The acknowledgment that sexuality was constituted differently in the ancient world than in our own (and differently, indeed, between Greece and Rome) has helped in the struggle to de-essentialize contemporary models of sexual behavior and expose the arbitrariness of the labels ‘normal’ and ‘deviant’ or ‘perverse.’ And yet the way ancient sexualities tend to be constructed around some version of the opposition penetrator/ penetrated shows that, despite this acknowledgment, there is still a tendency to essentialize the models of the ancient world. This essay aims to complicate the picture by arguing for a ‘queer’ reading of the Metamorphoses and the myth of Hermaphroditus and Salmacis, in particular. It will contend that Ovid’s myth provides an etiological narrative of complex sexual identity that originates in but transcends antiquity to provide a critique of what Judith Butler (2004, 65) has called the “idealized gender dimorphism” of the present day. This narrative speaks especially to the multiple, often overlapping identities assumed by the person who identifies as queer or as intersexual. The essay has a two- pronged trajectory: examining both how the later developments of feminist and queer theory informed by psychoanalysis have employed Ovidian myth within their own master narratives as they seek to understand the human subject; and using this body of theory as an interpretative lens for the myth itself, offering a reading that engages transformation as the vehicle of meaning for gender identity.