Overview
What boi means.
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.
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.
A gender expression or identity associated with youthful masculinity, often within queer communities.
Boi in one line
Origin
Where the word comes from
"Boi" as a queer identity term grew out of Black American vernacular and butch/femme lesbian and gay male communities, where the deliberately altered spelling of "boy" marked it as a distinct, self-chosen label rather than simply youth slang. Its use spread through queer communities of colour and ball culture before being taken up more widely.
By the 1990s and 2000s, "boi" had become an identity term in its own right within lesbian, queer, and trans-masculine spaces — often describing someone assigned female at birth with a masculine, boyish gender expression that isn't necessarily "butch" or binary trans-male. No single coiner or date is documented; it developed through community usage across overlapping subcultures rather than one identifiable origin point.
- Where
- Black American vernacular and butch/femme, queer POC, and ball culture communities
Signs people describe
Common experiences
None of these is a test. Most people recognise a few and shrug at the rest.
Sir makes you flinch.
Dude, mate, bro, boi all land correctly and you never had to think about why.
Being called a woman is wrong.
Being called a man is also wrong, but wrong in a heavier way, like being handed something you did not agree to carry.
Your wardrobe is boyish rather than businessman: hoodie, cap, trainers, oversized shirt, boxers. Proper adult men's clothing reads as fancy dress on you.
You are thirty-four and get taken for a teenager, and mostly you do not mind, which is itself the tell.
You want the flat chest and the shoulders.
You are much less sure about the beard, the hairline and the voice that eventually sounds like a father.
Masculinity for you is play and mischief, not authority.
Being the most senior person in a room feels faintly like a trick you are getting away with.
Being someone's boi does something for you that no pronoun conversation has managed.
You admire butches.
You do not feel like one. Butch feels too solid, too grown, too much responsibility for other people.
Somebody in a queer space called you boi before you had any theory about it, and something in your chest went quiet.
You have privately worried that you are just refusing to grow up, and then noticed the version of grown up on offer was never yours anyway.
Day to day
What it looks like on a normal Tuesday
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.
Across the parts of a life
Open the area you came here for.
Straight answers
What people get wrong
Boi is a stop on the way to becoming a man.
Sometimes it is, and those people lost nothing by using it. For plenty of others it is the destination, held for thirty years. Both are real. Neither makes the other a phase.
Boi just means young.
There are bois in their fifties and sixties. Boyishness here is a kind of masculinity, not an age bracket, and the people who have used the word longest tend to be the oldest ones.
It is a lesbian word, so trans and non-binary people are borrowing it.
It has run through lesbian, trans and non-binary communities in parallel for decades. Plenty of bois sit in more than one of those at once.
It is just a trendy internet spelling of boy.
The spelling comes out of Black American English and hip-hop, and it has been in queer use far longer than most of the platforms it gets blamed on.
You cannot be a boi and use she/her.
A great many bois do, particularly in lesbian community. Pronouns and gender do not have to make a tidy sentence together.
Boi is just a kink thing.
Boy as a kink role is a genuine and separate thing, and some people have both. But most bois are describing how their gender works when nobody is playing at anything.
Non-binary means androgynous, so bois are half-and-half.
Boi is not in the middle. It is fully masculine and specifically not a man. Those are different statements.
Take care
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.
Pronouns
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.
Consider another path
This might not be your word if…
- 1Man 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.
- 2You 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.
- 3Your 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.
- 4It 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.
- 5You feel between things, or neutral, or absent. Boi is not the middle of anything. Look at agender, neutrois or genderqueer instead.
- 6You 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.
- 7You 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.
Close by
Related identities
Butch
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.
ReadTrans man
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.
Transmasculine
A broad umbrella covering anyone moving masc from a female assignment. Boi is one specific shape inside it, not a synonym.
Read
Boyflux
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.
Read
Demiboy
Partly a boy and partly something else, at the same time. Boi is fully boy-shaped, just not man-shaped.
ReadStud
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.
Tomboy
Generally a girl or woman who is masculine, with womanhood intact underneath. If womanhood is intact underneath for you, that is the closer fit.
ReadLeather boy
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.
Genderqueer
A wider word for being off the map entirely. Boi is one specific way of being off it, with a definite direction.
ReadQuestions people ask
Frequently asked questions
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.
The flag
Designer (BoiQirl via ask-pride-color-schemes) and date (2017-02-19) on record, but the flag is a PNG and the archived post gives colours in words only; no hex values.
Sources
- Boi (slang) - Wikipedia Overview of boi as identity term across butch/femme and gay male communities; fetched 2026-09-06
- Boi definition: How the once queer term is going mainstream - Slate History of boi as a queer identity term, especially among people of colour; fetched 2026-09-06
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