Home » Blog » Trans Became Pornhub’s Second-Most-Viewed Category in 2025 — as Anti-Trans Laws Multiplied

Private demand for trans content hit a record just as public hostility toward trans people intensified. The paying half of that demand isn’t staying on the free tube sites.

In 2025, “transgender” was the second-most-viewed category on the world’s largest porn site — up five spots from the year before, behind only “lesbian.” It happened in the same twelve months that lawmakers across the US and UK passed some of the most restrictive anti-trans legislation on record.

Those two facts sit uneasily next to each other, and that discomfort is the story.

The category data comes from Pornhub’s 2025 Year in Review, reported by IBTimes UK in December. On a platform that draws more than 3.5 billion visits a month — traffic that rivals Netflix and TikTok combined — a category ranking is a large enough sample to mean something. What it appears to mean is a widening gap between what people seek out in private and what the public conversation says about the same subject. And where that private demand carries a wallet, it increasingly routes to subscription platforms rather than free ones.

The numbers

The trans category didn’t climb alone. “Femboy” broke into Pornhub’s global top 10 for the first time, jumping 15 places in a single year, per IBTimes UK. Search terms moved in the same direction: “trans threesome” up 67%, “trans amateur” up 49%, “queer” up 132%, “bisexual” up 88%.

Pornhub’s own framing leaned into the cultural read. Natassia Dreams, a trans brand ambassador for the platform, called it “a cultural shift,” noting that trans-led content had reached the number-two spot for the first time and that viewers were “seeking out stories and performers who break old ideas about gender and sexuality.”

There’s a demographic engine underneath it. Gen Z is now the largest group watching adult content and, by Gallup’s polling, the queerest generation on record — roughly one in five identifies as LGBTQ. Their private search behavior tracks their public identity shifts more closely than any prior cohort’s did.

The contradiction

The uncomfortable part is the timing.

The same year those searches climbed, anti-trans sentiment hardened into policy. GLAAD’s tracker recorded the equivalent of 2.5 anti-LGBTQ incidents a day between May 2024 and May 2025, and 52% of them specifically targeted transgender and gender-nonconforming people, as PinkNews reported. In the UK, 72% of trans and non-binary people said they did not feel safe because of their gender identity.

Sociologists have a name for the shape of this: the “red state paradox,” in which the regions with the most restrictive laws around sexuality tend to post the highest consumption of the content those laws target. Some research has found that areas with the strongest anti-trans sentiment show elevated rates of searching for trans-related content specifically.

None of that should be read as tidy vindication. Rising view counts are not the same as rising respect, and the visibility comes with an obvious hazard: a category ranking can reflect genuine curiosity and reductive fetishization at once, often from the same audience. That tension is real, it falls hardest on trans performers themselves, and it doesn’t resolve just because the numbers went up.

Where the money goes

Here’s the part the tube-site headlines miss: a view on a free platform is not a dollar. The demand those rankings capture is mostly unpaid. The paying version of it behaves differently — and it has been migrating toward subscription platforms, where the economics reward exactly the kind of audience the trans niche attracts.

The scale of that paying market is large and documented. Americans spent an estimated $2.63 billion on OnlyFans in 2025, AOL reported, citing OnlyGuider, on a platform with more than 300 million registered users. And the money there doesn’t come from where casual observers assume. In an OnlyGuider study of more than a million subscribers, reported by Yahoo Finance, messages drove 69.74% of all revenue while subscriptions accounted for barely 4% — and only 4.2% of subscribers spent anything at all.

That structure favors intent-driven niches, and few are more intent-driven than this one. An audience that searches out a specific category rather than scrolling a feed arrives pre-qualified: they know what they want and they convert through direct messages and pay-per-view rather than passive browsing. It’s why discovery tools index the category directly. OnlyGuider, which organizes the platform by niche, maintains a directory fans use to find top TS OF creators — a search term that barely registered a few years ago and now anchors its own vertical.

The through-line from the Pornhub data is straightforward. The free platforms measured the curiosity. The subscription platforms are where a slice of it turns into a recurring business for the performers on the receiving end.

The caveats

Read the figures for what they are. Pornhub’s rankings are search-and-view data, not a survey of identity or intent; a category topping the charts says what was watched, not who watched it or why. OnlyGuider’s spending estimates are a model built from search and financial data, not a ledger of confirmed transactions. And the demand these numbers describe is not automatically benign — visibility and fetishization travel together, and more of the former has not reliably produced more of the latter.

What the data does show, across two very different platforms, is a consistent direction: private demand for trans content rose through 2025, and the paying portion of it is concentrating where creators can actually monetize it.