Clinically, medicine currently describes intersex people as having disorders of sex development, a term vigorously contested.have criticized medical interventions designed to make intersex bodies more typically male or female.A closer analogy to hermaphroditism in botany is the presence of separate male and female flowers on the same individual—such plants are called monoecious.Monoecy is especially common in conifers, but occurs in only about 7% of angiosperm species.Arthropods are the phylum with the largest number of species.

This contrasts simultaneous hermaphrodites, in which an individual may possess fully functional male and female genitalia.

Hermaphrodite is used in botany to describe a flower that has both staminate (male, pollen-producing) and carpellate (female, ovule-producing) parts.