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.
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. 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.”īy 2015, five years after discovering Tumblr and its erotic underbelly, I’d had enough of the sissy “community,” such as it was. 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. 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. My early posts were silent reblogs of pretty vanilla porn that sometimes featured trans women. 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. But for the sake of adopting a label I understood, I acquiesced. 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. 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. There were any number of things that gave me pause about calling myself a sissy.
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. 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. 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. 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. 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…. 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. (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.) 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.