Femboy

Femboy is an internet-native term for a young man, or a masculine-assigned person, who presents in a conventionally feminine way — clothing, hair, cosmetics, manner. It is a description of expression. It is not a gender identity, not a sexual orientation, and not a sexual interest, and this entry has to say all three because the word's history online has attached it to each of them at different times.

The clarification matters more here than for most terms in this vertical. Most femboys describe themselves as men; some are non-binary; some later identify as transgender and most do not. None of that is carried by the word itself.

Definition & scope

The term names a look and a manner adopted by someone the world reads as male. Wikipedia's article states the boundary plainly: femboy is a term of gender expression and does not define the sexual orientation or gender identity of the person using it. Nor does it imply any medical step — femboy is not a stage of transition, and treating it as one is a mistake made in both directions, by outsiders who read every feminine man as a closeted trans woman and by online commentary that reads any transition as an escalation of the same thing.

It is the masculine-side counterpart to tomboy and belongs with butch, femme and gender nonconformity among terms of presentation rather than identity. The asymmetry with tomboy is instructive: the feminine-behaving boy has always drawn more social hostility than the masculine-behaving girl, and femboy is the first widely used word for him that was coined by the people it describes rather than applied to them.

History & origins

• 1981: an early printed occurrence appears in Ralph De Sola's Abbreviations Dictionary, well before the modern sense.
• 1990s: the term is in use as a straightforward insult for a man failing to meet conventional masculinity, per Dictionary.com, which dates it to at least that decade.
• 2000s: the variant femboi appears, borrowing the LGBTQ+ spelling boi, which by around 2000 denoted a young gay man and is also used by some trans men and masculine-presenting lesbians.
• 2013: the word is added as a pornography search category, a step Dictionary.com records and which is the direct source of the persistent misreading of femboy as a sexual interest rather than a mode of dress.
• c. 2018: the modern self-applied sense consolidates on 4chan's /lgbt/ board and spreads to Reddit.
• 2020: it reaches TikTok in volume, where #FemboyFriday and related trends make it briefly a mainstream media subject.

In practice

Femboy presentation is ordinary in its components — skirts, thigh-high socks, cosmetics, longer hair — and unusual only in who is wearing them. What is genuinely distinctive is that the term is almost entirely online. It circulates in image boards, short-video platforms and their attendant subcultures rather than in the offline institutions that carried butch and femme; there are no femboy bars and no fifty-year oral history. That makes the word volatile, cohort-bound, and difficult to measure by any conventional instrument.

It is also used both admiringly and as an insult, sometimes in the same thread, and people who use it of themselves are frequently explicit that they are reclaiming it.

Psychology

There is no clinical literature on femboys as such and no diagnosis that applies. The ICD-11 removed gender incongruence from its mental-disorders chapter in 2019, and feminine presentation by men has no diagnostic status.

The academic attention the phenomenon has received is sociological. Foster and Baker's analysis in Social Media + Society examined 205 TikTok videos from the platform's 43 most-followed male creators and found that the aesthetic popularly labelled femboy both challenges and reinforces conventional masculinity: creators subvert recognisable gender tropes while still trading on muscularity, attractiveness and sexual bravado. Their framework is hybrid masculinity — the observation that borrowing feminine markers can leave a masculine hierarchy intact rather than dismantling it. It is a useful corrective to the more excitable claims made about the trend in the press.

Prevalence & culture

How common is being a femboy?

No survey measures it, and any figure is a bounded guess rather than a count.

The available ceiling comes from gender nonconformity generally. GLAAD's Accelerating Acceptance 2017 survey, a Harris Poll of 2,037 US adults fielded in November 2016, found 12% of 18–34-year-olds identifying as transgender or gender nonconforming, against 6% of 35–51-year-olds — defining the category as not identifying with the sex assigned at birth or having a gender expression different from conventional expectations. Roughly half of that group is masculine-assigned, and only a fraction of feminine-presenting young men use this particular word, which is confined to specific online spaces and to a single cohort.

Gallup's 2025 tracking survey sets the wider context: 9% of US adults identify as LGBTQ+, rising to 23% of those under 30. The estimate recorded on this entry sits far below either figure and is stated at low confidence, because the honest answer is that the term is popular online and rare in the population.

The gap between the word's search volume and its measurable population is the largest of any term in this vertical, and it is a good reminder that visibility and prevalence are different quantities.