I would like to begin by asking that we all be honest about pornography. Not honest in the tedious, guilt-ridden way that characterizes so much writing about sexual representation—that dreary oscillation between prurient fascination and performative disgust—but honest in acknowledging what anyone who has spent more than fifteen minutes on the internet already knows: pornography is our era's most frank and unsentimental archive of how bodies are imagined to relate to one another. It is capitalism's unconscious made flesh, desire's most literal marketplace, and the site where our cultural fantasies about gender, power, and pleasure are enacted with a bluntness that would make even Foucault blush.
And yet, for all the reams of critical theory devoted to the body, to desire, to the violence of categorization, scholarly writing about pornography remains strangely coy. We get Judith Butler on gender performativity, yes, and Leo Bersani on the radical potential of being fucked, and even—if we're very lucky—Linda Williams on the "frenzy of the visible." But the actual mechanics of contemporary pornographic representation, particularly as it intersects with trans embodiment, remains oddly under-theorized. Perhaps this is because engaging seriously with pornography requires a willingness to be vulgar that most academics cannot quite muster. Or perhaps it is simply that the pornographic, in its relentless insistence on making the invisible visible, threatens to expose the degree to which all our theories about bodies and desire are, at base, just elaborate ways of talking about holes.
This essay is about holes. More specifically, it is about how transmasculine and trans bodies in pornography perform a kind of taxonomical crisis, destabilizing the neat binaries of penetrator/penetrated, active/passive, male/female that structure not only pornographic representation but also, if we are to believe Lacan (and on days ending in 'y', why not?), the entire symbolic order itself. The hole, in psychoanalytic terms, is never just a hole. It is lack, absence, the site of castration anxiety, the terrifying reminder of what one does not have. The phallus, meanwhile, is presence, plenitude, the floating signifier of power itself.
Transmasculine pornography—by which I mean pornography featuring individuals assigned female at birth who identify as male, masculine, or transmasculine, and whose bodies may or may not bear the marks of medical transition—scrambles this equation entirely. Here we find bodies with holes that refuse to signify absence, bodies that possess orifices while also claiming the phallus (whether fleshy, surgical, or silicone). The result is not simply a "both/and" that we might comfortably file under the capacious category of "queer"—though it is that—but rather a more fundamental challenge to the visual and conceptual grammar of penetrative sex itself.
What happens when the hole is not where it is supposed to be? What happens when the body that penetrates also contains the architecture of being penetrated? And what does it mean that we need pornography—that most maligned and supposedly simplistic of genres—to think through questions that critical theory has been circling for decades?
To understand what trans bodies do to pornographic representation, we must first understand what pornography has traditionally done with holes. And to understand that, we must, regrettably, spend a moment with psychoanalysis.
The phallus, Lacan tells us, is not the penis. (Every undergraduate who has ever suffered through a semiotics seminar knows this; it is among the discipline's most cherished distinctions, right up there with "sign/signified" and "the Death of the Author.") The phallus is a signifier, the privileged signifier, the one around which all others organize themselves. It represents presence, authority, the law. The vagina, meanwhile—or more precisely, the absence of a penis—represents lack. Woman, in this formulation, does not have; she is the site of absence, the hole that reminds man of what he might lose.
Even setting aside the obvious heterosexism and biological essentialism of this framework (and we should not set it aside, merely postpone its full indictment for later), there is something worth preserving here: the recognition that penetration is never just a physical act but a symbolic one, structured by power and animated by fantasies about presence and absence, having and lacking, activity and passivity.
Pornography, in its most conventional forms, literalizes this symbolic order with a crudeness that is almost touching. The money shot—that climactic moment when ejaculation must be made visible, external, a proof of pleasure that conveniently also serves as proof that something happened—is the phallus asserting its presence, its productivity, its refusal of the void. The penetrated body, meanwhile, is there to receive, to be filled, to have its absence temporarily occluded by the phallus's generous offer of plenitude.
This is, of course, a fantasy. It is a fantasy that requires an enormous amount of labor to maintain: camera angles that obscure certain realities, editing that compresses time, performances that subordinate actual pleasure to its legible signifiers. But it is a powerful fantasy, one that structures not only pornographic representation but heterosexual (and, let's be honest, plenty of homosexual) relations more broadly. The penetrator is active, agentic, the grammatical subject of the sexual sentence. The penetrated is passive, receptive, acted upon.
Here enters the transmasculine body.
Buck Angel—former pornographic performer, producer, and public figure—is perhaps the most visible figure in transmasculine porn, which is both a blessing and a curse. A blessing because his work opened up a space for trans men in an industry that had largely rendered them invisible; a curse because he has become something of a shorthand, a metonym that flattens the actual diversity of trans masculine embodiment and desire.
But let us linger with Buck Angel for a moment, not as an individual but as a text, a site of representational complexity that exposes the fault lines in our taxonomies of sex.
Buck Angel's body confounds. Heavily muscled, extensively tattooed, with a deep voice and facial hair, he presents all the secondary sex characteristics we have been trained to read as "male." And yet he possesses what porn, in its charmingly direct vernacular, calls a "front hole"—what was assigned at birth as a vagina and which, due to testosterone's effects, has often transformed in size and sensitivity. He penetrates. He also is penetrated. He tops. He bottoms. He is, in the language of queer semiotics, "illegible" in the most productive sense of that term.
When Buck Angel is penetrated, what are we watching? Is it, as some critics of trans porn have suggested, simply "lesbian sex" by another name, a woman being penetrated by another woman regardless of how either party identifies? This is the TERF reading, and it is as lazy as it is transphobic, requiring us to ignore embodiment, identification, and desire itself in favor of a chromosomal essentialism that even high school biology has abandoned.
Or is it, as one might argue from a more affirming but still heteronormative position, a "man with a vagina" being fucked? This preserves trans identity but maintains the binary structure: there are men and there are women, and sometimes they have unexpected genital configurations, but the categories themselves remain intact.
Neither reading captures what is actually interesting about transmasculine porn, which is the way it exposes the hole as something other than absence. When Buck Angel is penetrated, we are not watching lack being filled. We are watching a specific orifice being engaged for pleasure on a body that also claims—through hormone therapy, through surgical intervention, through self-identification, through the very act of being in porn as a man—the symbolic and literal territory of the phallus.
The hole, here, does not signify castration. It signifies, if anything, multiplicity. An embarrassment of riches.
Pornography, for all its supposed transgression, is deeply conservative in its structures. This is not merely a moral observation but a formal one. Mainstream pornography organizes bodies into a rigid taxonomy: male/female, top/bottom, active/passive, penetrator/penetrated. These binaries map onto each other with a neatness that would make Saussure weep with joy. Man penetrates; woman receives. The top acts; the bottom is acted upon.
Even gay male pornography, which one might expect to trouble these binaries given that both participants ostensibly occupy the same category, tends to preserve the active/passive split with remarkable fidelity. There is a "total top" and a "power bottom," roles that are often coded through body type (muscular versus slim), behavior (dominant versus submissive), and yes, who penetrates whom. Lesbian pornography made for heterosexual male consumption, meanwhile, simply doubles the "woman" category while preserving the essential passivity assumed to characterize female sexuality.
Transmasculine porn breaks this machine.
Consider a scene—and such scenes exist, though one must wade through considerable cisgender noise to find them—in which a trans man penetrates a cis woman with a strap-on while also being penetrated vaginally. Who is the top here? Who is the bottom? The trans man is performing penetrative masculinity, wielding the phallus in its most literal (if silicone) form. But he is also being penetrated, his body opened to receive. The woman is being penetrated, occupying the grammatically passive position. But she is also, presumably, doing the penetrating, her fingers or a toy engaging the trans man's front hole.
This is not simply "switching," that respectable queer practice where partners take turns in dominant and submissive roles. This is simultaneity, a collapse of the either/or into a both/and that fundamentally challenges the way pornography has taught us to watch sex.
The psychoanalytic implications are deliciously insidious. If the hole represents lack and the phallus represents presence, what do we make of a body that claims both? Lacan, were he alive and significantly less of a Cartesian, might call this the Real—that which resists symbolization, the traumatic kernel that cannot be integrated into the symbolic order. But perhaps that gives psychoanalysis too much credit. Perhaps the real point is that psychoanalysis, like pornography, has always been invested in maintaining these binaries because they make the world legible, parseable, safe.
Transmasculine bodies in porn do not make the world safe. They make it stranger, more capacious, and infinitely more interesting.
There is a peculiar demand placed on trans pornography that is not placed on its cisgender equivalent: the demand for authenticity. Trans porn must be "real," its performers must be "really" trans (whatever that means), their pleasure must be "genuine" (as opposed to the obviously performed pleasure of cis performers, which we politely agree to overlook).
This demand reveals something important about how we consume images of trans bodies. There is an ethnographic quality to it, a documentary imperative. We watch trans porn not merely for arousal (though certainly for that) but also for information. What does a trans masculine body look like? How does it move? What does it sound like in pleasure? The trans body in porn becomes pedagogical, tasked with teaching us not only how to desire but also how to understand, categorize, file away.
This is, of course, impossible. Pornography is always already artificial. It is performance, spectacle, labor. The money shot is not "authentic"; it is a convention, developed to prove to a camera that something has happened, that pleasure is real and measurable. The moans are often amplified or even dubbed. The positions are chosen not for pleasure but for visibility. To demand that trans porn be more "authentic" than cis porn is to hold trans bodies to a standard that is fundamentally unfair and, moreover, to miss what is actually transgressive about pornographic representation.
What trans masculine porn offers is not authenticity but complexity. It offers bodies that cannot be easily read, pleasures that do not map neatly onto our existing categories, sexualities that refuse the binary logic of penetrator/penetrated.
Consider the front hole itself—a term I use advisedly, aware of its clinical coldness but also its utility in denoting a body part that is both the same as and different from a vagina. Testosterone often changes the front hole's appearance and function: the clitoris may enlarge significantly (sometimes to the point where it can penetrate a partner), the labia may become more prominent, vaginal tissue may thin or change in sensitivity. This is not a vagina pretending to be something else. It is an orifice that exists in a space between our usual categories, neither fully the "female" anatomy it was assigned at birth nor fully transformed into something else.
When this hole is engaged in porn—penetrated, licked, fingered, fucked—what are we watching? We are watching a body part that has no stable name, no fixed meaning in our cultural lexicon of sex. The camera can show us the physical act, but it cannot tell us how to understand it. Is this "vaginal sex"? Is it something else entirely? The signifier floats free, untethered from its usual signified.
This is not a failure of representation as much as it is triumph.
To illustrate this, let us talk about Pornhub's category system, that great algorithmic sorting hat of human desire. When I last checked—and these things change, the taxonomy of online porn being nearly as fluid as gender itself—Pornhub had categories for "Gay," "Lesbian," "Transgender," and of course the default unmarked category of straight porn, which needs no label because heterosexuality is the water in which we swim.
The "Transgender" category is itself a mess, a dumping ground for anything that does not fit neatly into the male/female binary. Pre-op trans women, post-op trans women, trans men (though significantly fewer), non-binary folks, crossdressers who may or may not identify as trans—all of it gets filed under the same label, as though "transgender" were itself a stable category rather than an umbrella term covering a vast range of embodiments and identifications.
But here is the rub: any taxonomy of sex will be a failure because sex itself exceeds categorization. We can invent as many categories as we like—and the internet has certainly tried, bless its heart—but there will always be bodies, acts, desires that spill over the edges, that refuse to be contained.
Transmasculine porn does not need a better category. It needs us to abandon the project of categorization altogether, or at least to recognize it for what it is: a management strategy, a way of organizing the unorganizable so that it can be marketed, consumed, and ultimately controlled.
Every category is a kind of violence. Not always a malicious violence—sometimes it is the soft violence of legibility, the well-meaning attempt to make space for difference within existing structures. But violence nonetheless, because every category says "you belong here and not there," "this is what you are and not that," "this is how you should be understood."
The hole—the literal, physical hole—resists this violence. It simply is. It does not care about our categories. It does not know that it is supposed to signify lack, castration, femininity, passivity. It is just tissue, nerves, potential pleasure. It is only our looking, our theorizing, our relentless need to make meaning that burdens it with all this symbolic weight.
Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, in their opus of controlled substances and wild theorizing, Anti-Oedipus, called for a non-fascist life. We might extend this provocation: can we imagine a non-fascist fuck?
If fascism, in Deleuze and Guattari's expansive use of the term, is about rigid hierarchy, the organization of desire into channels that serve power, the paranoid defense against the multiplicity of the body—then most pornography is, indeed, pretty fascist. It insists on hierarchy (top over bottom, penetrator over penetrated), it channels desire into narrow and predictable forms (man desires woman, dominance desires submission), and it is paranoid as fuck about any provocative confusion of categories.
Transmasculine porn, at its best, offers something else. Not necessarily a utopian vision of egalitarian pleasure (I do not wish to be naive), but at least a complication of the hierarchies we have been taught to accept as natural.
When a trans man with a front hole penetrates a partner while also being penetrated, we are witnessing what Deleuze and Guattari might call a rhizomatic model of desire—non-hierarchical, multiplicitous, moving in multiple directions at once. The phallus is not the organizing principle here; it is one element among many, a tool that can be picked up or put down, shared, multiplied.
This is not to romanticize trans porn or to suggest that it is inherently more politically virtuous than other forms of pornography. The industry that produces trans porn is still an industry, still exploitative, still operating under capitalism's logic of commodification. Trans performers are often underpaid, fetishized, subjected to working conditions that cis performers would refuse.
But at the level of representation—at the level of what these images do to our habitual ways of seeing and understanding bodies—there is something quite genuinely radical happening. The trans masculine body in porn is an argument, a counter-statement to the rigid binaries that structure not only pornography but gender itself.
Let us return, finally, to holes.
This is my proposal: let us stop asking what the hole means and start asking what it does. Let us watch these bodies not as puzzles to be decoded but as provocations to think differently about pleasure, power, and the stubborn multiplicity of human flesh.
Pornography cannot and will not save us. It is too compromised, too complicit in its own commodification. But it can show us things that polite discourse obscures. It can make visible the bodies that other regimes of representation render invisible. And it can offer us, in its blunt and unsentimental way, a reminder that our theories about gender and desire are always playing catch-up to the bodies themselves, which have never cared about our categories and never will.
