Why did a porn account repost my selfie?

A lot of transfems online, especially the "normie"[1] ones, often find their selfies reblogged by random accounts. Clicking through to these accounts, they find out that they are primarily porn accounts. Specifically, "shemale"[2] (urgh urgh urgh) porn accounts run by chaser dudes. This triggers reactions ranging from confusion to disgust. Why did this porn collector decide my lunchtime selfie was worthy of a place in his feed of "punished sissy's"? It feels like it makes no sense, especially when your selfie is (no offence) not you at your sexiest.

My personal theory is that it's a sort of analogue deepfake or magic eye picture: the selfie, no matter how benign, is rendered as sexual via the context provided by the porn posts now flanking it. It's using context and framing as a weapon to sexually objectify trans women for just existing in the world. The bigger the gap between the regularness of the selfie and the extremity of the porn is part of it. This phenomenon is simply a modern evolution of the centuries old transmisogyny society enacts on trans women, assuming everything they do or touch is sexual because the trans woman is a sexed being.[3]

Trans women are disproportionately affected by this type of cyber-harassment, but it does happen to other oppressed and sexualised people; pregnant people, amputees and visibly disabled people, fat people, etc etc. If your body type is a fetish, there might just be someone archiving public photographs of you into their porn database.[4]

It's tech-enabled sexual harassment. You get notified when your selfies are reblogged, with a direct link to the reblogger's account. For most regular people, getting their selfie reblogged is unusual. The porn curator wants you to know you've been added. Seeing your face amongst degrading stereotypes of a facet of your identity is violating. It's shocking.

So yeah, I don't know. I wrote this post because I wanted to explain my thoughts about this, without spamming in the replies of a friend who just got hit by the chaser-seflie-reblogger.

  1. By this I mean, women who exist in the real world, use bsky etc as social media. Yknow like, their avatar is their real-life face, they use their walletname as their display name. Fandom accounts and faceless accounts with the occassional selfie usually don't get hit by this. ↩︎

  2. I don't know how else to describe it, sorry. ↩︎

  3. Please forgive my butchering of transfeminist thought, it's been a while since I studied properly. ↩︎

  4. Young cis women also get hit by this, if their minority status is "local". ↩︎