Demigirl
Demigirl means being partly a woman — a real connection to womanhood that only goes so far, with the rest being some other gender or none at all.
- One of nine Demigender identities
- Verified flag
- 11 min read
What it is
Demigirl means being partly a woman. Not a woman who is bad at it, not someone pretending, not someone who has not decided yet. Partly. The rest is some other gender, or none at all.
People mean two slightly different things by the partial bit. Some mean they partly identify as a woman. Some mean they have a real connection to womanhood without being one. Both use the word, and nobody has ever agreed a percentage.
It says nothing about what you were assigned at birth, how you dress, who you sleep with, or whether a single person knows.
Pronouns
There is no correct set. She/her is the one you will hear most often, frequently kept because it is accurate for the part that is a girl. She/they is close behind, they/them alone is common, and some use it/its or neopronouns.
Pronouns are not a measurement. She/her does not make anyone less of a demigirl, and they/them does not make anyone more of one.
In languages where every verb and adjective carries a gender, there may be no neutral option to want in the first place. Working around the grammar you have is not a lesser version of this.
And if changing them would cost you a job, a family or your safety, keeping the ones you have is not a compromise on anything real.
Does this sound like you?
Take the test
Twenty questions, about four minutes, nothing leaves your phone. It suggests. You decide.
An ordinary day
Mostly, nothing happens. You get up, you go to work or class or the same four rooms, and your gender does not come up once.
Then it does, in a way far too small to mention. A group chat renamed "the girls". A form with two boxes, and you tick the one you always tick.
It does not hurt, exactly. It is more like a shoe that rubs at the heel. You notice, you shift your weight, you carry on, and by six o'clock you have forgotten which shoe it was.
Then the doubt, usually after a quiet week: I have made this up out of nothing. Then someone says "as a woman, you know how it is", it snags, and you have your answer for another month.
What people get wrong
How it actually plays out
Love
For most people this is not where it hurts. If you have a relationship, it probably works. What this does is put a small lag on certain words.
"Girlfriend" is close. "Wife" arrives carrying more than you signed for. Someone introduces you as their partner and the relief is out of all proportion to the sentence.
Some partners quietly need you to be a woman so their own word holds. A man who calls himself straight. A lesbian who fought for years to say it. That is theirs to work out, but you feel it land first.
Queer spaces can be the same shape. Welcome, included, invited to everything, and still slightly a guest. Wanting to be in the room without being counted in the total is not ingratitude.
You may never tell a partner. You may tell exactly one person and no one else, ever. Neither makes what you have with them a lie.
Desire
Being wanted as a woman can feel good and slightly off at once. Like being applauded for a part you are understudying.
Some people want the girl in them seen precisely, in bed and nowhere else in their life. Some want desire with the gender taken out of it: hands, attention, no nouns.
"Good girl" can land hot on a Tuesday and hollow on a Thursday, from the same person, with nothing else changed. That is worth saying out loud rather than waiting for them to guess.
There is a particular relief in someone who does not need to name what you are before they touch you.
If you feel little or no desire, that says nothing either way about this word. Plenty of demigirls are asexual. The two facts sit next to each other and never have to speak.
The body
You do not need to be uncomfortable in your body for this word to fit. Plenty of demigirls are fine in theirs and always have been.
Where there is discomfort, it tends to be partial in the same way the rest of it is. Mostly fine, occasionally wrong.
A chest that is right under a jumper and wrong in a mirror. A voice that is yours until you hear it recorded.
That is a hard thing to report. Clinics and insurers want a clean story: wrong body, clear fix, straight line. Yours goes sideways and stops halfway — assuming any of that exists where you live.
Wanting one thing and not the rest is a real want. A lower dose. Hair and not surgery. Surgery and not hormones. Nothing at all, permanently.
Some demigirls medically transition, some do one piece of it, many do none. None of that is the test. Being partly a woman is not something your body has to prove on your behalf.
Work
If you are read as a woman at work, you will be treated as one whether or not you are one. The interruptions, the note-taking, the advice about your tone, the assumption that you will book the room.
If you are read as a man, the same job hands you a different set of small wrong things, and no word for those either.
Then the snags. "Ladies and gentlemen." The women's network invite. The HR dropdown with two options. If your work runs to no HR at all, it will still have a uniform, a rota and a name badge.
You may decide never to say anything at work, for a whole career. That is a normal decision, not a failure of nerve. A contract, a visa, a rota, a reference: these are real things and you are allowed to protect them.
If you do say something, keep it short. "I'm not entirely a woman; nothing else needs to change." Most colleagues file that and move on faster than you expect. The ones who do not were going to be a problem about something.
Family
Families hear "not entirely a woman" as "not my daughter". That translation takes about a second, and it is usually about them rather than you.
The words are where it sticks. Daughter, sister, auntie, mum; or son, brother, uncle, depending on where you started. Those are roles, and you can be perfectly happy in them while the gender underneath is only partly true.
Expect relief if you say your pronouns are staying. It is a real kindness that they take it well, and it can still sting, because the part they kept is the part that cost them nothing.
Older relatives surprise you in both directions. The one you dreaded shrugs. The one you counted on goes quiet for a year.
Some houses are not safe for this. Not awkward, not disappointing. Unsafe. Staying silent there is a decision about who gets access to you, and it is yours to make for as long as you need to make it.
Coming out
There is no single moment. There is a long line of small ones, and you will skip most of them.
The problem with a fraction is that it invites arithmetic. People want to know how much, whether it changes, what they should call you now. You can refuse the maths. "Mostly, not completely" is a whole answer.
A script that works: "I'm a woman up to a point, and that's the whole of it." If your pronouns are staying the same, say so in the same breath — it is the question people ask next.
Short things get repeated correctly. Long things get repeated wrong.
Pick people for what they will do with it, not for how much they love you. Some people love you loudly and cannot hold a thing for a week.
Expect to say it more than once. People file "not entirely" under "not really" and revert inside a month. That is tiring, not a verdict.
And you can never come out at all. Not to family, not at work, not to one single person. That does not put the word on hold, and it does not expire.
Nearby identities
The distinction is the useful part.
The same shape with a different anchor: partly a man, rest something else. Some people are both at once, part girl and part boy, with a gap in the middle.
Compare Demigirl and Demiboy →The girl part rises and falls, sometimes to nothing, sometimes to full, where demigirl sits still at partial. In practice people draw that line differently and some use both words.
Compare Demigirl and Girlflux →You move between genders over time. Demigirl is stable and incomplete rather than complete and shifting.
Compare Demigirl and Genderfluid →No gender at all. If you look inside and find nothing rather than a bit of a girl, this is the page you actually want.
Compare Demigirl and Agender →A neutral gender rather than an absent one, though the definitions overlap with agender and some people use the two interchangeably.
Compare Demigirl and Neutrois →The umbrella most people file demigirl under. Not everyone does — some demigirls call themselves women and nothing else — and that disagreement is real rather than a misunderstanding.
Compare Demigirl and Non-Binary →It might not be you if…
- "Woman" fits you completely and what chafes is the treatment: the expectations, the interruptions, the dress code, being told to smile. Being a woman who is furious about the rules is still being a woman.
- There is no girl in it at all. If the honest answer underneath everything is "nothing there" or "neutral", the word you want is probably agender or neutrois.
- It moves, and the moving is the main event. Some weeks a man, some weeks a woman, some weeks neither: read genderfluid or bigender first.
- The only reason "woman" feels wrong is that you think you are failing at it. Not feminine enough, not pretty enough, too loud, too big, too flat. That is a feeling about your worth and it deserves attention somewhere else.
On the hard days
The worst version is the sandwich. Not trans enough for one room, not woman enough for the other, and everybody is perfectly polite about it.
There is a specific cruelty in being told you are diluting something. Partial gets read as tourism, as keeping the easy option in reserve. There is no easy option in here.
Almost nothing recognises a fraction. Not forms, not law, not the doctor's dropdown, not the toilets. You will round yourself to the nearest available box. Most days that is fine; some days you get home and cannot speak for an hour.
Then the 2am version, where the whole thing feels assembled out of things you read online. The word itself is recent. That says nothing about how long people have felt this.
Doubt is not evidence. It is what it feels like to hold something that has no paperwork.
If you are somewhere none of this can be said aloud, you are not less this for keeping it quiet. It has already survived years of silence.
Questions people ask
Am I a demigirl, or just a woman who hates the rules?
Try this. If every expectation attached to women vanished overnight — no dress code, no assumptions, no smiling on request — would "woman" then fit you completely?
If yes, the word you want is probably woman, which is a large and ordinary thing to be.
If it would still cover only most of you, the leftover is what this page is about. The test is not how much you like womanhood; it is how much of you it reaches.
Can I be a demigirl and still use she/her?
Yes, and many do. Pronouns are what you want said out loud, not a measurement of anything.
Some keep she/her because it is accurate for the part that is a girl. Some keep it because changing it would start a conversation they cannot afford at work or at home. Neither waters the word down.
Can you be a demigirl if you were assigned male at birth?
Yes. This is about how much womanhood is yours, not where you started from.
There are AMAB demigirls who found the word before any transition, during one, and without ever wanting one. You do not owe anybody a more binary story to earn it.
Am I trans enough to call myself this?
There is no threshold and nobody is keeping the register. You do not need dysphoria, a diagnosis, a new name, a haircut, or a single person who knows.
Trans, in the wide sense, means the gender you were handed is not the one you have, and "partly" is still not. Some demigirls use the word trans for themselves and some do not; both are common.
Use whatever helps you think clearly, and put it down if it stops helping.
Read next
Three families of words that get mixed up constantly, because from the outside they look like the same thing: people who are not simply…
Guide · 14 min readAgender Identity: What It Means to Live Without GenderAsk most people what gender they feel like and something comes back. Ask an agender person and the line stays open.
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.