Demigender

That is what separates this group of terms from its neighbours. Juxera names a complete gender that sits close to female without being it; a demigirl is partly a girl. A neighbour and a fraction are different claims, and the vocabulary was built to keep them apart.

Where the demi- prefix came from

The coinage is unusually well documented for a word of this kind. On 12 August 2010 a user posting as Bad Patient, on the transyadas board of the Asexual Visibility and Education Network, wrote that a fondness for the word demiromantic had suggested sticking the same prefix in front of anything, and proposed demiguy, demidude and demibloke for a masculine element too strong to sit under Agender. Bad Patient said in the same post that the suggestion was not entirely serious.

Uptake did not wait for seriousness. In December of that year another user on the same forum, hunting for a definition of demigirl, was told the word had been made up there. 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, run by Marilyn Roxie. Roxie's genderqueer survey that autumn carried both as options, and nine respondents selected demiboy against seven for demigirl.

What sits under the demigender umbrella

Demiboy and demigirl are the two members with real circulation, and the pattern generalises freely from there. Deminonbinary, also written demienby, is a partial connection to being Non-binary. Demifluid describes a gender in which one part is fixed while another moves between genders, and demiflux keeps a fixed part while the other varies in intensity rather than in kind. Demiandrogyne applies the same move to androgyny. Demigender is used on its own as well, by people who report a connection to the idea of gender rather than to any particular gender.

The Nonbinary Wiki records a disagreement about where the umbrella sits. One reading files demigender under bigender, on the ground that two genders are in play. The other holds that a bigender person combines two distinct genders while a demigender person may hold only part of one, which is a different arrangement. Both readings are in current use.

How demigender got into a statute

In 2018 Washington state began issuing X gender markers, and the statute defines X as a gender that is not exclusively male or female, listing demigender by name alongside agender, bigender, genderfluid, neutrois and a dozen others. A word coined on an asexuality forum eight years earlier, printed in a state law, is a rare outcome for this vocabulary.

The dictionary record is thinner but real. Wiktionary marks demigender a rare adjective and carries three printed citations: Stephanie Brill's The Transgender Teen in 2016, Michael Beattie's Counselling Skills for Working with Gender Diversity and Identity in 2018, and Genny Beemyn's Trans People in Higher Education in 2019.

What the surveys record

The Gender Census put demigender at 5.9 per cent of gender-diverse respondents in 2022, and the Nonbinary Wiki gives 6.45 per cent when every demi- identity is aggregated. Both are shares of people who sought out a gender survey and answered it, not shares of any population. The Trevor Project's brief on gender diversity among LGBTQ young people found demigender terms in free-text answers rather than as checkboxes, which is where a word of this size usually sits.