At eight years old, when most girls are turning the pages of Harry Potter, Rebecca was watching hardcore pornography. A year later, she began consuming yaoi or Boys Love (BL): Japanese illustrated fiction centred on romantic and sexual relationships between men. Once she reached her teen years, Rebecca says, this material “became tangled up with my trans identification.” For nearly a decade, Rebecca believed herself to be a homosexual male, running from the fate of women in pornography into the fantasy of gay male relationships.
Criticism of straight or bisexual men identifying as transgender lesbians (“transbians”) is now well rehearsed. Anyone equipped with eyes and critical faculties can see what is at work: a fetish, swollen by pornography until it spills offline. Far less examined, however, is the inverse phenomenon: straight or bisexual women coming to identify as gay men. This, too, can be traced to pornography and, more controversially, to erotic media produced by women for women. In addition to BL, this media includes fanfic stories written by fans of popular franchises and slash, a genre of fanfic that centres on imagined sexual or romantic relationships between well-known male characters, such as Star Trek’s Kirk and Spock.
Rebecca believes that the fascination some women have for gay male relationships is merely the mirror of men’s interest in lesbians. Psychotherapist Joe Burgo has a different understanding. From treating teenage girls who identify as gay boys, including some he says are “obsessed with gay male relationships,” he says:
I think it’s driven by a fear of their own burgeoning sexuality, which in our pornified culture feels scary and vulnerable. Early exposure to porn seems unavoidable these days since it’s ubiquitous. These girls then “identify out” of their sex into an imaginary sexuality that feels safer.
Testosterone-fuelled and free from the risks of pregnancy or the constraints of female bodies, sex between men is often cast as the climax of sexual liberation. This idea dates back at least as far as the ancient Greeks. A Youtube comment from a fujoshi (literally “rotten woman,” the term for a female BL fan) explains the appeal: “In BL, relationships are free from the power dynamics that so often define traditional heterosexual romances… It’s a space where love feels equal.”
It’s precisely that imagined equality that appeals to young girls whose understanding of womanhood and heterosexuality have been defined by the violence and degradation of porn. But when women step into male identities, sexual desire is not merely redirected but displaced. It is rerouted away from the female body and gradually severed from it altogether.
Fleeing Femaleness
Laura Becker is another young woman who came to believe she was a gay man after immersion in online pornography and socialising in girl-dominated social media spaces. In her case, it led to irreversible medical interventions. A tomboy from early childhood, Laura eschewed femininity, “let alone the stereotypical Barbie or pornified women” and could never relate to other girls. She feels her bawdy humour made her more masculine and recalls the only women in the public eye who were like her were treated as “comic relief.”
Laura was first exposed to pornography at eleven or twelve. She began to search for romantic scenes of kissing and lovemaking. But algorithms quickly steered her to violent content, delivering what she describes as “more intense porn that had elements of BDSM like deep-throating, slapping, crying, degradation of women, humiliation.” By fourteen, she was using pornography every day. After consuming what she described as “loving scenes,” she would be left with a sharpened sense of loneliness, which she would then combat by watching BDSM to detach.
From this material, she drew stark but inevitable conclusions. Women were merely sexual objects to be used, and female pleasure was inseparable from pain. Meanwhile, men were animalistic, and in that, more authentic. Against this backdrop, heterosexuality did not look reciprocal or tender but risky and dehumanising. Gay male romance, by contrast, seemed to offer an escape. It was not simply “men without women,” but desire stripped of the dangerous and degrading meaning that pornography had attached to femaleness.
When Laura began identifying as trans at sixteen, after reading about “gender identity” on Tumblr, she did not want to be a straight man. Gay men, she felt, seemed “healthier and more loving.” More than anything, she wanted to be “treated with humanity and loved for my mind and personality.” The fantasy of being a gay man flowed from pornography into fanfic, which she read and wrote for friends on Tumblr. Although she describes much of this writing as “wholesome, romantic and funny,” Laura now believes that some girls’ immersion in the genre masks “a desire to have the life of a different person.” If a young person lacks the agency to achieve their goals in reality, she argues, they may retreat into wishful thinking, “and that’s exactly what transgender is.”
For Laura, this meant cross-sex hormones at nineteen and a double mastectomy at twenty. She recalls crying after orgasm while using pornography, because she knew she would “never get to make love as a real gay man.” What had promised escape instead deepened her dysphoria and self-hatred. By twenty-two, she had detransitioned. In retrospect, Laura speaks less of finding a true self than trying to slough a skin of womanhood that had come to feel uninhabitable. Pornography, she says, was not only a sexual outlet but a framework through which she tried to make sense of power, rejection, and her longing to love and be loved by men.
Animal Instincts, Digital Fantasies
The digital world has a way of revealing our animal instincts. Far from becoming a realm where minds meet free of bodies, it has instead highlighted how differently the sexes tend to socialise and explore sexual fantasy. When Twilight did not satisfy her, EL James did not simply move on; she rewrote the fiction to suit herself and entertain her online friends, amplifying its erotic charge until it became Fifty Shades of Grey. Meanwhile, many men spend hours in a state of arousal, chasing the perfect pornography.
Increasingly, confused young people approach identity in the same spirit: something to be searched for, assembled, and refined online, curated and upgraded like an avatar. AI now enables users to generate ever more niche fantasies. In this setting, pornography and BL are no longer mere stimulus and response. They form part of a broader digital lifeworld in which the commonality is the desire to escape reality; the compulsion to take on a new digital form while longing impotently to embody that identity in the real world.
Helena, a detransitioner who has written powerfully about her experiences, also came to identify as male after early exposure to pornography. Unlike Laura, she describes herself as a stereotypically girly child who “hated sports, roughhousing, and getting dirty.” During a period marked by grief and an eating disorder, she found refuge on Tumblr, a space she now likens to Lord of the Flies, but with girls. Though she formed close relationships there, she recalls a rigid social hierarchy in which status was earned through claims to marginalisation. As a white “cis” girl, she was at the bottom. Identifying first as non-binary and later as a gay transman offered a route to recognition.
Both the pornography she had seen and the “sex positive” version of feminism that was popular on Tumblr terrified Helena. Fear of “dangerous, kinky, scary-sounding sex with many different men” led her to conclude: “I must not have really been meant to be a girl, because if I was, this wouldn’t all be so scary and confusing.” Like Rebecca and Laura, Helena turned to erotic stories about gay male relationships. She reflects that, because they’re written by girls, “they make sense and feel familiar instead of different and intimidating.” Getting lost in the stories and community offered Helena distance from her own body and, crucially, social currency. Meanwhile, identifying as male and fantasising about gay men felt liberating for her. Helena spent eighteen months on testosterone before ultimately reconciling with her sex.
Rebecca, Laura, and Helena are not alone. On Reddit, the slide from watching BL to identifying as a gay trans man is treated as an open secret. In a subreddit titled “Yaoi enjoyer to trans man pipeline?” one commenter explains that yaoi and slash fiction “tenderised my brain to the point where I could accept it as a possible reality. I needed something really explicitly gay, yet not too ‘real’, to start imagining what it might be like to be male.” Ironically, the consensus-building that characterises these forums is stereotypically female. Each “trans man” who affirms another poster quietly advertises her sex with every validating comment she posts. To those not immersed in such fantasies, this looks less like self-discovery than dissociation and groupthink: a flight from the female body into an imagined safer and less shameful male sexuality.
The Hatred of Women
BL is often naively defended as harmless, because it is developed by females for females. Yet as with the Twilight fanfic Fifty Shades of Grey, popular storylines often include coercion, humiliation, and rigid hierarchies reframed as romance. The hit series Jinx, for example, follows a debt-ridden young man who becomes the sexual plaything of an older, violently dominant fighter. Rape and financial coercion function as mere background elements for the plot rather than shocking aberrations.
Like pornography, BL, fanfic, and slash have grown more extreme in recent years. Within slash groups, readers can filter stories by increasingly specific practices straight from pornography. Campaigner Helen Joyce, who has researched the phenomenon, now believes “there is a ‘doom loop’ between the porn that boys and young men watch, and the fic that girls and young women write and read.” Moreover, the emergence of self-publishing online has removed any editorial scrutiny, meaning that stories metastasise into ever more twisted fantasies.
Being exposed to pornography as children does not absolve young women of all responsibility in adulthood. As with their sisters baring all on OnlyFans, participants in these fantasies may be both shaped by the pornified online ecosystem and complicit in sustaining it. Yet, while we each have choices to make, there is no escaping the hatred of women that is fostered by pornography.
Across the fractured terrain of contemporary male politics—whether conservative manfluencers, centrist dudebro podcasters, or brocialists—there is a striking point of consensus. When something goes wrong, it is women who are to blame. More specifically, it is “Karens” or “AWFLs” who are held responsible for everything from the election of Donald Trump to drag queens in libraries. White women, in particular, have become the universal punchline, the repository for a hatred that simmers beneath the surface of malestream politics. Who would want to be a woman when male commentators feel entitled to pontificate on whether our politics are dictated by our ovaries, while asserting a right to turn any image we post online into material for masturbation?
A culture that initiates girls into sex through violence, humiliation, and male entitlement should not be surprised when some seek to escape womanhood altogether. Pornography teaches that to be female is to be consumed; slash and BL offer relief by removing women from the sexual frame entirely. When desire is displaced rather than lived, and fear is reinterpreted as identity, fantasy ceases to be private. What begins as a personal means of coping with a pornified culture gradually acquires social force, demanding recognition, affirmation, and finally accommodation; until reality itself is expected to bend around the notion that women were never meant to inhabit their own bodies in the first place.
