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.

What sits under the demigender umbrella

Demiboy and Demigirl are the two members with real circulation, and the pattern generalises freely from there. The compounds are built the same way each time, which makes the set easy to read once the rule is clear: the stem names the gender a person holds part of, and any -fluid or -flux element says what the remainder does.

Demigender is used on its own as well, by people who report a connection to the idea of gender and not to any particular gender. The Nonbinary Wiki gives a second reading for each of the two main terms, and it describes a different situation entirely: a demigirl may be someone assigned female at birth who feels the barest association with that assignment without enough dissociation from it to be uncomfortable, or someone assigned male at birth who is transfeminine without being wholly binary. Demiguy carries the mirror pair. The first reading is about how much of a gender a person holds; the second is about a weak attachment to an assignment, and the two arrive at the same word from opposite directions.

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, and added that the appeal of the words was partly that nobody else was using them.

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 and that the only description of it was on the yada wiki; the reply came from a user who identified as a demigirl and described the sense as a blend of female and agender with no male component at all. 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. Those two figures are the earliest count of anybody choosing the words, and they are small enough to date the vocabulary precisely.

How demigender spread beyond the forum

The move from an asexuality forum to a general gender vocabulary happened on Tumblr and left dates behind it. A blog called demigenders started in March 2014 as a space for people using demigirl, demiboy, demienby, demigender, Demiflux and demifluid; demigenderpalace followed that June with the same purpose. In 2015 the Tumblr user transrants posted demigirl and demiguy flag proposals that became the standard flags for both, grey for the partial part, white for the agender or non-binary part, and pink or blue for the gender being partly held. The user druxydeity built the deminonbinary flag on the same pattern in yellow. In 2021 a person posting as Bluebolt712 created Demigenders Awareness and Pride Day, set for 15 December.

Named users have followed. The romance novelist Chelsea M. Cameron identifies as a demigirl, the Irish journalist Kay Cairns as a genderqueer demiguy, the Indian activist Dan Rebello and the psychologist Sand Chang as demiboys. Kacen Callender, who is a demiboy, wrote Felix Ever After, whose lead character is one as well; the dating simulator The Office Type has a demigirl and a demiboy among its characters. Sam de Leve, who plays non-binary characters for the Geek and Sundry network, described themself as a half-boy in a Twitter biography, which is the same idea reached without the prefix.

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.

The dictionary record is thinner but real. Wiktionary marks demigender a rare, non-comparable adjective, derives it from demi- plus gender, 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. Brill's is the most substantial of the three, since it states the relation to bigender and multigender and notes that a demigender person may also be demifluid or demiflux. Wiktionary also records translations in four languages, including the Spanish pair semigénero and demigénero. LGBTQ Nation observed in 2022 that neither Merriam-Webster nor Dictionary.com carried the word at all, which remains the shape of the record: a statute and three specialist books, and no general dictionary.

How demigender differs from its neighbours

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, and Brill's book states the first while leaving room for the second.

The other contrasts are cleaner. GenderGP sets demigender against Genderfluid on the ground that a fluid gender moves while a demigender one is stably partial, even where the strength of the connection rises and falls. Against Agender the difference is that agender names little or no connection to any gender while demigender names some connection to at least one. Against a binary trans identity the difference is completeness rather than direction: a trans man's identification is whole, and the demi- prefix exists to say that a person's is not. Graygender makes a third kind of claim again, describing a weak or ambivalent relation to gender as such rather than a fraction of a named one.

How often demigender is actually chosen

The Nonbinary Wiki gives 6.45 per cent when every demi- identity is aggregated, a figure drawn from the people who took a gender survey and answered it.

The Gender Census counts demigender on its own, as an identity word on the checkbox list and separately from demiboy and demigirl. Its 2022 round drew 39,765 usable responses from people who say they do not fit solely into one of the two binary categories, so its shares describe those respondents and end there. The survey also publishes what the checkbox does to a word, and demigender is the flattest case it has: a rise by a factor of 3.6 when the word joined the list, the smallest of the twelve terms it tracks that way and roughly a third of the mean.

The Trevor Project's brief on gender diversity among LGBTQ young people shows the other way these words surface. A quarter of the young people surveyed selected genderqueer or gender nonconforming, a different identity, or several identities at once, and the free-text answers from that group included demiboy, demigirl, demiflux and demifluid alongside agender, bigender, polygender and two spirit. The demi- terms were written in, not offered.