Demiboy

Demiguy, demiman, demimale and demidude are the same identity under other names, and people pick between them on how the word sounds, since nothing separates them in meaning. The counterpart is demigirl, which appears in the same sources under the further names demifemale and demiwoman, and the pair descends from a single forum post. Both sit inside Demigender, the general term for a partial connection to one gender alongside another gender or none.

Where demiboy was first written down

The record begins with a suggestion its author called half serious. In 2010 a user of the Asexual Visibility and Education Network posting as Bad Patient wrote that any word could be made to fit by putting demi- in front of it, and that having too much of a masculine element to call themselves Agender and feel good about it, they might be a demiguy, or a demidude, or a demibloke. INTO, which quotes the post, records that Bad Patient later said the suggestion had not been meant seriously, and that the word travelled regardless.

Two things follow from that post beyond the date. The first is that the coinage was reached by subtraction: the writer already had a word, agender, and wanted a weaker version of a different one. The second is that the list in the post is a list of synonyms, three at once, which is why the term arrived in circulation with four interchangeable forms and never settled on one.

Circulation followed quickly. By 2011 demiboy and demigirl had both been added to the Genderqueer Identities and Terminology page of the blog Genderqueerid, which is the first time either appears on a list somebody else maintained. INTO dates the settling of the definition now in use to Tumblr in 2014, four years after the forum post and one platform along.

Why the printed record for demiboy starts late

Wiktionary's citation file opens in 2015, five years after the forum post, with a piece by Kerri McNair in InfUSion, a University of Georgia publication, describing somebody who identifies as a genderqueer demiboy and uses ze and hir. Two further citations follow in 2017. One is from the anthology Come As Yourself, where the word appears in dialogue, a member of the family being introduced as a demiboy. The other is from L. Rowyn's novel The Sun Etherium, and it is the most useful of the three, because the character doing the describing draws a line: a demiboy blends neuter with male, as against a femboy, which the passage defines as a masculine shape with some feminine elements. A novel making that distinction in passing is evidence that the distinction was legible to readers by 2017.

INTO's roundup of demiboy characters and figures adds the later end of the same trail: Felix, the title character of Kacen Callender's young-adult novel Felix Ever After, Charley Condomine in the web series School Spirit, and Syle in the dating simulation The Office Type.

The person described is a genderqueer demiboy, with the newer word doing work inside a longer self-description, and the same stacking shows up across the popular coverage, where demiboy sits beside non-binary, Genderqueer or transgender.

No academic literature covers the word under this name, and Wiktionary is the only lexicon of record. That is a statement about what has been written down rather than about how many people use the word.

The counting sits elsewhere. The Gender Census carries demiboy as one of the identity words its respondents pick from, and its 2022 round drew 39,765 usable responses from a community-run, self-selected sample, which is the whole of what any share it reports is a share of. It also publishes what putting a word on the checkbox list does to it: the rise for demiboy was a factor of 6.4, against a mean of 10.1 across the words added that way.

How demiboy differs from a trans man

Queerty puts the difference in terms of completeness. A trans man's gender identity is male and stands in conflict with the sex he was assigned at birth; a demiboy holds part of a masculine identity, whichever assignment he started from. The two are not exclusive, and the Trans Youth Equality Foundation's terminology page, which Queerty cites, notes that transgender people may identify inside the binary, across it or outside it, so a person can be both Transgender and a demiboy. Queerty adds that gender dysphoria is not a prerequisite for being transgender, and demiboys, non-binary and genderqueer people may experience it as well.

The other side of the comparison is the part of the gender that is not male, and the sources decline to fix it. INTO describes demiboys as aligned with agender and with masculine genders without identifying equally with both; GenderGP puts the same point as a variable, saying the other part may be any gender, no gender, or a fluid one. Neither source names the remainder, and neither treats leaving it unnamed as a gap in the definition.

INTO gives the two cases that mark the range. One demiboy may be non-binary with a masculine presentation and expression. Another may have been assigned male at birth, feel no strong attachment to that assignment, and have no wish to move away from it entirely. The label covers both, which is what makes it useless as a prediction about anybody's presentation. Queerty says as much about clothes: some demiboys dress from the men's department, some dress androgynously, some mix the two, and none of it follows from the word.

Genderfluid is a different comparison again. A genderfluid gender changes, connecting with one gender and later another; a demiboy gender is stably partial, and the part that is not male does not have to move at all.

What demiboy looks like in other languages

Wiktionary's translation table is the closest thing the term has to a record of its spread, and it shows two different strategies. Some languages take the English word whole; others translate the parts, which is possible because demi- is a Latin-derived prefix several of them already own.

French is the informative row. It carries the English loan and three compounds of its own, which is what a term looks like partway through being naturalised rather than at either end of the process.

What the demiboy flag encodes

There is no official flag. The version in general use was made by the Tumblr user Transrants in 2015, and Queerty describes it as horizontal stripes in dark grey, light grey, light blue and white, which INTO counts as three colours across seven stripes. Transrants published no colour meanings. The readings in circulation come from the people flying it, and the two accounts agree: blue for masculinity, grey for the partial connection, white for agender and non-binary identities.

Pronouns follow no rule either. Queerty lists he and him, they and them, both used interchangeably by some people, and the neopronoun sets xe and xem, ze and zir, and ey and em. The 2015 citation from InfUSion is an early instance of exactly that: a demiboy using ze and hir, a decade before the article was written.