Women, Trans-Women, and Trannies

Let's look to Medieval Christianity and the Porn Industry to show us the way.

How Porn Explains Everything

Portrait of the Public Universal Friend, from Memoir of Jemima Wilkinson, a preacheress of the eighteenth century; containing an authentic narrative of her life and character, and of the rise, progress and conclusion of her ministry.

Take a look at any porn website. They are divided, segregated, and categorized into niche-specific fetishes. Which is pretty smart. I mean, who wants to wade through a valley of vaginas when all you want is a chick with a dick.

Whatabouts, Bothsides, and History

Stick with me here, as the point of this post is not necessarily the rights and wrongs or good or bad of the whole Trans argument. The focus, like much of my writing, will be on the authoritarian nature of the framing of the Trans argument. And my dog in this fight stands on the street corner of anti-authority. As always.

The whole thing is just a psychological circle jerk, a mutual moral masturbation with everyone stroking their egos while telling each other how great they are. Take the trans out of this argument and it boils down to some people feeling a certain way and telling everyone else who don’t feel the same way to start feeling that way. Or else.

Insert any other issue into that argument, and I’ll react the same way. Forcing others to engage in someone else’s personal identity struggle doesn’t smack of individual liberty or personal freedom to me. It reeks of overarching authority. Hard no for me, thanks.

Where else have we seen such over-arching authority? Oh yeah - the Medieval Christian Church. The history of trans-people is as old as humanity, of course. As is the desire of human nature to exert power over others. But the modern descriptions, depictions, and deliberations of the trans-movement are all us.

Christianity and transgender people lays out a basic roadmap that is given some color by this essay on getty.edu titled Transgender Lives in the Middle Ages through Art, Literature, and Medicine. It’s concluding paragraphs should cause us to take a breath and consider all angles again. Even the ones we disagree with.

Rather than struggling with how to allow for modern categories to represent medieval realities, we can confront here how the figures discussed throughout this article push against our own expectations of gender identity in the early Christian and medieval world, rubbing against our own anachronistic notions of a binary gender construct. If we accept that transgender subjects are not a modern phenomenon—a reality which, if we choose not to accept it, also denies the lives of transgender people today—then we must recognize that these saints and other related figures could have been people that did not identify with the gender they were assigned at birth. Or, at the very least, we must acknowledge and build upon the fact that these stories would have offered up effective models with which transgender audiences could have found ways for contouring their own subjectivity.

These recalibrations in our perspectives of what transgender means in the Middle Ages reveal a range of sites in which premodern non-cis-gender persons could find potent sites for selfidentification: not as queer, abject, and aberrant social figures, but often within the central practices of Christian worship, asceticism, and empire. The notion that to be a transgender man in the Early Christian world would not have been a radical queer practice is a deeply powerful thought, as is the simultaneous existence of deeply queer transgender women, whose stories come down to us only through screeds of trans-misogyny. As historians, our work now is to perceive these subjectivities, give them articulation, and go on to look at how other intersections of identity, like sexuality and race, have contributed to the erasure and preservation of these various lives.

Here is how Wikipedia opens up their page on Transgender history

Accounts of transgender people (including non-binary and third gender people) have been identified going back to ancient times in cultures worldwide. The modern terms and meanings of transgender, gender, gender identity, and gender role only emerged in the 1950s and 1960s. As a result, opinions vary on how to categorize historical accounts of gender-variant people and identities.

False narratives, fairy tales, protest marches, and urban myths have so clouded the actual historical record and contemporary significance of transgender populations that modern pop culture is simultaneously appreciative and attracted whilst repulsed and restrictive of trans people, their sexuality, and their place in society.

Yet another social construct added on top of all of the other social constructs. The thought seems to be that if one method of control fails, let’s try another. And another. More control. And yet more and more and more. We have generations of social constructs built atop each other. And like a giant Jenga, we keep pulling our identity blocks out hoping the whole structure won’t collapse.

I mean seriously, we humans have immense capacity to do anything and everything we choose to do. And this is what we’re doing. Let’s look back to see how we got here.

An academic study written about the person that created the field of study sheds much light on this often bewildering topic.

“For me, transgender history really is about personal reinvention, transformation, and the possibilities for people to change their identity.”

We’ve gone from what is at the core a very private and significant event in the life of a human being - “a personal reinvention . . . to change their identity” - to public protestations and personal predilections. Which explains the popularity of tranny porn, and the simultaneous desire to ban it.

At a time when trans people are experiencing increased media visibility simultaneously with waves of hostile legislation, negative political rhetoric, and violence, scholars say that studying trans history is particularly valuable. So many people are “talking about trans [issues] today,” says Bayker, “and we really need to know the history in order to be able to have a productive conversation” about what it means to regulate trans lives. “What undergirds a lot of the political rhetoric about trans bodies,” says Skidmore, is the idea that “they’re new and they’re threatening.” Trans history, she says, “can have incredible power because it suggests that trans people are not new; they’ve been around for a long time.”

Rachel Williams writes a lot about this subject, and I thought this piece lays out her point of view quite well. Her website is a treasure-trove of trans-talk and her style of writing is informative, interesting, and inclusive. Even to Otherers and Outsiders.

Trans porn, trans women, and the fetishization of “tgurls”

The point is that cis men are attracted to tranny-porn because of the exotic “third-gender” taboo thing, and after beating-off becomes boring, a hookup happens. Then after doing the deed, Cis-Man gets embarrassed and murders the Tgurl in a “remorseful panic”. That’s one scenario I guess.

Another thought might be is that horny dudes get bored with straight porn and get off on shemale sex. I mean, don’t look too hard to find more extreme porn than ladyboys. Rape porn anyone? The stratification of sex pumps up profits.

The video above was made in 1907 and is considered the first pornographic film. With no nudity. Those weird French - they can fuck up a good porno. It’s worth the four minutes to look back - and lament the loss of our collective innocence.

“If it were not for the subject matter, pornography would be publicly praised as an industry that has successfully and quickly developed, adopted, and diffused new technologies,”

It’s not the first time the Porn Industry has been a leading force in society. Remember the Beta/VHS kerfuffle? Sony choked on porn. Oh, and the internet? Not Al Gore. And e-commerce? It wasn’t Amazon or eBay streaming naked people fucking. Hell, work-from-home anyone? Don’t even get out of bed working at OnlyFans. All that and a happy ending.

In a great listicle about the porn industry, this one lays out eight advances of tech ushered in thanks to porn. In the piece 8 Ways Porn Influenced Technology I found this amazing nugget

At any second in the day, there are  — at least — 30,000,000 unique visitors viewing porn.

Maybe this approach by the porn sites to basically build a buffet as an alternative to making everyone eat the same taco actually works. On Pornhub for instance, I just counted 100 categories in 11 languages.

I noticed researched on Pornhub, they label the category Transgender and the performers are called many things: shemales, sissy, Trans Girl or Trans Babe, chicks w/dicks, ladyboys, tgirls, gurls, mtfs, and good ole tranny.

Pornhub 2023 Year in Review

Then I visited Trannytube.tv. Talk about an all-you-can-fuck buffet of babes with boners. Wow - there’s 72 channels of trannies.

I came across (no pun intended) a very pointed commentary in The European Conservative that comes (ugh - again) at the argument from an angle that I hadn’t considered. It’s foundation is the Matt Walsh documentary, with almost 180 million views, What is a Woman? Don’t go all sketchy hearing his name. This is an open discussion and we are looking at every position. (pun intended-last one!)

Is Violent Porn Making Girls Identify as Transgender?

In a pretty stunning declarative opening statement, the commentary blasts porn in general and Pornhub in particular, about pushing an agenda.

Walsh’s film could only skim the surface of the transgender debate. A 2023 Pornhub press release noted that “transgender” is now the site’s third-most popular category, and this data indicates, as Michael Warren Davis observed, that “statistically, the huge majority of Republican men are watching ‘transgender’ porn.” This interest is not necessarily organic; an investigation released in December revealed that Pornhub actively pushes gay and transgender porn to help kids find their ‘kink’ and shape sexual attitudes. The evidence that digital pornography plays a key role in metastasizing sexual identities and proclivities is overwhelming.

So we see in this public/private dichotomy our own selves divided. Gen-X has been in this discussion from the start here in America. The Stonewall Riots started on June 28, 1969 when I was five years old. We were the generation that stopped coloring inside of the lines. Our cohort never fit into a box.

Singular disruptions in American society define particular generations, and naming those cohorts is a uniquely 20th Century habit. As such, the comparisons between epochs begins with Hemingway himself quoting Gertrude Stein coining their cohort the Lost Generation. Where are we now?

I found a fun read here about naming us, How Are Generations Named? that spells out the renewed acceptance and tolerance of Trans and alternate lifestyles among our latest generations. But I always come back the Gen X attitude.

Eddie Murphy had to splain himself after getting arrested with a “Transgender Sex Worker”. Fair enough. Sex work is honest work, right? Or at least hard work. I mean, helping out a hot island gurl at 445 am is God’s work. Amen. Work it bro.

Gen X and Social Activism: Fighting for Equality and Justice

And the latest salvo in the war is this UK study casting some major shade on the the whole thing. I mean, double-mastectomies for 12-16 year old’s increased 13-fold from 2013-2020. Puberty blockers for children. Removing penises. Castration.

The incidence of gender-affirming mastectomy increased 13-fold (3.7 to 47.7 per 100,000 person-years) during the study period. Of the 209 patients who underwent surgery, the median age at referral was 16 years (range 12-17) and the most common technique was double-incision (85%).

I’ve included a bibliography of material below, from all street-corners, so we can all maybe someday walk out into the middle of the street to meet. But we have to understand that the total number of trans people we are talking about is miniscule in the context of 340 million people. And their voice is loud.

Children on puberty blockers saw mental health change - new analysis

Phalloplasty for Gender Affirmation

What to know about female-to-male surgery

Demographic and temporal trends in transgender identities and gender confirming surgery

An E-Commerce Empire, From Porn to Puppies

And a playlist I found that has some interesting songs. Well worth a listen.