Overview
What demigirl means.
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.
A partial but not complete connection to womanhood or femininity. The other part may be any other gender or agender.
Demigirl in one line
Origin
Where the word comes from
Demigirl surfaced alongside demiboy and demigender in early-2010s online trans and nonbinary communities, most visibly on Tumblr and community-run gender wikis. No individual coiner is documented; the word appears to have developed collaboratively as people adapted the demi- prefix from demisexual to describe a partial connection to womanhood.
The widely used demigirl flag — grey, light grey, pink, white, pink, light grey, grey — is attributed to Tumblr user transrants (Salem Fontana), with the earliest known version dated to around February 2014 and wider circulation following a July 2015 upload to a DeviantArt pride-flag archive.
Signs people describe
Common experiences
None of these is a test. Most people recognise a few and shrug at the rest.
You might tick "female" on a form and feel like you rounded up.
You might have had "she" land on you by accident and felt it as small good news, without wanting it made permanent.
You might be fine with being called a woman, and not fine at all with being told that is the whole of it.
You might have read the word non-binary and thought yes, then thought no, because there is definitely a girl in here.
You might have privately worked out a percentage, and been annoyed that it will not hold still.
You might want to be included in women's things without being counted as one of them.
You might have tried on cis woman, trans woman and agender, and found each one wrong by roughly the same amount.
You might have assumed for years that womanhood was a costume everyone puts on in the morning, and been quietly shocked to learn that most people are not acting.
Day to day
What it looks like on a normal Tuesday
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.
Across the parts of a life
Open the area you came here for.
Straight answers
What people get wrong
It just means a woman who dislikes gender roles.
Roles are about what you do; this is about what you are. There are demigirls who love dresses, baking and being someone's girlfriend, and women who hate all three and are entirely women.
You have to be assigned female at birth.
No. Plenty of demigirls were assigned male. Some find the word before any transition, some during one, some without ever wanting one.
Partial means part-time, or a way of getting the label while keeping the easy life.
It is a steady state, not a schedule. And no form, no law and no changing room has a slot for it, which is not the easy life.
If you cannot state the percentage, it is not real.
The fraction is a way of speaking, not a reading off a dial. How loud it feels shifts with the room and the day. Not being able to pin it down is the ordinary experience, not a sign of being wrong.
It is a stopping point on the way to being a full woman, or on the way back to being a cis one.
For some people it turns out to be a stage. For plenty of others it is where they stay. Neither outcome is owed to anyone watching.
Take care
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.
Pronouns
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.
Consider another path
This might not be your word if…
- 1"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.
- 2There 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.
- 3It moves, and the moving is the main event. Some weeks a man, some weeks a woman, some weeks neither: read genderfluid or bigender first.
- 4The 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.
Close by
Related identities
Demiboy
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.
Read
Girlflux
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.
ReadGenderfluid
You move between genders over time. Demigirl is stable and incomplete rather than complete and shifting.
Read
Agender
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.
ReadNeutrois
A neutral gender rather than an absent one, though the definitions overlap with agender and some people use the two interchangeably.
ReadNon-binary
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.
Trans woman
A woman, completely. A demigirl assigned male at birth is not the same thing, though some people use one word for a while and then the other, and neither use was a mistake.
Transfeminine
A direction of travel, not a destination. It fits demigirls moving towards womanhood from somewhere else; whether it fits those assigned female at birth is argued about.
ReadDemigirl, side by side
Questions people ask
Frequently asked questions
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.
The flag
Seven horizontal stripes (symmetric: grey, light grey, pink, white, pink, light grey, grey), created by Tumblr user transrants (Salem Fontana) — earliest known version circa February 2014, widely circulated after a July 2015 upload to the DeviantArt Pride-Flags archive; the pink is cited as #FDADC8 by most colour references, with #FFAEC9 appearing as a near-identical variant.
Sources
- Demigirl — Nonbinary Wiki Confirms demigirl as a demigender variant and general 2010s online origin; fetched 2026-09-06.
- Demigender — The Transgender Dictionary Demigirl flag description and attribution; fetched 2026-09-06.
Still figuring things out?
Twenty questions, four minutes, and a few words worth trying on.