Looking back, it seems obvious that these characteristics line up precisely with the popular image of trans women, but I had no reference for this sort of thinking back in 2013, when I made my first secret Tumblr account. Fresh out of college and struggling to figure out what kind of person I really wanted to be, I started a Tumblr blog (these were originally called “tumblogs,” a term that, much like “fetch,” did not happen), which was to become the most honest diary I had ever kept. I’d already been using Tumblr in an attempt to establish myself as a writer for several years, but my secret account was for my rich fantasy life where I was a girl. Except I still hadn’t figured out that I could be a girl at that point, so I settled on a less comfortable but easier-to-understand label: Sissy.
There were any number of things that gave me pause about calling myself a sissy. Sissy pornography takes many different forms and touches on a host of related kinks, like chastity and lifestyle D/s, but most prevalent and powerful is its relationship to humiliation. I didn’t especially want to be humiliated for wanting to be feminine, and I didn’t see any reason why someone should pretend to force me into doing what I wanted to do. But for the sake of adopting a label I understood, I acquiesced. It was a convenient falsehood, a context in which wanting to be a girl could be explained, and a good enough coping mechanism — for a while.
My early posts were silent reblogs of pretty vanilla porn that sometimes featured trans women. As time went on, I began posting more frequently, sharing details about my life and discussing how far I was from where I wanted to be. Although I found no erotic appeal in the idea of my identity being exposed, I found myself reaching out to others anyway, satisfying my unconscious need for community and validation. Once, I sent a self-described Chinese crossdresser a message that said, “I hope someday I can be as pretty as you.” She replied: “You can, and you will.”
By 2015, five years after discovering Tumblr and its erotic underbelly, I’d had enough of the sissy “community,” such as it was. Not only was I starting to understand the deep racism of “big black cock” fetishization, a common trope in stories written over stolen “captioned” images, but I didn’t feel comfortable expressing myself through a lens that was inherently based on my degradation any longer. Although I didn’t start out identifying as transgender, I could only put so many gorgeous trans porn creators (amateur and professional alike) in my “goals” tag before I understood that what I really wanted was to transition, and to pursue a path as my own woman. In a blog post I wrote that March, only a few months before I began my social transition, I described what I think must have been my first experience with gender euphoria: Briefly alone in my room during a party my girlfriend and I were hosting, I was overcome with the urge to dance:
