Boi
Masculine, but not a man. Boyish on purpose, and not planning to grow out of it.
- One of twenty-eight Non-Binary identities
- No settled flag
- 16 min read
What it is
Boi is masculinity without the manhood. Not a woman. Not really a man either — and the man part is usually the bit that does not fit. Boyish on purpose, and not waiting to grow out of it.
The word has been in use for decades and carries several meanings at once. In lesbian and butch communities it often means a young or youthful masculine person. In leather and kink, boy or boi is a role rather than a gender. This page is mostly about the gender, but you will meet all of them.
Where it comes from matters. The spelling grew out of Black American English and hip-hop, and Black lesbian and queer communities did most of the work of carrying it into queer use. Some Black queer people ask that everyone else use it knowing that. Others have no objection at all. There is no single ruling, and you will meet both views.
Keep reading
There is no agreed definition, and this is not a term that will give you a clean dictionary line. Two people who both call themselves bois can mean noticeably different things and both be using the word correctly.
Most bois were assigned female at birth. Not all. Some are trans men, some are lesbians, some are neither, and some are all three depending on who is asking and how safe the room is.
Pronouns
He/him is common. They/them is common. She/her is more common than outsiders expect, especially among bois in lesbian community, and it is not a contradiction — plenty of people are a boi who is a she.
Mixed sets do a lot of work here: he/they, they/she, or a set that changes by room. Using different pronouns at home, at work and in queer spaces is logistics, not dishonesty.
Boi also works as a term of address in its own right. Being called boi by someone who means it often lands harder than any pronoun, because it skips the argument entirely.
Does this sound like you?
Take the test
Twenty questions, about four minutes, nothing leaves your phone. It suggests. You decide.
An ordinary day
Morning. The same four things, because they work: the shirt that sits away from the chest, the trousers that do not cling, shoes that say nothing. Getting dressed takes two minutes or forty. There is rarely an in-between.
Coffee on the way. "What can I get you, young man." Then you speak, and something shifts, and you can watch the recalculation happen on their face. You stopped correcting it years ago. Some days you do not speak until after you have ordered.
At work you are the youngest person in the room, or you are read that way, and by now you cannot always tell which. Someone explains a thing you already know. Someone asks if you are the intern. You are thirty-six.
Evening, and someone in the group chat types "ok boi" with no ceremony at all. It goes straight past the entire argument about what you are and just calls you what you are. That small thing does more work than most conversations.
The rest is ordinary. Barber's chair and the two seconds of deciding what to say about the cut. Which toilet. Whether the changing room is worth it today. None of it dramatic, all of it constant, and mostly you are just tired rather than sad.
What people get wrong
How it actually plays out
Love
You get read as the boy in the room, and depending on who is looking that is either the best thing about you or a problem to be solved. Both happen. Sometimes with the same person, six months apart.
There is a strong pull towards partners who know what to do with a boi — butches, femmes, daddies, other bois. The good ones use the word easily and then treat you as a full adult everywhere outside of bed. That combination is the thing to hold out for.
The bad version is being mothered. Being managed. Having your money, your cooking and your admin handled by someone who thinks boyish means incapable, and slowly noticing you have no say in your own house. It creeps in gently and it is hard to name.
The other common failure: partners who want a man. Not cruelly — they just keep waiting for the grown-up version to arrive, and the waiting is its own kind of pressure. It usually surfaces as small comments about how you dress.
Not everyone is partnered, and boi does not require an audience. But it is a word that likes being said out loud by someone else, and it is worth admitting that if you are lonely about it.
Desire
Two things share this word and it causes endless confusion, so: boi as a gender, and boy as a role in kink, are not the same. Some people have both. Many have only one. If yours is only in bed, that is a role, and it is a good one, and it does not have to be your gender.
For a lot of bois, sex is where the gender gets confirmed rather than negotiated. Being handled. Being wanted as a boy specifically, not as a woman being tolerated in a haircut. "Good boy" said in the right voice doing more than any conversation about pronouns ever did.
There is a real pull towards service and eagerness in boi culture — wanting to be someone's, wanting to be told, wanting to be good at it. But do not accept the stereotype whole. Bois top. Bois are demanding. Bois run the room while still being called boi, and the word does not stop applying because you are the one giving instructions.
Practical, unglamorous parts: the words you can stand for your own body and the ones that end the evening. Shirt stays on, or binder stays on, or lights off, or none of that. Strap or packer or hands only. Being touched here but not there, and the awkward business of saying so before rather than after.
And some bois are not interested in sex at all, or rarely, and are no less bois for it.
The body
Some bois do nothing medical at all. They cut their hair, wear what works, and get on with it. That is a whole and finished version of this. Nothing below is a requirement.
For those who do want changes, the boi pattern is often specific and a bit awkward to explain to a doctor. You want the flat chest. You want the shoulders. You are much less sure about the beard, the hairline, the deepening voice that eventually sounds like somebody's father. Some bois take testosterone and love it. Some take a low dose deliberately, to get partway and stop. Some start, get the changes they wanted, and come off. Some want none of it.
Binding is the usual daily reality: the good binder, the one that has gone soft, the hours you are supposed to keep to and often do not. Sports bras, two of them, on the days the binder is too much. Top surgery sits on a lot of lists for years before it happens, and money is usually the reason, not doubt.
Then there is the part nobody writes down. Boyishness is partly a look, and looks age. The soft jaw and the slight frame that read as boy at twenty-two read as something else at forty-five, and testosterone will not give you back a boy's body — it gives you a man's. Some bois find that a genuine loss and grieve it quietly while still wanting the changes. If you have felt that and assumed it meant you were confused: it does not. It means you wanted a specific thing and the available options are approximate.
And plenty of bois have bodies that do not match any of this. Fat bois, disabled bois, bois who cannot bind because of pain or lungs or ribs, bois who cannot access hormones where they live or cannot afford them. None of that makes the word fit less.
Work
The cost of boyishness at work is being taken for junior. You get explained to. You get asked to take the notes. Clients address the person next to you. None of it is loud enough to raise, and all of it adds up.
Clothes are the daily negotiation. Menswear that fits a smaller frame is either expensive or from the boys' section, and the boys' section does not help with being read as an adult. The interview suit is its own event, and most bois have one story about it.
Some people solve this with what amounts to professional drag: a harder, older, more corporate masculinity worn from nine to five and dropped at the door. It works. It is also tiring, and you should know it is a cost rather than a personal failing.
There are workplaces and countries where none of this is negotiable, where being read as a masculine woman is survivable and being read as trans is not. Working out where that line sits, and staying on the safe side of it, is not hiding. It is a calculation people make every day.
Family
Families often accepted the masculine child and then panicked at the masculine adult. Tomboy was fine, even charming, because everyone assumed there was an expiry date on it. The trouble starts when the date passes and nothing changes.
The phrase you will hear most is some version of grow up. When are you going to settle down. When are you going to dress properly. It is aimed at the boyishness specifically, and it stings because it is half accurate — you are not planning to grow out of it, and they can tell.
Some families have no word for any of this, in any language they speak, and are not being hostile so much as genuinely lost. Some are hostile. Some are quietly fine and just carry on using your childhood nickname, which is either the kindest thing available or unbearable, depending on the nickname.
Siblings are frequently the good news. Younger ones especially tend to adjust in about a week and then find the whole thing boring, which is the correct amount of attention.
If you are in a household or a country where being read as trans or queer is dangerous, none of the above is advice. Staying legible at home is not a failure of nerve. It is how people stay housed and alive.
Coming out
The main problem with coming out as a boi is that the word does not travel. It works in queer rooms and lands as gibberish almost everywhere else. Explaining it to your mother means either a twenty-minute lecture or a different word entirely.
So most people use a translation layer. Non-binary or trans for family, forms and doctors. Boi for the people who already know what it means. That is not cowardice or dishonesty, it is knowing your audience, the same way you use different words at work than in bed.
There are two separate coming-outs here and people often forget the second one. Coming out to straight family is one problem. Coming out inside lesbian or women's community — where moving masc can be read as leaving — is a completely different one, sometimes harder, sometimes with more grief attached.
Plenty of bois never announce anything. They just start dressing how they dress, let people call them what they call them, and the word arrives by itself. That counts. There is no version of this that requires a speech.
And if you are somewhere it is not safe — living with family who would throw you out, in a country where any of this is criminalised, in a job you cannot lose — not coming out is a reasonable decision made by a reasonable person. Knowing the word about yourself is not the same as owing it to anyone.
Nearby identities
The distinction is the useful part. Names without a link don’t have a page yet.
Older, heavier, rooted in lesbian tradition, and carries authority and a duty of care. Boi is lighter and less in charge. Many butches were bois first, and some butches find boi a bit soft.
Compare Boi and Butch →Man, not boy. If being read as an adult man is the goal rather than the problem, that is the word. Some people move from boi to trans man; plenty never do.
Compare Boi and Transgender Male →A broad umbrella covering anyone moving masc from a female assignment. Boi is one specific shape inside it, not a synonym.
Compare Boi and Transmasculine →Your boyness rises and falls in intensity over time. Boi is usually steady — it is not that you feel more or less of a boy this week.
Compare Boi and Boyflux →Partly a boy and partly something else, at the same time. Boi is fully boy-shaped, just not man-shaped.
Compare Boi and Demiboy →A masculine identity from Black lesbian community with its own history and rules. Not a synonym for boi, and not a word non-Black people should take up.
Generally a girl or woman who is masculine, with womanhood intact underneath. If womanhood is intact underneath for you, that is the closer fit.
Compare Boi and Tomboy →A kink role in a power dynamic, marked by service and by having a Sir or Daddy. Some bois are both; the two are not the same thing.
It might not be you if…
- Man fits you fine and you just find it embarrassing to say out loud yet. That is a confidence problem, not a gender one, and trans man may be your word.
- You want to be seen as a woman who is masculine. Butch, stud, masc, tomboy and dyke are all doing that job better than boi will.
- Your masculinity is about authority — being the steady one, the one who handles it, the one people defer to. That is a butch or a man's shape more than a boi's.
- It only shows up in bed, or with one particular partner, or in a scene. That is a role. Roles are good. This is a gender page.
- You feel between things, or neutral, or absent. Boi is not the middle of anything. Look at agender, neutrois or genderqueer instead.
- You like the aesthetic on other people and the word does nothing when it is aimed at you. Wanting to look like that is not the same as being it.
- You are drawn to it mainly because it sounds better online than the words you actually live with. That usually wears off in about a year, and the words underneath will still be waiting.
On the hard days
The infantilising has no off switch. Being talked over, carded at forty, asked if your parents know where you are. You chose boyishness; you did not choose to be treated as incompetent, and other people cannot tell those apart.
Then there is the phase accusation, which arrives from every direction. Straight people think you are a confused woman. Some trans men think you are stalling. Some lesbians think you defected. Each of them is certain they are the reasonable one.
Ageing is the part people do not warn you about. The particular body that made boi legible does not stay, and testosterone offers you a man's body rather than a boy's. Wanting the changes and grieving what they cost at the same time is normal and lonely.
There is also fetishisation, which is exhausting in a way that looks like flattery from the outside. Being someone's phase, someone's experiment, someone's soft boi fantasy that evaporates when you have opinions or a bad week.
And some days the word does not help at all. You are just tired, and misgendered again, and nothing in this page fixes it. Nothing has to. Nothing about you stopped being accurate because today was bad. Sleep, and it will still be there tomorrow, and so will you.
Questions people ask
Is boi just a phase before becoming a trans man?
For some people, yes. They used boi for a few years, then man fitted better, and nothing about the earlier part was fake or wasted. For plenty of others, boi is where they stop and stay. The test is not how long you have used it. It is this: imagine a stranger calling you a man in twenty years' time. If that sounds correct, man may be your word. If it sounds heavy, or like a costume, or like being handed a responsibility you did not ask for, boi may be doing the actual work. Both outcomes are common. Neither one makes the other retroactively wrong.
What is the difference between a boi and a butch?
Weight and adulthood, mostly. Butch is an old and specific lesbian tradition with its own lineage, and it carries authority, steadiness and often a duty of care towards others. Boi is lighter and younger-coded, less about being the one in charge, more about mischief and play. A lot of butches were bois first. Some butches find boi a bit soft or dismissive of what butch cost them historically. Some bois find butch too heavy a thing to carry. There is also a scope difference: butch is generally held within lesbian community, while boi travels wider, including to people who are not lesbians at all.
Can I use boi if I am not Black?
The honest answer has more than one part. The spelling comes out of Black American English and hip-hop, and Black lesbian and queer communities did most of the work of turning it into a queer word. Non-Black people have also used it for decades, and many Black queer people have no objection. Others do object, and they are not being unreasonable. Practically: know where it came from, do not perform an accent or an aesthetic that is not yours, and if a Black queer person tells you it sits badly coming from you, do not argue the point. Note also that stud is a different word with a different status — that one belongs to Black masculine lesbian community and is not open in the same way.
Am I too old to be a boi?
No. There are bois in their fifties and sixties who have used the word longer than some readers of this page have been alive. Boi describes a kind of masculinity, not a birthday. What is true is that the world makes older bois less legible — the boyishness that read as charming at twenty-two reads as unserious to people who only recognise two adult options. That is a problem with the two options. If the word still describes how your masculinity actually works, age has not taken it off you.
Read next
You have probably read a list like this before. This one includes the parts that usually get left out: the forms, the money, the people…
Guide · 14 min readComing Out as Transgender or Non-Binary: A Complete GuideMost guides to coming out are about the sentence. This one is about everything around it: whether to say it at all, who gets it first…
This is not a clinical instrument, not a diagnosis, and not evidence of anything about anyone. It describes experiences so you can recognise your own — or rule them out.