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So Trans People Are Porn Now?
So, the Republican Party wants to ban porn. We know that. Not only has porn been a boogeyman since at least the Reagan administration, but Trump’s old “Wish List” Project 2025 says it explicitly. That’s bad enough on the face of it, but looking at the context an even grosser and more insidious agenda is revealed. They’re not actually (just) talking about sexually explicit material (which would be bad enough). No, they’re also using “pornography” to refer to something totally unrelated: media that simply…involves the existence of transgender people.
The Project 2025 document sweats bullets, panicking about all the porn “invading [...] school libraries” and spreading “the toxic normalization of transgenderism.” It describes porn as “manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of transgender ideology.” Honestly, it would be funny if it weren’t so grim. It’s the equivalent of saying “Horror movies should be banned!” and, before anyone even has a chance to question you about it, adding “Horror movies are manifested today by the proliferation of colorful puppets in children’s TV shows!” If you’re scared of The Cookie Monster you can just say that, babe. Maybe it’s horny for you to read kid’s books with trans characters in them, but that doesn’t make them porn. That’s just a you problem. Well, it would be, except that the rhetorical bait and switch is working.
This strange conflation between pornography and trans people wouldn’t even feel worth addressing if it weren't so politically salient. After all, porn is good and cool, actually, and there isn’t any of it in school libraries, so who cares? Unfortunately, this rhetoric is powerful enough that we need to talk about it. Countless books are being banned and trans people in the US are being targeted more than ever. Trans women are being forced into men’s prisons, a terrifying prospect especially given the well-documented prevalence of horrific sexual assaults routinely carried out when trans women are imprisoned with men. It’s been three years since the first politician openly called for trans people to be “eradicated from public life entirely,” and the situation is only getting worse.
All this persecution is being justified by this “save the children from pornography” narrative that imagines trans people as perverse and innately sexually explicit. It needs to be addressed directly. So, let’s talk about how so many people became convinced that trans people are inherently pornographic, what that has to do with sex workers' rights, and what we can do about it.
How Is Transsexual Not Sexual?
So, why does anyone treat trans people’s existence as inherently sexual? To some, even those who believe in the rights of trans people to exist as themselves, it might feel intuitive. After all, the (at this point fairly antiquated) term “transsexual” literally has “sexual” in the word. What’s not sexual about getting surgery to turn your dick into a pussy or vice versa?
Well, that idea might look reasonable on the surface but even the smallest bit of consideration shows how unfair it is. Even ignoring the fact that plenty of trans people don’t have or want bottom surgery, it’s a strange double standard to treat trans people as inherently sexually explicit because of that. Some aspects of transness are related to sexuality, but so are some aspects of almost everyone’s lives. Pregnant women can exist in all sorts of media without it being pornographic, despite their pregnancy pointing directly to sexual activity beyond just having different genitals than they used to. And pregnancy only lasts nine months, not the lifetime that most trans people’s transness does. People can get BBLs or other cosmetic procedures to make themselves more attractive without their bodies suddenly becoming inherently too sexual for kids to see fully clothed at the supermarket. People can wear wedding rings in public, implying a sexual relationship in most adults' minds, without that being some sort of lewd act. The list goes on. We can all understand that adults can be sexual beings while still having full lives and personalities beyond that. While queer people and sex workers might be reduced to their sexual lives and stigmatized for it, no one accuses anyone else of ‘molesting children’s eyeballs’ just by having genitals and a sexuality and existing in kids’ vicinities. It’s a clear double standard.
It’s also worth noting that the sexual assumptions adults often make about trans people don’t really carry over to how kids think. While many adults think of genitals immediately when they think about gender or transness, that’s not how children’s understanding of the same topics tends to operate. The same way that you or I sort people into gender categories in our minds before ever seeing their junk, kids do the same thing. Kids who are too young to know about sexual matters would not even think to imagine that a trans person had had surgery because most wouldn’t think that the difference between boys and girls is found in their underpants to begin with. Studies show that young children are aware of gender differences far before learning most people with penises are boys/men and most people with vulvas are girls/women. Most kids (my own childhood self included) tend to believe gender has something to do with haircuts or clothing choices. While someone mentioning that they’re trans might conjure images of genitals in the minds of many adults, kids learning a boy they know used to be a girl is very unlikely to cause the same thought process.
The Real Link Between Trans People & Porno
There’s more to the equation of trans people and porn. I think it partially comes from the fact that many people (maybe even including you, dear reader) have mostly engaged with trans people through porn and other sex work. If that’s true for you, it’s okay! You don’t have to be embarrassed or ashamed. The first time I learned about trans people was from porn and I was so naive and confused that I assumed every girldick I saw was CGI. It’s a common experience (well, maybe not the CGI part, but still). Unfortunately, mostly hearing about trans people (trans women especially) in the context of sex work might make one assume that being trans is “a sex thing.” That’s an especially easy misconception to develop when many people conflate being trans with crossdressing, a practice that's frequently erotic.
So if being trans isn’t “a sex thing,” then why did you mostly just see trans girls in sexual contexts until a few years back? Well, unfortunately trans people face vicious job discrimination with little-to-no protections. Even trans people who don’t “look trans” still have a harder time finding work if their IDs sex marker doesn't match their gender. Because of this, sex work is the most accessible occupation for many trans folks. Since we engage in sex work at higher rates we've gotten a reputation associated with the field. Trans women in particular are massively overrepresented in porn and other sex work, but even trans guys do more than you might expect. Plus, because being trans stands out, a lot of porn with trans performers is thought of as its own separate category. It’s a somewhat controversial marketing gimmick like “BBWs” or “BBCs” that could add to the impression that transness is a primarily horny experience.
Beyond just the overrepresentation of trans folks in sex work, there’s also been an underrepresentation of “out” trans people in other parts of daily life which can add to the feeling that trans people and porn are somehow synonymous. The more job discrimination, the less likely it is you’ll end up with a trans bartender or cashier or tax attorney. The more social stigma, the less likely your trans friends and acquaintances will ever tell you they’re trans (and, no, you can’t “always tell”). The more ostracizing it is to date or marry trans people, the less likely you are to meet us through family and friends. And the more trans people are percieved as weird and separate , the less likely you are to see any trans characters in your favorite media (you know, unless that media is porn), further perpetuating the problem. When you’ve mostly only engaged with trans people through porn, sex work, and jokes that conflate crossdressing kinks with transness, it makes sense you’d hear “trans” and think about a sexual fantasy instead of the lives of the real people who populate them.
Why Trans = Porn = Bad
We can talk all day about all the little reasons why trans people seem sexual to so many, but we might be missing the forest for the trees. The truth is that vilifying groups of people by painting them as hypersexual is a common tactic in the world of politics. The sexualized stigma attached to trans people is just one example of stereotypes and propaganda divide us by making us think of each other as sexually tainted and dangerous.
Reducing folks to sexual archetypes is an easy way to create stigma against pretty much any minority because of the way our culture demonizes sexuality. As anthropologist Gayle Rubin put it in her seminal essay Thinking Sex, in Western cultures “Sex is presumed guilty until proven innocent.” While most other human pleasures are understood as neutral or positive unless they cause harm, activities deemed sexual are immediately suspicious in the minds of many. Therefore, it’s pretty easy to make people distrust others by associating making them seem sexual. Plus, because sex is treated as more “base” and “animal” than other sorts of pleasure (even very physical ones like eating and exercise), associating someone’s identity with sex also makes them seem less fully intelligent, valuable and human than others.
In Sexed Up (2022), renowned author and academic Julia Serano describes how many groups have had this tactic used against them. Black men and Latino immigrants are imagined as aggressively, animalistically sexual rapists. Sex workers are thought of as stupid, lazy, and lascivious. Gay men are thought of as recklessly sexual, predatory and hedonistic. The list goes on. This nonsense about trans people being bathroom creeps indulging in a dangerous fetish and grooming children just by existing in their vicinity? It’s just one more way the stigma on sexuality is weaponized to divide us.
Drag Queens & Porn Stars
Many groups get defined as sexual and stigmatized for it, but the sex workers and trans people specifically have a lot in common in this area. After all, the whole inspiration for this article is this administration’s weird equation of adult media and trans people. We’re being lumped together. The same strategies are being weaponized to dehumanize both groups at once.
Conservatives ostracize both queer people and sex workers by pretending we can't be trusted around children. There’s been a lot of bullshit in the news these past few years about kids being “groomed” by events where drag queens perform child-friendly lip-syncing shows or read kid storybooks. In fact, the devastating Colorado gay club shooting that so many hateful pundits blamed queerness for was a direct response to something similar. Most drag queens aren’t trans, but the rhetoric that paints trans women as terrifying sexual freaks tends to equate transness, drag and crossdressing, making one big, bad villain out of a smorgasbord of whoever they think is doing gender wrong.
All these news stories about kids being “groomed” by being “exposed” to drag in child friendly environments rang a bell in my mind. Do you remember 2011? Between Bin Laden’s killing and Occupy Wall Street there was one little news story that’s stuck in my head for the decade+ since: Sasha Grey read a book to some kids as part of the Read Across America program. That’s it. She was fully clothed. She wasn’t even working in porn at the time, and she certainly wasn’t being railed while reading “Dog Breath" by Dav Pilkey to a group of elementary schoolers. But, of course, parents complained. The school was so scared of the PR nightmare that they denied it ever happened. So did the National Education Association, going so far as to turn down a donation because it would come from an adult entertainment company. The fact Grey had ever worked in a sexual field marked her for life as not child appropriate in the eyes of many. Now, queer people like drag queens and trans women are receiving the same treatment. To paraphrase Serano, according to this ideology we are sex and sex is bad.
The same way sex workers (and ex sex workers) are deemed inherently inappropriate, fired from working with kids or even having custody of their own children, trans people and others who queer gender expectations are being given the same treatment. We’re not only being pushed out of public life, it’s being done by linking our existence to sex work. When kids' books with gay parents are “pornography”, and pornography is being actively targeted with bills like Senator Mike Lee’s SCREEN Act, everyone’s freedom is threatened. Everyone whose life doesn’t fit perfectly into a Christian nationalist vision of straight marriage, chaste thoughts and strict gender adherence, at least.
If you’re tunnel-visioned on trans rights, it might seem intuitive to defend against these dehumanizing narratives by insisting that transness isn’t sexual. And it’s true: being trans isn’t any more sexual than being any sort of human is. But the more time we spend insisting “it’s not horny, guys!” the more we subtly concede that horniness is suspicious and dangerous. It’s not! Of course being horny with non-consenting parties and kids is super fucked up, but having a sexuality is good, actually. Trans people don’t deserve to live in peace because we’re not fetishists. Some of us (like yours truly) are fetishists. Fetishists deserve to live in peace too! So do sex workers. So do sluts that don’t get paid for it. We all deserve rights and humanity because we’re people, and sexuality doesn’t make anyone any less of a person.
It’s a scary time to be trans, but there’s hope. Here’s some ways you can help in the fight against sexual repression…
- Stay Informed: Consider following sources like Wet Ink Magazine, XBiz and Free Speech Coalition for news about sex work and the adult industry. Subscribe to Erin Reed’s newsletter Erin In The Morning for updates on trans issues in the USA. There’s lots of other great journalists out there, too, and publications like Them cover global trans issues including those attacking sex workers. When you stay engaged you not only know the threats to our lives and freedom but also the powerful ways people are fighting back. It’s not a backdrop of hopeless terror; it’s an evolving string of events including lots of good news and important work.
- Contact Your Representatives: If you’re American, this website is an especially good resource for learning what bills are targeting the trans community in your state. Then, you can call your representatives and let them know how you feel. There are even websites that will generate scripts for you to read if you’re a little phone shy or don’t know how to put it. It’s a bit harder to find the same for sex work and porn advocacy, but following the political action of the Free Speech Coalition can help you know what bills need opposing in that area. It’s not nearly as confusing or intimidating as it might feel if you’re new to advocacy.
- Get Involved In Local Community & Activism: There are queer people, sex workers, and their allies near you and it’s the perfect time to start making connections. That could mean using dating apps like Lex, Grindr or Feeld to make individual connections. It can mean using websites like Fetlife to find sex+ queer events and community near you. These connections help build community ties, spread information, and create mutual aid networks. It’s inherently fulfilling to make new connections with different kinds of people, not just politically important.
- Avoid Respectability Politics & Infighting: We’re safer, stronger, and happier together. Instead of spending hours doomscrolling on platforms that feed on our attention and outrage, connect with people interpersonally with empathy and curiosity. Not everyone will use the same language as you, have the same experiences, or share your passionate opinions. If you worry someone in community with you will “make us look bad,” sit with that feeling and resist the gut reaction to protect your image by excluding them. Those who hate trans people and sex workers will attack us no matter how good we try to look. Here’s an amazing piece of writing outlining how we can better stay in community together. It’s written for trans people in particular, but it’s very broadly applicable.
- Take Care Of Yourself: Meditation, yoga, journaling, art, and spending time with pets and friends are all wonderful options for self-care. As Devon Price discusses at length in Unlearning Shame (2024), motivating yourself with shame only causes harm. Activism isn’t a test of your personal virtue and torturing yourself doesn’t help anyone. Do your best to listen to your body, care for yourself, and forgive yourself when you don’t treat yourself or others the way that’s deserved. It’s not selfish to keep yourself healthy and safe.
- Be Prepared To Protect Each Other: Marching, protests and calling representatives are great, but this situation might end up needing more from you. It might be time to think about what resources you have that could directly help people in your local community stay safe. This could mean donating extra food to food banks or using your couch to host people who need it. You don’t need to wait for an organization to tell you how to help. You can do more good than you might think just by keeping an eye out and an open heart.
Photo Credits:
Banned books photo courtesy of NBC
Hunter Schafer photo courtesy of Huffington Post
Sexed Up author Julia Serano photo courtesy of her Medium page
Photo of Sasha Grey reading to children courtesy of TMZ
