Grooby is one of the largest and most popular producers of transgender porn in the world. Since 1996, the company, owned by Steven Grooby, has been creating and marketing adult entertainment featuring trans women. It began with flagship site Shemale Yum, which was followed by Ladyboy-Ladyboy, Black Shemale Hardcore, Shemale Pornstar, and over two dozen others. But as awareness of trans issues has gained traction broadly, and small producers and outspoken activists within the porn industry have advocated for more respectful and realistic representation, Grooby was faced with a problem: Should it change its successful branding to reflect less derogatory terminology? If it took terms like shemale and “tranny” out of its site names, search terms, and film titles, would it lose its market share to other companies that were willing to keep using words that upset performers but beckoned consumers?

“In terms of SEO, words like shemale and tranny are searched exponentially higher than other terms” for transgender content in porn, says Kristel Penn, marketing and editorial director at Grooby. “Our product was reaching those looking for it without diluting the results of those looking for nonadult services.” But sensibilities were changing, and the pressure to abandon outdated and damaging terminology for transgender people was growing everywhere—but especially in the porn community.

And it was about time.

Trans activist and performer Venus Lux Albert L. Ortega/Getty Images

Trans pornography has always been a small segment of the overall porn industry in America—Penn says, “it has a minute market share in the adult industry overall”—but it’s always been popular within that niche. Viewership for the genre has increased steadily since the 1990s, and exploded in the past half decade. Searches for the word transgender have gone up by nearly 300 percent over the past three years on Pornhub alone, according to research the company compiled specifically for this article. And trans porn is bankable. In 2015, Adam Grayson of production company Evil Empire told IBT that trans porn was his most popular genre. “In terms of revenue per scene or movie? Hands down, without a question,” he said. “Nothing even touches it. And we sell it at a price premium…because we can get it.” Fans of trans erotica are extremely loyal, as there’s relatively little content available to them that fills their needs.

But despite the money that trans performers have made for producers, their work has been mired in cringeworthy epithets, reductive stereotypes, and predictable (and often offensively nonrepresentative) scenes for decades. Models had long been at the mercy of producers and marketers more concerned with making a buck than representing performers with dignity—part of the reason it’s been such a long, slow climb to respectability.

Transsexual performers were named on the so-called Cambria List, which discouraged the creation of pornography that included elements considered obscene by federal prosecutors back in 2001 (in anticipation of the conservative George W. Bush years). Also on the list? Bondage, interracial sex, and facial cum shots. But where most of these elements have become common in porn over the past 16 years, trans porn remained somewhat sequestered in its own corner of the industry. There weren’t many producers who were willing to take the chance, and those who did were worried about pushing the envelope too far.