilia, gynephilia and sexual can confirm, complicate or overturn.
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The citation trail is more important than the brevity of the summary: it shows where individual claims can be examined in context. The source revision retrieved here is dated Jun 29, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q7069444. None of the 0 selected statements returned an explicit reference.
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This entry incorporates text from “Androphilia and gynephilia” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.