Search Your Heart Out

BY KENZI HALE @TheKenziHale

“I’m straight but I’m so attracted to you,” is tonight’s opening salvo uncaringly fired from a man whom I will never meet in real life. “Can I see your cock?”

He sends me $100 to masturbate via webcam for him. The act lasts for 10 minutes and is ultimately punctuated by an interaction that reveals this man’s deep need to be assured he is heterosexual. Still, he informs me he’s fantasized about being intimate with a trans woman ever since he saw that one picture of openly trans porn performer Bailey Jay a decade ago.

Four years ago, I made the decision to step into the adult entertainment world. I spent a good 20 years being a musician, touring—the whole thing. But struggling in underground music gets to be tiring as you get deeper into your 30s, so my life pivoted. To porn!

Talking about the preconceptions of sex work can be boring, but let me make it clear: I fucking love my job; and I love my job fucking. I get to do the things I want to do with my life, and while it has never been an easy climb to relevance, working in this industry is something I genuinely see myself doing until the day I die.

Anyway, this isn’t about the pain of having to hear this man ramble about my dick. I know this man is not telling me he’s straight for me. It’s all a part of the per formance for him, whether he knows it or not. The lyrics might change a bit, but the song remains the same.

Or at least that’s how it used to feel. People just like this man still exist in my chatroom, but they’re growing quieter lately. Sadly, the voices making up the “I’m straight!” chorus while engaging with a trans sex worker aren’t being replaced by customers who say all the right things, but the words are certainly evolving; I’ve seen these men becoming more neutral about their predilections.

“But Kenzi!” you might be thinking, “who cares? Maybe this change in how people engage with you is simply because you’re super-hot and have been doing porn long enough to gain an audience!”

To those of you who are thinking that, I say thank you. I am super hot! But also you’re wrong—here’s some correlative data coming at you right now!

For those who don’t know, porn megasite Pornhub has a nice little category feature on the side of its homepage, much like your Facebook does, only wildly horny. So every time you click “MILF” or “Big Boobs,” on the left, your click is recorded and added to a running tally of what categories are popular each year.

According to a recent report from Pornhub pertaining to 2022, transgender was the seventh most-viewed category on the site in the world, up five places from the year before. Additionally, transgender was the third most-searched subcategory in the US, outranking such evergreen favorites as mature, amateur and hentai. Six years prior, Phub, as the cool kids call it, released a study about the rising popularity of the trans category, finding that “worldwide, transgender-related terms...represent 1.97% of all searches on Pornhub, so that’s well over a million searches each day.”

In other words, dum-dum TERFs (or trans-exclusionary radical feminists) and ‘phobes can say what they want about not being attracted to trans folks, but the numbers don’t lie and the numbers say more and more people are finding out trans women are in fact, super-fuckable. Six years sure did shift a lot for us trans girls, eh?

Perhaps the best part? The trend doesn’t just take place on the porn consumer side of the street. Well-known and respected content creators such as Summer Hart simply list cis/trans scenes as “lesbian” now. And while this might seem like a small or confusing step to those outside the adult content industry— or even just folks who aren’t trans—small changes in verbiage represent a growing shift inside the adult world that acknowledges trans women as—get this—women; you know, the thing we’ve been asking for this whole time.

The change is heartening. Genderfluid industry vet Sinn Sage, for example, has observed a massive shift over time. Sage’s body of work has been overtly queer and featured a range of cis and trans performers. When she first started, Sage tells SFR, trans porn would be relegated to “the bargain bin of the gas station DVDs.” But things started to shift around 2018, according to Sage. There is no one easily identifiable indicator or cause, but studios such as Trouble Films and Crash Pad started laying the groundwork for the modern era of trans porn in the 2000s, she says, coupled with increasingly accepting representation for trans women and a societal shift toward “actually giving

And maybe it’s as simple as that. Maybe it’s just people giving a shit; maybe it’s exposure to trans girls’ very existence— their right to be sexual in a non-fetishized manner. Or maybe us trans women are finally having our moment in the sun. The democratization of porn led by frustrated creators of all stripes has loosened the studios’ stranglehold on the industry. The tools available through sites like Pornhub and Onlyfans have finally reached the shores belonging to trans creators. Oh, and straight dudes? You’re no less straight for being attracted to trans women. We’re

Kenzi Hale is a marginally known sex haver and pro wrestling mark. She also likes her cat a lot.