What Can We Uncover From Mark Robinson’s Trans Porn Fascination And Startling Hate-Fueled Rhetoric?
Recent data found that searches for trans porn are most popular in red states like Texas, Georgia, and Kentucky, all of which are among the most active agents in the wave of anti-trans legislation.
Editor’s Note: This article includes mentions of transphobia, violence against trans people, and transphobic slurs.
Last month, a CNN investigation uncovered a litany of offensive comments left by North Carolina Lt. Gov. Mark Robinson on the porn website “Nude Africa.” Robinson—who is currently running for N.C. governor—has made a name for himself as one of the most vocally homophobic and transphobic politicians in the U.S. He has compared LGBTQ people to “maggots,” and “flies,” referred to being gay or transgender as “filth,” and advocated for trans women to be arrested for using the bathroom that matches their gender identity.
In light of Robinson’s track record in this space, it came as a surprise when CNN’s investigation found comments where he expressed an affinity for transgender pornography: “I like watching tranny on girl porn! That’s fucking hot! It takes the man out while leaving the man in!” he wrote on Nude Africa.
While news outlets and political action committees alike reported on the findings with shock and scandal, Robinson is not alone when it comes to transphobic people who consume trans porn.
Last year, PornHub—the leading global porn website with nearly 5.5 billion monthly visits—found that “transgender” was the sixth most viewed category of porn in 2023, outperforming “threesome,” “big tits” and “big ass.”
And 2022 data from Lawsuit.org found that searches for transgender porn are most popular in red states like Texas, Georgia, and Kentucky, all of which are predominantly Republican and among the most active agents in the recent wave of anti-trans legislation.
Robinson is not the first right-wing politician or public figure who’s been found to have connections to trans porn. In 2021, former Alabama State Senator Tom Whatley liked a tweet featuring nudes of a trans porn performer (that he later unliked), and infamous Infowars host Alex Jones was seen with trans porn open on his phone in a 2018 live stream. Jones later addressed the findings on his show where he told a caller that it was an accidental porn pop-up menu. “I’ve probably had porn menus pop up 500 times on my phone,” he told the caller. Robinson, Whatley and Jones did not respond to Uncloseted Media’s request for comment.
“I think most trans people will tell you that they probably are not at all surprised by the fact that somebody who is engaging in such inflammatory anti-trans rhetoric has a history of interest in transgender porn,” says Julia Serano, a trans author who writes about gender, sexuality and science. “Although, I understand, for the average person, that that might be surprising.”
While the popularity of transgender porn may seem counterintuitive given the prevalence of transphobia, Serano says that stigma actually contributes to its popularity. She relates this to a phenomenon called the eroticization of the other, which argues that stigmatized groups, like trans people, can be alluring to some members of more dominant groups because of the taboo associated with them.
“So you can experience some kind of attraction towards somebody that is intertwined with viewing them as an other. And if you’re viewing somebody as other, you’re dehumanizing them to a certain extent,” Serano told Uncloseted Media. “You’re not viewing them as a normal human being who has their own agency and autonomy and interests, you’re viewing them as just this object that you can find attractive, but you can also look down upon or view negatively.”
Transphobia in the U.S., particularly by right-wing politicians, is arguably at an all-time high. Over 660 anti-trans bills have been proposed in state legislatures this year alone, 45 of which have passed into law. Former President Donald Trump has repeatedly vowed to stop “transgender insanity,” and his campaign has spent over $19 million on ads attacking trans rights. FBI crime statistics also show that anti-trans hate crimes have been sharply increasing over the last five years.
Because transphobic people like Robinson make up a significant chunk of the market, mainstream trans porn is often designed in a way that leans into this taboo and objectification. When Dutch-American porn actress and activist Chelsea Poe started in porn in the early 2010s, she remembers how all of the major companies that produced trans porn would market their performers using slurs like “trannies” and “shemales” and would emphasize narratives about trans women pretending they were cisgendered and “tricking” men into sex.
“At the time, trans women could really only shoot for a few companies that were calling us these slurs and putting us in very demeaning, predatory kinds of situations,” Poe told Uncloseted Media, adding that the industry has changed for the better in the last few years.
Despite this, videos using slurs or harmful tropes continue to perform well on porn websites, and Google trends show that searches for “tranny porn” and “shemale porn” consistently outperform search results with less stigmatizing language like “trans porn.” On Reddit, the largest trans-related subreddit—with 1.5 million members—is r/traps, a porn-sharing group named after a derogatory term that describes trans women as nothing more than “traps” for cis men.
In the videos, trans actresses are often expected to perform in a way that matches stereotypical conceptions of trans women. Tobi Hill-Meyer, a porn actress and director, left the mainstream porn industry in part due to the sexual expectations put on her by producers. She says she and other trans performers were directed to act very traditionally feminine, and that they were expected to ejaculate on camera or act as penetrative tops even when hormone replacement therapy could make these functions very difficult.
“I wasn’t being sexy the way I wanted to be sexy, I was being sexy the way that a particular straight male fantasy wanted to see trans women,” Hill-Meyer told Uncloseted Media. “You end up with this push to do that thing that cis women can't. And I think a lot of it is an exploration of what men imagine is possible with a trans woman that they might not have in the rest of their lives.”
These depictions impact how trans people are viewed and treated in everyday life. Serano says that because of the popularity of trans porn, many cis men like Robinson—who may have never met an openly trans person—are exposed to the existence of trans women through porn, creating stereotypes that they are hypersexual, hyper-feminine sex objects.
“If people's first experience is with trans porn and these characters that only exist to appeal to men's minds, then people are going to take that and treat actual trans people in real life in that way.”
“When I was younger, I would encounter people where it was very clear that their only interactions with trans people was through trans porn, and they would say things like ‘I like girls like you,’” Serano says. “In their minds there was this archetype [of me] because of what they saw, and then when they learned that I’m a tomboyish, feminist trans woman, they almost felt as if I had done them wrong, as if I had deceived them.”
This sentiment resonates for Dee Butcher, a trans woman from Robinson’s home state of North Carolina. “Sometimes people forget that you are a human being and that you do exist past that sexual desire,” she told Uncloseted Media. “But at the same time, due to society’s way of sexualizing queer people in general, I don’t fault people because you’re literally indoctrinated to believe that [trans people] can only exist in an inappropriate setting.”
These stereotypes can have a serious impact on trans people’s lives. Associations of trans people as inherently sexual have fueled far-right campaigns such as book bans, attacks on drag story hours and allegations that teachers who ask students their pronouns are grooming children.
Additionally, the view of trans women as hypersexual can make it difficult for some to find employment outside of sex work. Poe, like more than one in ten trans Americans, entered into sex work after being unable to find another job out of high school. She says she is often treated like a “second class citizen” in the U.S. and notes persistent financial discrimination against even legal sex workers.
Serano says that this stigmatization can extend to people who openly date or are attracted to trans people.
“If they are open about their attraction to trans people, then some people are going to think that they must have a trans fetish, and they will assume that there must be something wrong with them because being attracted to a stigmatized group is viewed as illegitimate,” Serano says. However, unlike trans women themselves, “that [stigma] is something that they can distance themselves from.”
That “distancing” ends up being most harmful to trans people. Dee Richardson, another trans North Carolinian, says that they’ve been approached by many cis men who wanted sex or a relationship, but only in secret for fear of judgment.
“Everyone is worth more than that,” Richardson told Uncloseted Media. “You shouldn’t hurt somebody like that and make them be vulnerable to you and have them open themselves up to you on that level if you won’t even love them out loud.”
While PornHub's data shows that trans porn is one of the most popular genres of porn on earth, a 2018 study found that only 3.3% of heterosexual men and 1.8% of heterosexual women would be interested in dating a trans person, compared to 11.5% of gay men, 28.8% of lesbian women, and 51.7% of bisexual and other queer people.
There is evidence to suggest that Robinson and other folks who are attracted to trans people in private have a tendency toward abuse against the community. A 2018 study of trans porn viewers found a “highly significant and substantively large association” between shame about their viewership and expression of anti-trans prejudice.
Hill-Meyer says that in an effort to dissociate from that shame, people may lash out by expressing transphobic views or committing violence against the community. Worse, the perpetrators of this violence can often get away with it because of the “trans panic” defense, which the LGBTQ+ Bar refers to as a “a legal strategy wherein defendants charged with violent crimes weaponize their victim’s real or perceived sexual orientation or gender identity/expression to reduce or evade criminal liability.” And even though trans people are over four times more likely to be victims of violent crimes, this defense is still legally admissible in 30 states, including North Carolina.
Richardson says that the fear of this retaliatory violence is ever-present. They remember a recent incident after having sex with a cisgendered man, where he “clammed up” as soon as he ejaculated, and refused to speak to or even look at them until they left his home.
“At this point, I’ve entered fight or flight. Like, I’m not at home, let me just get myself on out of here,” they say, adding that his energy “literally just flipped like a switch.”
“That is a regular, normal, everyday interaction” for trans people, Richardson says. They add that people tend to value trans femme bodies less than others, and “unfortunately, that makes men think that they can do whatever they want to you, especially in an intimate space.”
While many cultural forces need to change in order to create a more inclusive society for transgender people, Hill-Meyer believes that a good place to start is by “depicting trans people in porn in a more humanistic way.”
For her, that involves reimagining the whole process of a shoot: unscripted scenes where ejaculation and orgasm are optional rather than required, and where performers are given agency to decide what they want to do on camera.
“One of the central things that I wanted to do was have a real, accurate, and holistic representation of trans people’s sexual experiences,” Hill-Meyer says. “That meant letting the performer show off what their sexuality looks like instead of conforming to somebody else’s desires for and fantasy of what they want to see trans people doing.”
Butcher and Richardson say that when it comes to covering the connections between transphobic people like Robinson and their attraction to trans people, it’s important to examine these issues with curiosity and analysis rather than simple sensationalism.
“The focus should be more on, ‘Can we dissect the psychology of this?’ Like, how are you a politician that stands for these things, why does this keep happening?” Richardson says.
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Thank you for this longer exploration. Not at all repeating your coverage of the topic but definitely relevant to what you're talking about, Wonkette published one of my pieces related to this when the CNN story first broke.
https://www.wonkette.com/p/good-god-cnn-watching-trans-porn
That's a story I'm proud of.