Leadership Quote by June Singer

Singer’s line refuses the tidy, bureaucratic model of identity: no negotiations, no treaty between “male” and “female,” no careful accounting of which trait belongs on which side. The verb choice does the work. “Manage” sounds like HR language, a strained attempt to keep opposites from misbehaving. “Flowing,” by contrast, is bodily and kinetic; it frames androgyny as movement rather than a solved equation.

The specific intent is to shift androgyny away from compromise. A compromise still accepts the premise that there are two fixed poles and you’re tasked with balancing them. Singer’s formulation is more radical: it treats the poles as provisional markers, useful only insofar as they describe a current. You don’t build a bridge to cross a river; you become fluent in the river.

The subtext carries a quiet rebuke to cultures that demand legible categories. If androgyny “manages” anything, it is other people’s discomfort. “Simply” is strategic here: it softens a concept that can feel socially combustible, presenting it as a natural state rather than an ideological campaign. That rhetorical move also echoes a scientific sensibility: observe the phenomenon without moral panic, describe it in terms of process.

Context matters. Singer, writing in a period when gender roles were publicly policed and privately renegotiated, aligns with a broader late-20th-century turn toward fluidity in psychology and culture. The line anticipates today’s vocabulary without adopting its labels. It argues that the most honest account of the self may be dynamic, not reconciled - less a truce between opposites than a refusal to treat them as enemies in the first place.