Demiflux

What holds still when demiflux moves

The example the LGBTQIA+ Wiki gives is the clearest statement of the structure on file. A person's static part is female and is always present; a second part is boyflux, running from fully male, through partly male, which is Demiboy, down to no intensity at all, which is Agender. The female part does not move while the male part travels the whole of that range. What the flux half contributes is therefore a floor rather than a direction: the fluctuating component can fall to nothing and rise again, and the gender does not become something else while it does.

The same wiki records a second use of the word that the first does not cover. Demiflux is also used for a demigender identity that itself fluctuates, so that a person may feel demigirl most of the time with the feeling moving between demigirl and agender. In that reading there is no separate static gender at all, and the fluctuation happens inside the partial identity rather than beside it. Both senses sit on the page without either being marked as the primary one.

The therapist Toby Barron's glossary of demigender terms gives a third and looser account, describing demiflux simply as fluctuation in the intensity of a person's connection to a gender, strong on one day and weaker on another, with no static component named. That is the definition a reader is most likely to meet outside the wikis, and it is not quite what either wiki says.

How demiflux differs from demifluid

The pair are built the same way and differ in what the moving part does. Demifluid holds one part static while the other changes between genders, so the Nonbinary Wiki's example has a woman part that stays put while the other part moves between man and Genderqueer. Demiflux holds one part static while the other varies in strength.

The Nonbinary Wiki adds a gloss on the distinction that the LGBTQIA+ Wiki does not make: it reads the -flux suffix as marking one of the genders as neutral, and its worked example gives a constant genderqueer part alongside a woman part of fluctuating intensity. The two wikis are describing the same word and are not describing it identically, and neither cites the other.

Demifluix, also called demifluidflux, is the compound of the two, and the Nonbinary Wiki notes that its own entry for the term is unsourced. A person with more than one fluctuating gender may use multiflux instead, and the LGBTQIA+ Wiki records that demiflux people frequently also describe themselves as Multigender.

Why demiflux replaced an earlier name

According to the Tumblr user variant-archive, quoted on the LGBTQIA+ Wiki, the identity was previously called genderpivot, and the name was changed because the person who coined it had become the subject of community objection. The wiki says nothing about who proposed the replacement, when the changeover happened, or whether the older word kept any users.

Who coined demiflux, and exactly when, is not recorded anywhere on file. The wiki states plainly that this is unknown, and dates the word only as in use since or before 27 October 2018. For a term with a documented rename in its history, that is an unusual gap.

Where the demiflux flags come from

The flag record is older than the word's earliest recorded use, which is a sign that the dating is conservative rather than a sign that the flags came first. The main flag was made by an unknown user on or before 27 October 2018, and has no confirmed meaning. An alternate flag predates it: the DeviantArt account Pride-Flags made it at some point before 10 February 2018, not as a demiflux flag at all but as a scrap, which the DeviantArt user JDLuvaSQEE later picked out and assigned to the term.

A design made for nothing in particular was matched to a label by somebody other than its author, and became one of the two flags the wiki lists. Flags for demiflux girl and demiflux boy followed from the Tumblr user a-marinara-sauce on 30 July 2021, by which point the term had subdivisions of its own.

Where demiflux has been written down

Earlier than the flag record suggests. The Nonbinary Wiki notes a Tumblr blog called demigenders, started in March 2014, which described itself as a safe space for people identifying as demigirl, demiboy, demienby, demigender, demiflux or demifluid. The word is in that list, which puts it in circulation more than four years before the date the LGBTQIA+ Wiki can attach to it. A second blog, demigenderpalace, followed in June 2014 with a similar aim.

The family the word belongs to has a much fuller record than the word does. The Nonbinary Wiki dates the first demi- gender coinage to a post of 12 August 2010 on the transyadas forum of the Asexual Visibility and Education Network, in which the user Bad Patient, saying they were not being entirely serious, suggested demiguy, demidude and demibloke for having too much of a masculine element to call themselves agender. Demigirl and demiguy were added to the AVEN Gender Definitions Masterlist on 12 December 2010, and by 14 October 2011 both had reached the Genderqueer Identities and Terminology page of the blog Genderqueerid. Its owner, Marilyn Roxie, ran a survey of genderqueer people that autumn in which nine people ticked demiboy and seven ticked Demigirl. None of that record mentions demiflux, which arrives in the sources three years later and inherits the prefix without inheriting the paper trail.

What the demiflux figures do not measure

Two figures on file touch the word, and neither counts it. The Trevor Project's brief on gender diversity among LGBTQ young people reports that a quarter of its respondents identified outside the gender binary, selecting genderqueer or gender nonconforming, a different identity, or more than one identity at once, while 7 per cent chose transgender man or transgender woman and nothing else. Taken together, 32 per cent identified as transgender or used a label outside the man and woman categories, and 11 per cent selected multiple options. Demiflux appears in that brief in one place only: as one of four examples, alongside demiboy, demigirl and demifluid, of the demigender write-in answers people gave when the survey let them name their own gender. No count is attached to any of the four.

The Nonbinary Wiki's demigender page carries a frequency of 6.45 per cent in its infobox, and states in the same line that the figure aggregates all demi identities. The page does not say what the percentage is a share of, and the figure covers demigirl, demiboy, deminonbinary, demifluid and demiflux together, so nothing in it can be read as a count of demiflux.

Outside the wikis and the surveys, the record is a glossary line and a therapist's blog post. The Out Front Theatre Company's terms list defines demiflux in a single sentence, as a gender identity where one part is static and the others fluctuate in intensity, which is the LGBTQIA+ Wiki's definition compressed. That is the extent of the term's circulation in writing that nobody maintaining a gender wiki wrote.