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One spring afternoon, two women sensually banged in a midtown Manhattan hotel room, while porn producer Courtney Trouble directed the "lusty web of lesbian sex." One goal of the shoot, of course, was to make exciting porn, but the other was to challenge the idea of what qualifies as lesbian porn — Trouble cast two of the biggest transgender porn stars in the biz, Bailey Jay and Chelsea Poe, for the girl-girl scene.

Transgender performers are getting more and more recognition in the porn world. The Feminist Porn Conference — which honors queer and transgender performers — has grown each of the three years it has existed, and just this year the "Tranny Awards" were renamed the more-P.C. "Transgender Erotica Awards." But they're still pigeon-holed, stuffed into the niche sub-genre of transgender porn within the already-marginalized genre of queer porn, whether they choose to be or not.

In the keynote speech at last year's Feminist Porn Conference, Trouble called for more porn that shows different types of people without classifying them as "other." "Put fat people in your porn without tagging it 'chubby chasers,'" Trouble challenged the producers in the audience, "Put trans people in your porn, but don't call it 'trans porn.'"

Wiped out after the lesbian shoot in the Manhattan hotel, Trouble, Jay, and Poe grabbed a lunch of Pret A Manger salads and spoke with me about the changes they're trying to make in the porn industry and what it's like to be trans women in porn.

Chelsea Poe: I consider our scene a lesbian scene, but mainstream porn would not consider that lesbian at all. I don't think even a lot of queer porn would consider that a lesbian scene. And I consider myself as much of a trans porn performer as a girl-girl performer.

Where do you draw that distinction? Why do think it's important to distinguish?

Poe: Well, it feels like trans porn performers don't even get a say in being anything other than a trans performer. I'm grouped in with all these other trans women who really don't have a lot in common with me, who shoot with cis men and really don't perform the same way as I do at all.

What distinguishes you, do you think?

Poe: I do mainly dyke porn. I think I'm the only trans performer who makes a living mainly shooting with cis women. It's extremely uncommon. I feel like none of the porn world recognizes any trans person's sexuality unless you're straight, essentially. It's almost just assumed you're straight.

Bailey Jay: That comes up a lot. They don't even break us down into smaller categories, they just use "shemale," "tranny," whatever buzzword they feel like using. They don't break us down into our preferences or what kind of scenes we do. I think that comes from the lie that we are somehow doing this for men, that we're doing this for the benefit of men, so we can have sex with men.

Poe: Exactly.

Jay: And that's just not the case. Men had nothing to do with my decision. They couldn't be further from my decision to live my life as a woman.

Courtney Trouble: The sites with all the categories have not figured out that the audience is not just made up of straight cis men yet. We're in a place right now where there are so many different kinds of porn being made, and so many different kinds of people are attracted to watching porn, but the language with which it's marketed doesn't work at all anymore.

To say that the scene we just shot was for a straight audience would mean a straight male audience. A lesbian would get a hell of a lot out of it, but it's marketed as "straight" because it's assumed that the person watching it is straight.

Jay: The default setting for humans is a straight man.

Trouble: The only other option is "gay," which is for the assumed gay male customer, so there's no lesbian porn in the gay category. So if you wanna find lesbian porn, you have to go to the straight category, which means that female customers have to say they're straight [to find porn featuring women]. There's a problem there. The whole categorization system has to change in order for porn to really embrace feminism or provide equal access. You have to get rid of the straight, gay, trans categories.

Jay: I think a lot of people automatically go to the bleach blondes with bulldog tits, and they don't want that. They don't know that there are human beings, diverse-looking people masturbating and doing stuff.

Trouble: I'm masturbating right now to the same thing over and over again, to totally mainstream porn. It's Bonnie Rotten's gangbang, but it's her second one. She's, like, in this bikini, writhing around like a little stripper, whatever, really typical, but then there's this interview sequence where they're like, "Is this your first gangbang?" and she's like, "No, I had a really sloppy one on camera before and it just wasn't good, so I really wanted to do another one where I was being well taken care of with professionals." Then they're like, "What's your goal?" and she's like, "I just want to have a lot of orgasms," and I'm just like, "Girl, I'm gonna watch this whole thing for you!" The interview just really informed me as a viewer that what I was watching was somebody's fantasies come alive, wanting to be somebody who experiences their real sexuality on camera and has it documented. And then they just totally rip her apart and I'm like, "Yes." I can watch this girl get ripped apart and I don't have to be like, "Oh no."

I think that's kind of the disease about thinking about feminism and porn is there's this idea that all porn is bad unless it's got the "feminist" tag on it, and I don't think that's the case at all. I'm probably the most hardcore feminist in the feminist porn movement, and I watch Bonnie Rotten gangbangs.

Poe: Even with all this about how great feminist porn is, there's still some problematic practices within it. Like there's still companies that won't shoot trans women.

Jay: I was tweeting about this the other day. There's a big huge company that I won't say the name of that my husband was supposed to shoot for, and they knew he was married to me or dating me at the time, and they said, "Don't even say her name on the set," because they were freaked out about HIV. And I was like, "What does that have to do with anything?" One, you can't catch AIDS from hearing someone's name, and two, I wasn't like, "I think I'm a woman and, oh! I think I have AIDS now."

Trouble: There's a huge lack of sex education, not just in the porn industry but in the entire country, and that's reflected in a lot of people who work in the porn industry. There was a syphilis outbreak [in the porn industry], like, two summers ago and the big argument was like, "We didn't know what it looked like," and I'm like, "That is your field, that is your industry. Like if you were a construction worker you would know what a fucking concussion looked like, right?"

Why do you think it's important to have porn for, by, and including different kinds of people?

Trouble: Advertising, television, even sports, fashion, all sort of give us this image of what we're supposed to try to be, so I like to use my porn to provide alternatives to that and show that you don't have to try to be anything. But at the same time, I also feel that queer people don't have a lot of things media-wise that aren't totally laced by politics, so one thing that I really like to do is separate my beliefs from the porn that I make and often will just create hardcore bondage porn that queer people can masturbate to, without thinking about identity politics or injustices. I call those "treat pieces." There was nothing political about our scene today.

Jay: No, not really.

Poe: I feel like the biggest trans porn star in the world doing lesbian porn, I feel like that's a huge thing.

Jay: That's so weird when you say that. That I'm the biggest.

Poe: You are.

Jay: It's so crazy. I should act like way more of a cunt and walk out.

Trouble: We would kiss the ground you walked on if you did that.

Jay: I had no idea. I'm gonna start right now.

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