Pornhub’s Year in Review: Trans Porn Up 75%

With trans rights being whittled away in the real world, findings made by Pornhub’s Year in Review 2022 are disappointing but not surprising. This is the ninth Year in Review that Pornhub has done since 2013 (the 2020 Year in Review was skipped, which could be due to issues connected to the COVID-19 pandemic, or possibly because PornHub’s parent company, MindGeek, was sued for hosting nonconsensual content in December 2020), and it shows some interesting insights into how we as a culture consume porn.

There were some minor shifts in ratings between certain trends, but the biggest increase (+169%) was in search terms for “Reality.” Pornhub itself theorizes that this is because “Amateur” sex workers, a search term which decreased 19%, have gone full-time with their work, and the quality of their videos has improved, which leaves viewers to search for a more “homemade” feeling in other categories.

In contrast to the apparent desire for reality in porn, the Transgender category on Pornhub shot up 75% in popularity. This seems consistent with a trend of rising pornographic popularity for trans people. The 2014 Year in Review presented no analysis of popularity by category, only search terms. That year, transgender porn did not make it onto the top 20 list of popular search terms, but the slur-including search term “shemale fuck girl” rose in popularity by nearly 200%.

In 2015, trans people were also mostly left alone, not appearing in the top 20 search terms, rising search terms, nor in the top 20 categories. However, in 2016, the “Shemale” category ranked #17, and in 2017, the Transgender category ranked #11. Since then, the Transgender category has remained firmly in the top 20 categories. In 2022, though, the search term “trans” finally broke the top 20 search terms for the first time since 2018.

While it would be nice to believe that this indicates that more trans people are searching for, and able to find, porn with bodies more like our own, it seems far more likely that this is pure and simple fetishization, especially considering that among the top search terms in this category are “transgender surprise” and “gender x,” whatever that means. (On a sidenote, Pornhub noted that searches for FtM outperformed searches for MtF, but does not provide any reasoning for that. It’s likely due to the fact that searches for “trans,” “transgender,” “transsexual,” etc. default to showing transfeminine people, so the distinction is needed when searching for transmasculine performers.)

Not only that, but Lawsuit.org compiled Google search data in early June of this year and cross-referenced it with survey data from PPRI.org, finding that residents of cities with a strong transphobic bent are more likely to search for trans porn. The raw data provided by this study shows that, aside from names of specific trans performers, a vast majority of search terms include slurs like “tranny,” “shemale,” “femboy,” and “trap.”

Although distressing, this may answer a question that has surrounded the issue of trans rights: why do conservatives see us as sexual predators? Maybe it’s because they only see us in a sexual context. If they saw us less as porn categories and more as real people, they would relax a little about the concept of us existing. That shift in perspective may mean giving up some of our hard-won porn popularity, but that’s just a sacrifice we will have to make.