It finally happened. Tumblr, scrambling to get back in Apple’s good graces after being kicked off the app store for facilitating the distribution of child pornography, recently announced that it will implement a blanket ban on “adult content” beginning December 17. But although it may appear to be a well-intended act of censorial overreach, Tumblr’s incoming ban was inevitable even before SESTA/FOSTA made hosting adult content into a legal time bomb; as an anonymous former engineer told Vox, Tumblr’s owners at Verizon forced the measure so they could sell more ads on the platform.
Sex workers and erotic artists were quick to condemn the ban, noting in particular the inevitable economic devastation such measures would exact on those doing survival sex work and for whom their accumulated Tumblr followers and customers can (and often do) make the difference between eating and going hungry. (In what one hopes is only a macabre twist of fate, the December 17 deadline falls on the 16th annual International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers.)
In another curious fluke of congruence, Tumblr’s announcement came a week after The American Conservative (TAC) published an essay by Rod Dreher called “Andrea Long Chu’s Fake Vagina,” responding to several essays by Chu after her controversial New York Times op-ed about gender confirmation surgery and mental health. Already unnerved by Chu’s essay (which he calls “an icon of our radically disordered culture”), Dreher comes absolutely unglued when he reads Chu’s thoughts on forced feminization erotica, describing it as “the process of demonic possession….[and] profoundly evil.”
It feels somehow appropriate that Tumblr should announce its porn ban hot on the heels of Dreher’s moralistic rant, since it was Tumblr — or rather, its “filthy” users — that led me to understand the deep toxicity of how cis society views and defines trans sexualities.
So with that in mind, let’s talk about sissy porn.
The idea of a “sissy” may conjure different things for different people. In scientific literature, its best-known usage may be in Richard Green’s 1987 article “The ‘Sissy Boy Syndrome’ and the Development of Homosexuality,” in which Green, drawing from longitudinal analysis of “feminine” and “masculine” boys as they mature, ponders parental influence on the “link between being a ‘sissy boy’ and a ‘gay man.’” In the context of millennial pornography, “sissy” as an erotic identity takes on a more defined set of characteristics. By this definition, a sissy is someone with a penis who is fascinated by “traditional” Western feminine ideals, obsesses over lingerie and makeup, fetishizes oral and anal sex with “superior” cisgender men, and often expresses themself hypersexually.
Looking back, it seems obvious that these characteristics line up precisely with the popular image of trans women, but I had no reference for this sort of thinking back in 2013, when I made my first secret Tumblr account. Fresh out of college and struggling to figure out what kind of person I really wanted to be, I started a Tumblr blog (these were originally called “tumblogs,” a term that, much like “fetch,” did not happen), which was to become the most honest diary I had ever kept. I’d already been using Tumblr in an attempt to establish myself as a writer for several years, but my secret account was for my rich fantasy life where I was a girl. Except I still hadn’t figured out that I could be a girl at that point, so I settled on a less comfortable but easier-to-understand label: Sissy.
There were any number of things that gave me pause about calling myself a sissy. Sissy pornography takes many different forms and touches on a host of related kinks, like chastity and lifestyle D/s, but most prevalent and powerful is its relationship to humiliation. I didn’t especially want to be humiliated for wanting to be feminine, and I didn’t see any reason why someone should pretend to force me into doing what I wanted to do. But for the sake of adopting a label I understood, I acquiesced. It was a convenient falsehood, a context in which wanting to be a girl could be explained, and a good enough coping mechanism — for a while.
My early posts were silent reblogs of pretty vanilla porn that sometimes featured trans women. As time went on, I began posting more frequently, sharing details about my life and discussing how far I was from where I wanted to be. Although I found no erotic appeal in the idea of my identity being exposed, I found myself reaching out to others anyway, satisfying my unconscious need for community and validation. Once, I sent a self-described Chinese crossdresser a message that said, “I hope someday I can be as pretty as you.” She replied: “You can, and you will.”
By 2015, five years after discovering Tumblr and its erotic underbelly, I’d had enough of the sissy “community,” such as it was. Not only was I starting to understand the deep racism of “big black cock” fetishization, a common trope in stories written over stolen “captioned” images, but I didn’t feel comfortable expressing myself through a lens that was inherently based on my degradation any longer. Although I didn’t start out identifying as transgender, I could only put so many gorgeous trans porn creators (amateur and professional alike) in my “goals” tag before I understood that what I really wanted was to transition, and to pursue a path as my own woman. In a blog post I wrote that March, only a few months before I began my social transition, I described what I think must have been my first experience with gender euphoria: Briefly alone in my room during a party my girlfriend and I were hosting, I was overcome with the urge to dance:
Dreher isn’t completely wrong when he claims sissy porn is toxic. If it wasn’t in some way, I wouldn’t have felt the need to close down my first Tumblr and create a new one after coming out. My new account was to be a clean break from the old, confused version of me; a place where I could frankly and honestly explore my sexuality without being held down by shame and cruelty. I dove in and posted frequent updates, and as my body began to respond to hormone treatment, even shared pictures of myself.
I’d been running this second blog in secret for as long as I’ve been out. Tucked away from my forward-facing persona, my lewd Tumblr has been a haven for exploration, fantasy, and open communication with other transfeminine people. I’ve received more messages than I can count from people who tell me that posts like mine helped them embrace and explore their own gender and sexual identities; people who, like me, managed to find their way from Tumblr’s sissy morass to a loose community of people who had begun to escape the shame that had been prescribed us.
Much of the well-known writing on sissy porn, or feminization erotica in a broader sense, is cis academic theory on the subject, written by people like Alice Dreger and Ray Blanchard. Explaining Blanchard’s theories of transgender sexuality in her book, Galileo's Middle Finger (controversially awarded and then stripped of a Lambda Literary Foundation award in 2016), Dreger summarizes: “Whether a transkid [sic] grows up to become a gay man or a transgender woman would depend on the individual’s interaction with the surrounding cultural environment.” Blanchard’s typology for those who do grow up and express a desire to transition is a rigid binary: One is either a “homosexual transsexual,” i.e., a trans woman who is exclusively attracted to men, or an “autogynephilic transsexual.” In explaining the latter, Blanchard claims in his 1989 text, Archives of Sexual Behavior, that “All gender dysphoric males who are not sexually oriented toward men are instead sexually oriented toward the thought or image of themselves as women.”
Given this extremely limited theoretical framework, one can almost comprehend Dreher’s stupefied terror in his TAC column. If young gay boys can truly be pressured into being trans by “the surrounding cultural environment,” and if their environment includes access to sissy porn, might they not be unnecessarily convinced that they need to transition? This is what trans-exclusionary radical feminists (TERFs) refer to as “transing children”: the idea that acceptance of and support for transgender adults will lead to children being pressured into transitioning despite not actually being transgender. (If this reminds you of Green’s framework in which “feminine” boys are supposedly culturally influenced to be gay, points for paying attention.) But it’s rhetoric like this that causes kids to be ashamed of transgender feelings in the first place — and that gives sissy porn its power.
At its fundamental level, sissy porn exists because of our shared social anxiety about how we categorize sex and gender, in every sense those words convey. Scrolling back through my old blog today and browsing Tumblr's rich, doomed crop of sissy blogs, it's stunning to revisit the pornography I felt was so scandalous back then and find it utterly defanged. When you remove the shock factor of a person with a penis wanting to be seen and treated as a woman (or at least something different than a “man”), most of what's left there is, quite frankly, a pretty standard humiliation kink. And I hope that if CSI has taught us anything, it's that even people who think being disrespected is hot deserve respect outside of the bedroom.
Tumblr isn’t the only place where sissy porn lives on the Internet, but once upon a time, it was the place where I and thousands of other scared, desperate trans women consumed it — and later, where we could escape from worrying about what the Rod Drehers and Alice Dregers of the world think about our sex lives and tastes in porn. In relentlessly pathologizing any expression of transgender sexuality, all they’ve accomplished is creating the very cultural context in which young trans women are forced to turn to spaces like Tumblr’s sissy community for any hope at self-expression. I imagine that Tumblr’s porn ban must feel like a victory to them. For me, it’s just one more reminder that cis society isn’t ready for trans people to be ourselves.
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