Is Violent Porn Making Girls Identify as Transgender?

This essay was published at The European Conservative, and I’ve received so much feedback from parents affirming that pornography contributed to the gender dysphoria of their children that I will be writing a follow-up. More soon.

In 2022, The Daily Wire released the documentary What is a Woman? The film featured conservative commentator Matt Walsh exploring the titular question through a combination of interviews and on-the-ground reporting, and the results were typically triggering for transgender activists outraged by the film’s success. According to X (formerly Twitter), the documentary accumulated 177 million views on the platform within a week—which, even when adjusting for shoddy metrics, makes it one of the most successful documentaries of all time.

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.

There is another very important aspect to the porn-to-transgender pipeline that has been largely ignored. For millions of young people, masculinity and femininity are being defined by online pornography—with profound and ugly consequences. Porn addiction is now ubiquitous among young people, and a generation has grown up with their view of sexuality shaped by the extreme and violent content found on major porn sites such as Pornhub. An increasingly toxic sexual environment in which sexual violence has been normalized has been the result.

A 2019 study from the Archives of Sexual Behavior, for example, found that teenage boys exposed to violent pornography are two to three times more likely to victimize girls. Dame Rachel de Souza, Children’s Commissioner of England, recently warned that porn-inspired sexual violence is on the rise even among children. “I will never forget the girl who told me about her first kiss with her boyfriend, aged 12, who strangled her,” de Souza reported. “He had seen it in pornography and thought it was normal.”

He wasn’t wrong. A new UK report indicates that “nearly half of all girls aged 16 to 21 say they’ve had a partner expect sex to involve physical aggression such as slapping and choking.” The normalization of sexual violence is the culture-wide consequence of men and boys imagining themselves as the aggressor in millions upon millions of porn scenes. Consider just a sampling of recent data:

• A British study found that 44% of boys between the ages of 11 and 16 who viewed pornography said that porn gave them ideas about sex acts they wanted to try.

• A 2016 study found that 53% of 11-16 year-old-boys and 39% of 11-16-year-old girls said that they believed pornography was a realistic depiction of sex.

• A 2021 study found that 1 out of every 8 porn videos shown to first-time users on porn home pages feature acts of sexual violence.

• A 2021 study found that 24.5% of young adults cited pornography as the most helpful resource for learning how to have sex.

Girls and boys are now coming of age in a dating landscape shaped primarily by pornography. Sexual violence has become normative not just for adults copycatting digital porn and sexual entertainment such as Fifty Shades of Gray, but for minors and children as well. Much of the sexual violence that occurs in our society is now simply a part of the way men and women—and boys and girls—treat each other, and most of this behavior takes place in the ever-growing grey zone between consent, crime, and coercion.

Consider one example: in 2019, a report in The Atlantic noted a sharp rise in the practice of choking during sex, with 24% of American women reporting that they felt fear during intimacy as a result. A 2021 survey published by The Insider revealed that one in three female undergrads between the ages of 18 and 24 at a major American university reporting being choked the last time they had sex; 58% of female college students said they’d been choked by a partner, with almost 65% reporting that it occurred during their first sexual or kissing encounter. According to the study, the practice is so common among Gen-Zers that most don’t even discuss it

For millions of girls—and boys—the answer to the question “what is a woman?” is coming from Pornhub. In that context, it’s not difficult to see why many girls would see their femininity as a net negative—something likely to make them the target of unwanted sexual attention and abuse.

Abigail Shrier refers to this trend in Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters (2020). Noting that sexual torture is common in mainstream pornography, Shrier quotes Sasha Ayad, a therapist who co-authored the book When Kids Say They’re Trans (2023). “In my experience, the kids that I work with are pretty often freaked out by porn,” Ayad told Shrier of the adolescent girls she sees in her practice. “In some cases, you know, porn did play a big role in their new adopted identity.” Shrier adds: “If you have trouble seeing the appeal of transgender life, consider that the typical dating life available to young women today doesn’t look as great as it used to be … this culture make[s] it hard to imagine why anyone would want to be a girl.

A mother going by Jennifer (not her real name) concurred with this view in a 2021 article for the Substack newsletter Parents with Inconvenient Truths About Trans (PITT) titled “Mother Warns of Influence of Pornography on Gender Identity Among Youth.” When her daughter began to identify as transgender, Jennifer began searching for clues as to why. She discovered that her daughter’s online activity included a horrifying diet of degrading pornography featuring many sexually violent themes. As Jennifer told the feminist outlet Reduxx: “I think [pornography] is one of the biggest components in all of this. These young girls are exposed to pornography and they don’t want to be on the receiving end of what they see.”

I’ve been speaking on the issue of pornography, primarily to students, for over a decade, and I can attest to the fact that many girls are terrified of what they see in pornography. In the videos they encounter, women are virtually always subjected to grotesque maltreatment and even torture. As this pervasive digital rape culture has bled into their reality, it makes sense that some girls would react to these new sexual expectations by rejecting the female identity. Indeed, it is significant that a growing number of girls are embracing androgyny and identifying as “non-binary”—many do not necessarily want to transition into boys, they simply do not want to be girls.

Mary Harrington, author of the must-read manifesto Feminism Against Progress, is opposed to what she calls the “Meat Lego” ideology of transgenderism—but is very sympathetic to the plight of teen girls today. As she told me in an interview:

If I were fifteen today, I would 100% be they/them. One notable thing about ‘enbies’ [‘NB’s, those identifying as ‘non-binary’] is that they don’t meddle with themselves medically. They just want out. What else are you meant to do if your options are to adopt this identity that allows you to wear casual clothes, dye your hair weird colours, and comes with a handy side-order of being able to castigate your elders, or be with guys who don’t even think you’re a person? If you were a fifteen-year-old girl, what would you do? Of course they’re jumping at it. I’d be jumping at it.

Why? Because despite the girl-boss rhetoric and feminism and growing female dominance in academia, adults have permitted a sick, pornified digital world to be built up around upcoming generations that sends them very different messages. Young girls are entering adolescence in a landscape utterly transformed by violent digital pornography, and the playing field resembles a 21st century sexual version of The Hunger Games. Some of them—perhaps many of them—are looking around and deciding that they don’t want to play. This is a complicated issue, and there are many reasons for the growing rejection of femininity in our culture. But one of them is certainly the degrading and vile answer that our “adult entertainment” gives to the question: What is a woman?