For many men who identify as women, nothing is more arousing and “gender affirming” than being treated as a sex doll. When trans activist Paris Lees was “catcalled, sexually objectified and treated like a piece of meat by men,” his response was very different from that of the average woman. To him, “it was absolutely awesome.”
The submissive sexual fantasy that underpins so much of male transgenderism has even inspired a new trans-rights slogan. The phrase “Protect the dolls” has recently been emblazoned across the chests of celebrities from Pedro Pascal to Tilda Swinton. The slogan is a far cry from the brisk moral clarity of the early feminists, “Votes for women, chastity for men” or the demand of disabled people, “Nothing about us without us.” This is because transgenderism is born not from a burning sense of injustice. It is born of men’s sexual entitlement, fed by today’s ubiquitous pornographic ecosystem.
Pornography is not only, as Andrea Dworkin observed, where the Left went to die. It’s also where the trans-identified generation was born—and where their ghoulish cheerleaders reside. From girls binding and cutting their way out of womanhood to boys who find arousal and solace in cross-dressing, the architects of pornography’s mega-platforms program both its viewers’ desires and their very identities.
In December 2023, porn programmer Dillon Rice told an undercover journalist that Aylo, his employer and the parent company of PornHub, deliberately “push[es] stuff that’s less accepted, like putting a trans male or a trans female in a scene… Test it out, see if you can get a bigger audience with it. See if you can convert somebody. Right?” This, he seemed to believe, was tantamount to a public service: “Let’s say you’re twelve years old. You’re still figuring out your sexuality. Maybe even your gender. Wouldn’t it be helpful to see not a celebration but just like maybe a normalization of something that you think is what you want? You know? Probably helps a lot.”
The idea that pornography is a tool to help people uncover their true sexuality is an inversion. Armies of developers like Rice are paid to sustain users’ attention, to keep them online, and thus to pull them away from who they are, locking them into niche fetishes that can never be realized with a real person.
Our society has utterly failed to protect the first generation to have come of age under the pornocracy. Though it may be uncomfortable, we must listen to their stories—and then take steps to make sure today’s children and adolescents aren’t lured down the same path.
Engineering Sexual Tastes—and Identities
Efforts to engineer tastes have been phenomenally successful; the market for trans porn is booming. Pornhub’s 2024 Year in Review reports that interest in the “Transgender” category is rising worldwide: “Trans” was the sixth most-searched category among men and the ninth among women. Many users of this content are now attesting that it changed them—and not for the better.
Forrest and Shane are men who, as boys, were targeted by developers like Rice—the twelve-year-olds he claimed to be helping. Both are detransitioners, and both believe that the pornography they were exposed to as teenagers pushed them toward a cross-sex identity.
Shane has now largely recovered physically from the months he spent on cross-sex hormones, and he is thankful to have narrowly escaped leaving his place at a prestigious university to become a cross-dressing prostitute. Meanwhile, Forrest underwent full and irreversible surgery, having been groomed into transition by trans-activist social workers and predatory men in Portland’s queer scene. He is now reconciled with his sex, but he deeply regrets losing the chance of ever becoming a father. Both Shane and Forrest are adamant that pornography shaped their trans identities.
Forrest explained to psychotherapists Stella O’Malley and Sasha Ayad on the Gender: A Wider Lens podcast that at about ten he began, out of curiosity, looking at erotic cartoons. Soon, he was drawn into more niche material. “The things that I started looking at originally led to a sort of general theme of female domination and degrading men, and as that got stronger, other themes got tied into it, and one of them was cross-dressing,” he told them. When he met his first girlfriend and fell deeply in love, what he had seen in the femdom (female-domination) cartoons overtook his feelings. Consumed by shame and confusion, he ended the relationship and used pornography even more intensely. He thought the men portrayed were ugly, thinking: “If I’m going to be in a position like that, I don’t want to look that ugly, because it just looks gross.” At 16, he began to watch live-action pornography. He recalls, “it wasn’t a depiction of healthy sex; it was degrading sex—but I was projecting myself into the woman at that time.”
Soon, a line was crossed in Forrest’s mind. He moved from imagining himself in the submissive role of the women he watched to identifying as a transwoman full time. Forrest’s counsellor—also a man who identified as a woman—affirmed his identity, while social workers took him to a “queer community” project. There, much older men coaxed him into transition and warned that he needed hormones and surgery while still young or he would have health problems and never pass as a woman. When he came round from the anaesthesia, “the regret was already there.” At first, “it was suppressed,” but then “it started bursting out.”
“You’re Becoming My Perfect Sissy Doll”
Like Forrest, Shane encountered pornography on the cusp of puberty when he got his first phone. As with Forrest’s obsession with femdom, Shane says he became drawn to content in which men were degraded: first “forced feminization,” then “sissification” pornography. “The first thing I ever masturbated to was that content, even though I’d always been attracted to women—and still am. Having my first ejaculation to that binds your associations: this powerful physiological experience welded to those images.” He found these themes “arousing because they played on wanting something and not wanting it at the same time.”
The idea that it is degrading for a man to perform the role of “woman” is a tacit acknowledgement of the inequality between the sexes. Within universities, a cadre of trans identified academics have sought to give this unvarnished sexism intellectual gloss. Most well-known of these is Andrea Long Chu, who wrote in his 2019 book Females that “the very act of looking at sissy porn itself constitutes an act of sexual degradation.” That’s because it puts viewers into the submissive, degraded, “female” role, training them to identify with and be aroused by it. After carefully considering the question, Chu concludes that “sissy porn did make me trans.”
For Shane, the allure of a trans identity was not only sexual. He used the fantasy of being a woman as a retreat from what he saw as the responsibilities of manhood. It was a way to express emotion without fear of judgement. Arguably, trans identified influencer Dylan Mulvaney—a gay man whose “girl” persona is simpering and giggling—is the vacuous public face of this pornified desire to become a vulnerable object in need of protection.
As Shane describes it, the sissification-hypnosis (or hypno-sissy) subgenre of porn “uses professional hypnosis techniques: binaural beats to drop you into a trance, rapid-cut flashing images, a focal point in the centre while other images run in your periphery, and a voice or captions pushing the same messages over and over. It tells you to give up being a man, to be used, to throw your life away. It’s intense enough that your nervous system hits a freeze response.”
Even off porn platforms, Instagram, YouTube and TikTok host innumerable films and reels with titles like “You’re Becoming My Perfect Sissy Doll — Sissy Hypnosis & Feminization ASMR” and “Dollification Hypnosis: Becoming a Mindless, Obedient Doll.” In these immersive fantasies, male listeners are infantilized and feminized through make-up and clothes. The climactic end point is to become a sex object.
At college, Shane began to cross-dress publicly and then to identify as a woman called “Sage.” He was feted by his peers for his authenticity and bravery. But as with Forrest, who began exploring relationships with older men on Craigslist, Shane started hooking up with men and was sexually assaulted. Meeting his girlfriend changed his life. Now deprogrammed, he reflects that sissy porn “drives you toward being used; it’s a pipeline to prostitution.” That the telos of “woman” is “prostitute” is the logic that underpins pornography.
Fetishizing Womanhood—and Childhood
While Forrest and Shane came through the other side, their experiences are far from unusual. Trawl through any forum where young men gather and you will find them musing on whether arousal to forced feminization or to sissy content proves a man has a female gender identity. In a typical Reddit transgender advice group, one young man asks whether his porn habits are evidence that he is a woman. He explains he is conflicted: “Maybe it’s underlying misogyny since it [is] hot to be degraded to me being something I might unconsciously hate is the ultimate sexual fantasy.” A chorus of men chimes in to affirm his womanly identity.
Ascribing trans identities to children is in itself a sexual fetish. So-called “egg chasers,” often older, predatory men, give advice to “crack the shells” of youngsters they consider latently trans, encouraging them to come out as the opposite sex. Details from the trial of queer activist Stephen Ireland revealed that the convicted child rapist—sentenced to thirty years—shared grotesque fantasies with his boyfriend about dosing boys with estrogen and using suction cups on their chests to mimic breast growth.
Investigative journalist Genevieve Gluck, co-founder of Reduxx, has documented pornographic subcultures in which men share these dark desires. She has uncovered forums devoted to the castration of children—some advocating chemical means, others orchidectomy—and traced links between figures in these circles and policy-work that has influenced global clinical guidelines for trans-identifying patients. In Gluck’s view, transgenderism and pornography are aspects of the sex industry—the former sells sex as an act; the latter sells sex as a product. She explains: “Gender identity conceptually reduces women to sexist stereotypes, or a fantasy in a man’s head. It is also an ideology that uniquely redefines womanhood—and to a lesser degree, manhood—as the living embodiment of pornography.”
Critics of transgenderism often fixate on the “suicidal empathy” of the liberal women and girls who prop up trans identities. It is undeniable that the public face of official transactivism is female, from human-resources departments embedding gender ideology in workplace policies to the intellectually incoherent activists who wave “protect the dolls” banners. These women are ripe for ridicule. But laughing at women who put being liked above logic will not protect young men like Shane and Forrest. It lets those driving transgenderism off the hook.
Today’s newest “dolls” have been failed by older generations too timid to take a moral stance on pornography. They have been preyed on by pornographers and exploited by a minority of men pursuing their twisted fantasies about “trans” children. If there is a duty of care, it is first to the children being targeted and then—reluctantly—to the men already captured by this machinery, to stop them doing further harm to themselves and others. That means saying no to policies that turn womanhood into a fetish and rejecting the idea that men who perform fragility are in any way vulnerable.
Protect the dolls, yes—but from themselves. And protect our kids, full stop.
