Home » Blog » Transgender Was Pornhub’s Second Biggest Category in 2025. the Interesting Numbers Are Underneath It.

Almost nothing moved at the top of the rankings this year. Nearly everything moved one level down.

Read Pornhub’s 2025 Year in Review looking for the categories, and very little has happened. Read it looking for the qualifiers, and the picture is completely different.

The report, published on 9 December, put “lesbian” first among viewed categories and “transgender” second. Underneath those headline positions sit the numbers the company chose to highlight, and they are almost all modifiers: “trans threesome” up 67 per cent, “trans amateur” up 49 per cent, “lesbian MILF” up 129 per cent, “lesbian scissoring” up 79 per cent.

The same pattern runs through every section. Not new genres. Narrower requests inside existing ones.

The top of the list is close to frozen

Pornhub notes this itself. The most-viewed categories change very little year to year, and lesbian, transgender, MILF, anal and mature have between them held the top five for years. “Hentai” was the most-searched term for the fifth consecutive year.

A ranking that stable is not measuring shifting taste. It is measuring which words the site’s own taxonomy makes available. There are only so many top-level categories, they have been the same for a decade, and the ranking mostly reflects how the menu is built.

The qualifiers are where users say what they actually want, because that is the only place the interface lets them.

What the modifiers are asking for

Sort the 2025 growth figures by what the words describe, and three groups appear.

Some specify a scenario. “Office affair” grew 210 per cent and “CEO” 388 per cent, both traceable to a single viral news moment in the summer. Role Play as a category rose 98 per cent. Occupation searches followed: “employee” up 183 per cent, “boss” up 175 per cent, “driver” up 144 per cent, “plumber” up 67 per cent.

Some specify a production style. “Natural beauty” up 124 per cent, “no make-up” up 136 per cent — requests about how something is shot rather than what it contains. “Trans amateur” belongs in this group. It is not asking for a different subject; it is asking for a different register.

And some specify a configuration — “trans threesome,” “lesbian scissoring,” “lesbian strapon.”

None of these are new interests. They are old interests being stated with more precision, by users who evidently do not find the category label sufficient.

Adjacent categories are moving too

The report also has “femboy” jumping fifteen places into the top ten of most-searched terms, which Pornhub attributed to broader interest in content featuring feminine men.

Worth stating plainly, because these things get conflated constantly: that is a separate category from transgender, measuring something different, and the report treats it separately. Search data records what viewers type. It does not describe who creators are, and reading one as the other produces nonsense in both directions.

Searches for “queer” were up 132 per cent and “bisexual” 88 per cent over the same period — again, sitting alongside the categories rather than inside them.

Where specific demand runs out of road

Here is the practical problem the numbers describe.

A tube site’s taxonomy is built for genre. It has a category page, and the category page has everything in it. A viewer arriving with a specific request — a particular configuration, a particular production style — can type it into a search box and get results, because a tube site indexes clips.

Subscription platforms work the other way round. The content is behind a paywall and the profiles are not indexed, so there is no equivalent search. A viewer who has worked out exactly what they want has no way to express that against a catalogue of creators, because no such catalogue exists on the platform.

That gap gets filled from outside. Independent indexes compile public profile data into the filters the platforms never built, which is where fans go to look creators up when a category name is not enough to go on. It is a workaround for a structural absence, not a feature anybody planned.

The mismatch is worth noticing. Demand has spent a decade getting more specific. The paid side of the industry has spent the same decade offering no way to be specific at all.

What this data cannot tell you

Three caveats, and they matter.

It is one company’s self-reported data, unaudited, from a single site. Pornhub decides what to publish and what to leave out, and the report is a marketing artefact as much as a research one — it circulates every December across mainstream and LGBTQ+ press precisely because it is framed as a neutral window onto private behaviour.

Percentage growth without absolute numbers is close to meaningless. A term rising 388 per cent from a small base and one rising 49 per cent from a large one are not comparable, and the report generally does not give the bases.

And free viewing is not spending. Everything above measures what people watch when it costs nothing. It says nothing about what they pay for, which is a different behaviour with a different distribution — and the reason a category can sit second by views while the economics of producing for it look nothing like the ranking suggests.

What the data does show, reliably, is direction. Users are describing what they want in more words than they used to. The interfaces they are describing it to have not changed in years.