Danbooru

Newhalf

Posted under General

Danbooru wiki says newhalf = female body but male sex organs.

…but any Japanese source you might find (and surely the Japanese should be more reliable sources, for the meaning of Japanese words?), including Japanese Wikipedia, Pixiv, weblio (checks a couple of dictionaries), Nico Nico, tend to suggest that the newhalf means, more-or-less, transwoman
…who may or may not have boobs, may or may not have a penis…
Could be 100% physically male, or done a complete sex change operation (creating boobs, removing the penis, and creating a [more-or-less] vagina), or anything in-between.

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kittey said:

You’re 1-2 years late to the party.

So everyone must read years and years of forum posts, everything ever posted, before making a comment?

Evazion’s stance: forum #191931, forum #194374

Which goes completely against the actual meaning of the word. Against how the Japanese actually use and define the word.
…but then again, you think that the meaning of words, are determined by Danbooru, rather than the speakers of the language in question.

The fact that you’re starting a new topic on a controversial topic right after the other two topics you raised a ruckus in have been locked, doesn’t shine a good light on you.

You seriously just said that?

That is so fractally wrong, I don't even know where to start.
Why do I even try?

zarlan said:

Which goes completely against the actual meaning of the word. Against how the Japanese actually use and define the word.
…but then again, you think that the meaning of words, are determined by Danbooru, rather than the speakers of the language in question.

Tags exist to find things. In this case, newhalf is for finding "girl with a dick and no vagina"

We don't think Danbooru decides what words mean, we think Danbooru decides what our tags mean. We all know what newhalf means and where it originates, but if we used it based on its Japanese meaning, it would be useless. We are an English speaking site, and most of the userbase doesn't care what newhalf's "proper" definition is.

Unless you have an irrefutable argument about a way to use the tag that's more useful to us than it is now, you're wasting your time throwing around Japanese links. Danbooru is not a Japanese site.

mongirlfan said:

Worth to note that Newhalf =/= Transgender (although it's expected both overlap sometimes).

There is some mention of that, in some of the Japanese sources, but it's not clear what they mean by that. How it is different isn't clear, from the sources I checked. What is clear, is that it isn't about people who must, by definition, have boobs and a penis. They may be 100% physically male, or 100% transitioned, or kept their penis or whatever.

Additionally, Newhalf should necessarily retain the penis because it originally refers to pre-op or non-op transex

Certainly, at least one source seems to suggest that the term has a tendency to be used more of those who are non-/pre-op (and such people, obviously have no boobs, as the Danbooru wiki suggests)
…except that the word can also be used to refer to post-op, so…

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blindVigil said:

Tags exist to find things. In this case, newhalf is for finding "girl with a dick and no vagina"

We don't think Danbooru decides what words mean, we think Danbooru decides what our tags mean.

This argument would work, IF the wiki states that what it describes is the "Danbooru meaning", and mentions what it actually means in Japanese.
Also, "We don't think Danbooru decides what words mean" is an obviously false statement, given what kittey has said, about the word "blade". (not the Danbooru tag, blade. No. The English word. Not that there is any sensible reason, to insist on naming a tag "blade", when what is actually meant is "edge", but that's not really relevant to this issue, nor the one in which it was brought up)

We all know what newhalf means and where it originates

You're seriously saying that everyone who uses, or visits, Danbooru, knows what newhalf really means, in Japanese?
…and that no one ever mixes up the Danbooru-meaning and the real one? (especially when reading sources about various characters, who may be mentioned as being newhalf?)

Updated

Have you ever actually read the wiki for newhalf?

Newhalf is a Japanese slang term for a pre-op or non-op male-to-female transexual. Also known as "shemale" (シーメール). The word "newhalf" was originally used for referring a male who had begun to transition to female but kept her lower body the same; literally a "new half".

The meaning for Newhalf, its pratical usage in danbooru, along with tagging notes are all there.

This discussions is already looking like a mess, because you're not very clear on these supposed definitions or the purpose of this forum, and you're mixing concepts.
It would be helpful if you bring the exact parts from each source that support that the definition of Newhalf is wrong, or if the Newhalf tag should be reworked (which I doubt will ever happen considering that we already had so many discussions and final statements from Evazion regarding these tags).

It's worth having this discussion, because the new definition for the tag is objectively worse for searching than the old one. It was made based on the faulty assumption that the not-explicitly-trans people we tag as newhalf based on body type were somehow the majority, which is not true - not in Japanese, not in English, not on Pixiv, and not even on the very posts on this booru. The overly-specific clause that the character's lack of vagina has to be visible led to people mass-deleting the tag from newhalves confirmed via character backstory, artist commentary, or even other traits visible in the image.

I think we should be honest about ourselves about the real definition here. No one's searching shemale and thinking "damn, I'm going to be really mad if this character doesn't have at least a C-cup and visible taint", they just want any transitioning MTF character or approximation thereof. Or, at the very least, we can be sure that trans characters won't magically develop vaginas just because they're out of frame.

feline_lump said:

The overly-specific clause that the character's lack of vagina has to be visible led to people mass-deleting the tag from newhalves confirmed via character backstory, artist commentary, or even other traits visible in the image.

Can you point posts where this is happening?
Because it looks like your point here is mixed with the Bridged/transgender forum debate. Newhalf isn't a canon tag and is a different subjet than the transgender tag. Also, Newhalf wiki has the tagging notes:

This tag should be used if you can either visually confirm the character has no vagina or there is information that clearly supports that the character doesn't have one, such as the tags used in the source, the artist's commentary or indicators in the art itself that confirms the character is a newhalf. When in doubt use the futanari tag instead.

The main purpose of these tagging notes is to identify futanari posts that are shemale/newhalf, because again, they're visually similar.

zarlan said:

You're seriously saying that everyone who uses, or visits, Danbooru, knows what newhalf really means, in Japanese?
…and that no one ever mixes up the Danbooru-meaning and the real one? (especially when reading sources about various characters, who may be mentioned as being newhalf?)

Considering the Japanese meaning of the word is right there in the tag's wiki, and we've had several different discussions on the tag up to this point, yes, I am saying that anyone involved in this discussion can be reasonably assumed to know the word's original meaning. It's a pipedream to expect that every single user will read that wiki, which apparently includes you it seems, but that doesn't negate the fact that the information is right there for anyone to see.

feline_lump said:

It's worth having this discussion, because the new definition for the tag is objectively worse for searching than the old one. It was made based on the faulty assumption that the not-explicitly-trans people we tag as newhalf based on body type were somehow the majority, which is not true - not in Japanese, not in English, not on Pixiv, and not even on the very posts on this booru. The overly-specific clause that the character's lack of vagina has to be visible led to people mass-deleting the tag from newhalves confirmed via character backstory, artist commentary, or even other traits visible in the image.

I think we should be honest about ourselves about the real definition here. No one's searching shemale and thinking "damn, I'm going to be really mad if this character doesn't have at least a C-cup and visible taint", they just want any transitioning MTF character or approximation thereof. Or, at the very least, we can be sure that trans characters won't magically develop vaginas just because they're out of frame.

You're just arguing we should do even more canon tagging than we already make exceptions for. We changed the tag to its current usage because it was just being tagged on any "canon" newhalf regardless of what you could see, and on nsfw posts it just ends up being visually similar or even identical to futanari. It does no one any good to have it flooded with sfw posts of Poison.

I'm not arguing that we should add SFW posts to the tag. I'm saying that there's a recent problem of people mass deleting the tag from NSFW posts that don't have a visible taint, which was particularly bad around last year. Some examples of this include post #5255860, post #3818871 (ignoring canon), post #5578650, post #4484309 (ignoring artist commentary), post #3712171, post #2602438 (ignoring artist tags + artist explicitly drawing characters differently).

Honestly, this behavior isn't even in line with what we have written on the wiki (which fully permits this kind of information to be used), and certainly has zero actual utility.

feline_lump said:
Honestly, this behavior isn't even in line with what we have written on the wiki (which fully permits this kind of information to be used), and certainly has zero actual utility.

The clause about tags and commentary was added less than a year ago by mongirlfan. It was never brought up for discussion and was never adopted as practice.

Veradux said:

The clause about tags and commentary was added less than a year ago by mongirlfan. It was never brought up for discussion and was never adopted as practice.

That was added nonspecifically as "information that would support that the character doesn't have [a vulva]" in 2014, and specifically expanded to tags, commentary, etc. in 2020. It was absolutely practice for years. If it wasn't, there would be no newhalf tag to delete on all of these images.

Veradux said:

The clause about tags and commentary was added less than a year ago by mongirlfan. It was never brought up for discussion and was never adopted as practice.

Actually, I only expanded it to be more clear and detailed as just "information" is vague, but the wiki already had these notes years before. See the wiki's first version:

Only use this tag if you can either visually confirm the character has no vulva or there is information that would support that the character doesn't have one (e.g. if the character is a pre-op trans woman). When in doubt use only the futanari tag and not this tag.

@feline_lump
Now I see your point better. I don't really get why these posts aren't tagged as newhalf. For the record, the artist mogiki hayami specifically only draw Newhalfs.

feline_lump said:

That was added nonspecifically as "information that would support that the character doesn't have [a vulva]" in 2014, and specifically expanded to tags, commentary, etc. in 2020. It was absolutely practice for years. If it wasn't, there would be no newhalf tag to delete on all of these images.

I should say it was never re-adopted. Because we changed the practice when we implicated it to futanari. And thus the gardened had to happen.

All I'm hearing now is a repeat of topic #19061, which itself was a repeat. So I feel like this whole topic is just stringing up the dead horse piñata that is "newhalf as a canon tag".
...I guess this was my swing for candy, but I'll put the bat down.

The tagging notes existed since the wiki's creation. At the time, Futanari and Newhalf were very separated from each others and treated as completely different things, so it was necessary to determine if a dickgirl in a post was either a Futanari or a Newhalf.

The first and main detail was if the character lacked pussy. However not every futanari or newhalf art will show the entire crotch region to determine that. So when in doubt, it gets tagged as futanari just for precaution.

I said before that Newhalf isn't a canon tag, but it turns out it kinda works like one actually (only NSFW posts showing either bulge or penis) with outside information such as knowing the characters is a Newhalf, artist's tags and commentary. Isn't it basically how we tag Otoko no ko characters? We need outside information allied with what we see in the picture when tagging Otoko no ko, if not, most of them would be tagged as 1girl.

Now, talking about concept and lore, I said before in other forum topics that "Futanari are girls who magically grew a dick, and Newhalf are boys who grew boobs through implants", emphatizing the fantastical nature of Futanari, while on the other hand, Newhalf are directly based on real life.

Let's look at post #2602438. We know for a fact this artist specifically never draw Futanari, only Newhalfs. The newhalf tag was very likely one of the tags in the pixiv post (it's now a bad link). The characters have large breasts and female clothing; but facial features and body structure are still reminiscent of masculine. Not every artist draw Newhalfs with this detail, so it is technically another way to visually identify a Newhalf in a post. For all these reasons, I believe these tagging notes should still be valid as a way to identify Futanari posts where there are Newhalfs being depicted.

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