It finally happened. Tumblr, scrambling to get back in Apple’s good graces after being kicked off the app store for facilitating the distribution of child pornography, recently announced that it will implement a blanket ban on “adult content” beginning December 17. But although it may appear to be a well-intended act of censorial overreach, Tumblr’s incoming ban was inevitable even before SESTA/FOSTA made hosting adult content into a legal time bomb; as an anonymous former engineer told Vox, Tumblr’s owners at Verizon forced the measure so they could sell more ads on the platform.

Sex workers and erotic artists were quick to condemn the ban, noting in particular the inevitable economic devastation such measures would exact on those doing survival sex work and for whom their accumulated Tumblr followers and customers can (and often do) make the difference between eating and going hungry. (In what one hopes is only a macabre twist of fate, the December 17 deadline falls on the 16th annual International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers.)

In another curious fluke of congruence, Tumblr’s announcement came a week after The American Conservative (TAC) published an essay by Rod Dreher called “Andrea Long Chu’s Fake Vagina,” responding to several essays by Chu after her controversial New York Times op-ed about gender confirmation surgery and mental health. Already unnerved by Chu’s essay (which he calls “an icon of our radically disordered culture”), Dreher comes absolutely unglued when he reads Chu’s thoughts on forced feminization erotica, describing it as “the process of demonic possession….[and] profoundly evil.”

It feels somehow appropriate that Tumblr should announce its porn ban hot on the heels of Dreher’s moralistic rant, since it was Tumblr — or rather, its “filthy” users — that led me to understand the deep toxicity of how cis society views and defines trans sexualities.

So with that in mind, let’s talk about sissy porn.

The idea of a “sissy” may conjure different things for different people. In scientific literature, its best-known usage may be in Richard Green’s 1987 article “The ‘Sissy Boy Syndrome’ and the Development of Homosexuality,” in which Green, drawing from longitudinal analysis of “feminine” and “masculine” boys as they mature, ponders parental influence on the “link between being a ‘sissy boy’ and a ‘gay man.’” In the context of millennial pornography, “sissy” as an erotic identity takes on a more defined set of characteristics. By this definition, a sissy is someone with a penis who is fascinated by “traditional” Western feminine ideals, obsesses over lingerie and makeup, fetishizes oral and anal sex with “superior” cisgender men, and often expresses themself hypersexually.

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.