How a minor tweak to porn sites could change the way we view gender identity

Although Lucy Hart identified as non-binary over the course of most of her career in porn, she says she rarely shared that part of herself within the industry. Instead, the performer and producer worked in the persona of a cis man who did “gender-bendy” things “like wearing fishnets” and getting pegged — until she came out as a trans woman in 2021.

Hart suspects some of her reticence to identify as non-binary in professional contexts stemmed from lingering discomfort with the term. Sure, it fit better than the male label she was assigned at birth, but it still didn’t match her actual gender. However, her decision to work under a cis male persona was also influenced by mainstream porn’s rigid presentation of gender.

Whether straight or gay, most porn only features permutations of cis men and women. As I’ve reported in the past, the category of trans porn has gained some mainstream visibility in recent years, but as Susanna Paasonen, a media studies professor at Finland's University of Turku who researches the adult industry points out, in the pornosphere the term “trans” almost exclusively refers to women with breasts and penises. Until recently, there was almost no room in this world for any other gender identity or expression, which functionally forced many non-binary folx to adopt binary porn personas.

Some of this narrow, binary focus just reflects prevalent perceptions of gender in society at large, and especially the invisibility of many gender identities and expressions in mainstream culture. But it’s also likely a partial byproduct of limitations baked into the back-end systems that many porn sites use to manage their content. As several industry insiders Mic spoke to explained, until last year almost all of the big porn site content management systems (CMS) only allowed users to categorize performers as, at most, Male, Female, Trans, or Not Specified.

“I’ve shot scenes with people I know are non-binary,” Hart recalls, “and before I’d post the clips I’d have to call them and say, ‘Hey, I’m really sorry but these are the only options. Which one do you want me to use?’ They’d always laugh, say they were used to it, and tell me their choice.”

This limitation is a prime example of the profound effects that wonky and often invisible internal technical systems can have on the wider world. By literally hard-coding a narrow view of gender into the unseen but ubiquitous infrastructure of the adult internet, these systems have both helped to normalize a culture of exclusion and erasure, and created a barrier to attempts to challenge that culture. All of which hurts not only porn creators but also viewers.

But Hart’s recent experience with the CMS she uses to run her own site, as well as a friend's site she helps operate, shows how surprisingly simple it can be to correct these systematic shortcomings — and the equally profound potential of those fixes.

Problems Hiding in Plain Sight

For years, Hart was forced to ask people to choose from a limited list of gender labels that didn’t fit them. She felt awful, but ultimately brushed it off as one of the unpleasant yet unavoidable annoyances that come with working in the adult industry. But over the last two years, she watched performers of color start serious discussions about the often outright racist terms used to label and search for their content, and saw that talk translate into real changes in the way several major sites titled, described, and categorized pics, videos, and performers. A handful of younger porn stars also started to openly identify as non-binary or genderfluid, and speak out on social media and in the press about the pain of being forced to misgender themselves just to exist in the industry. All of which got Hart thinking about the importance of accurate, respectful language.

Then, last year the producer whose site Hart helps manage called her to say that one of the performers they’d shot scenes with had come out as non-binary and changed their name. They wanted to know if Hart could update all their old scenes featuring this performer to reflect the change. Hart agreed to do what she could. “But when I couldn’t change their gender categorization, that was the one more time where enough was just enough,” she recalled.

So, last summer Hart sent a message to Elevated X, the CMS both she and her friend use, pointing out problems with their limited gender tag options. She asked if they’d be willing to do a customization, adding more options for their sites, and offered to pay whatever it’d cost.

To her surprise, Elevated X’s founder promptly replied, saying he acknowledged and understood the problem and his team would address it ASAP. For free. For every Elevated X user. Just weeks later, they updated their categorization system to include the options Male, Female, Trans (Unspecified), Trans Male, Trans Female, and Nonbinary, as well as a text field where users could enter their own preferred identifications, which would then become categories.

“This change is a drop in the bucket,” says Hart. “But it’s a big drop.” Because, while few people know it by name, Elevated X is one of the most widely used back-end systems in the porn world, an industry leader others follow. And while tweaking a back-end system is hardly enough to address all of the issues gender diverse performers face within the adult industry, it certainly does help to make many people feel more comfortable — and lower barriers to further change.

“This change is a drop in the bucket. But it’s a big drop.” — Lucy Hart

Despite being one of the biggest, Elevated X is hardly the only CMS used in the adult industry. Some people prefer to build their own system from the ground up. Some cobble together their sites’ back-ends using generalist, open-source tools like Drupal or Wordpress. And some use other adult industry specialist CMS tools like Adult Site Runner. But as the adult design firm AltGirlMedia put it in a recent blog post, “Elevated X is THE platform that pretty much everybody in the industry uses.”

Elevated X currently powers over 2,000 porn sites, including big studios like NewSensations and Penthouse. Several major stars, like Lisa Anne and Riley Reid, use it for their solo sites as well.

But for all its reach and silent power, Elevated X co-founder and CEO A.J. Hall tells Mic that Elevated X thinks of itself as a piece of pure, neutral digital infrastructure. “We are very purposeful in not anticipating or influencing [anything] in any way,” he says. “Literally everything we do derives from a client’s requests.”

His team built their core code in the early 2000s, back when gender diversity was not a big topic in popular discourse in the mainstream, much less the often socially regressive porn world. Accordingly, they (and most other firms) didn’t put much thought into their category labels, simply plugging in the few basic terms most people used at the time.

From the company’s launch in 2006 up until the day that Hart reached out to him, Hall claims none of Elevated X’s customers pushed back on its gender categories. So, true to its user-reactive approach, the company never took action on the issue.

Most of the adult industry insiders Mic spoke to were sympathetic to Elevated X’s strategy.

“Diversity and representation was never brought up to me by other performers when I started my sites over 10 years ago,” argues performer-creator Jayden Cole. “We are all educating ourselves today with respect to those who don’t feel like they belong in any of those [gender] categories.”

“No company could anticipate all customer requests beforehand,” added Sofie Marie, an adult performer and content creator who uses Elevated X to run her site, YummyGirl.com.

However, just because Elevated X’s narrow gender categorization options were the unintentional byproduct of a philosophy of client-centered neutrality doesn’t mean the consequences of that system were equally neutral and innocuous.

When a ‘Neutral Mirror’ Isn't Actually Neutral

Mainstream pornographers sometimes cast their industry as a neutral mirror, simply reflecting people’s desires back to them through unrestrained sexual fantasies. It doesn’t matter what social or historical forces might undergird those desires or fantasies, this line of thought runs, because porn isn’t meant to be didactic or prescriptive. It’s purely about giving people what they want.

This is a great way of explaining why mainstream porn so often features regressive gender, racial, and other tropes: It’s just a reflection of the darkest parts of our collective social id. However, this view misses the ways industry insiders can subtly, and often unwittingly, tip or angle the proverbial mirror, highlighting certain elements of society and its desires, while omitting others.

“While insiders often shrug off categorization systems as reflections of ‘how most people watch porn,’ the truth is that they simultaneously reflect and create consumption patterns.”

Rather than reflecting the world’s most prevalent fantasies and desires, porn often over-represents the most profitable genres — scenarios that producers can shoot at low costs that they know will appeal to high-income, high-spending demographics. Similarly, rather than reflecting the ways that people talk about sex and sexuality, porn producers fooling around with random ideas and sales copy have historically had a huge effect on the wider world’s sexual vocabulary.

Porn category tags specifically usually reflect how one set of producers, or one audience, talked about people and sex, in specific circumstances, at specific points in time. Flash freezing such narrow language into the enduring tools that creators and consumers have to use to organize and search out content can actually subtly teach people to narrow the way they think and talk about all things sexual, according to a slew of recent reporting. So, while insiders like performer-creator Alison Rey often shrug off categorization systems as reflections of “how most people watch porn,” the truth is that they simultaneously reflect and create consumption patterns.

Thanks to its pragmatic business logic, the mainstream adult industry overall is also typically quite slow to acknowledge changing social norms and terminology for all things sex and gender, points out Hanne Stegman, a PhD researcher at the University of Amsterdam who studies the porn world. The researcher Sophie Pezzutto has shown, for example, that sites seemingly resisted calls through the mid-2010s to stop using outright slurs to categorize trans performers and their content because they worried that shifting away from the patently disgusting terms their audiences had grown used to might cost them searchability. Companies also tend to resist more diverse or complex tags, adds Emilija Jokubauskaitė, another University of Amsterdam PhD candidate who studies the adult industry, because the fewer terms they have to sort out and parse, the easier it is to run site-guiding analytics on their user data.

Content creators use porn consumption patterns to figure out who and what to shoot. So if no one is searching for, say, non-binary people on porn sites — because they’ve gradually learned that category doesn’t exist — then the chances of a producer hiring an openly non-binary person and choosing to describe them as such (if they even could) in this profit-driven world are fairly slim.

More importantly, Stegman adds, “if consumers can’t easily find content by, for example, trans men on an adult site simply because the tag for it doesn’t exist, they might start to think that … that kind of content is somehow less [socially] acceptable than content by cis performers.”

“Limited gender categories contribute to a system in which the mainstream porn world has no incentive to hire or elevate people who might raise concerns about the limitations of those categories.”

“The absence of tags absolutely has contributed to the slow acceptance of non-binary gender identities” both within the industry and among consumers, acknowledges Rey. “Fear of public rejection has kept many performers from being open about their gender identities.” Which is often a deeply uncomfortable experience at best.

Ultimately, limited gender categories contribute to a system in which the mainstream porn world has no incentive to hire or elevate people who might raise concerns about the limitations of those categories. And in which gender diverse people have an incentive to stay silent or hidden.

The history of limited categories in common CMSs like Elevated X didn’t put the kibosh on gender diverse porn altogether, though. There is a vibrant world of queer porn out there that delights in showing all manners of people engaging in all manners of sex, and describing them in the terms that they use themselves — terms that break with mainstream porn language. But Jiz Lee, a non-binary performer-creator who works with the queer, indie studio Pink & White, points out that when the company was building its web presence in the mid-aughts it quickly realized that none of the key CMS tools out there were built for them. So, the Pink & White team felt they had to build their own CMS from the ground up — a process many other indie queer studios went through as well.

This logistical and cost barrier has contributed to a longstanding partition between the mainstream porn industry and the more free-wheeling indie, queer porn space.

“The LGBTQ+ porn community and the mainstream porn community have been separated for the most part up until very recently,” Cole, the performer-producer, stressed. “That’s part of why we didn’t hear anything about anyone struggling with web design or management tools that didn’t accommodate performers’ values or visions for gender diversity or representation.”

Lee and other gender diverse performers say they applaud Elevated X for ultimately changing its category options, acknowledging the speed, rigor, and industry- and consumer-shaping potential of the update. But any applause for this tweak must be tempered by an acknowledgment that the company’s decision to wait to enact changes until someone made a request, while logical from a client-centered business vantage, almost certainly contributed to the prolonged entrenchment of harmful, narrow gender norms in both the industry and the wider world.

A Minor Change with a Major Effect

Back-end updates like Elevated X’s rarely make big headlines — even in adult industry trade publications — no matter how profound their effects could be. Effective design changes, after all, are meant to be largely invisible.

That’s probably why this update only got a minor write-up in a few industry publications like xBiz, even though Hall seems to consider it one of his company’s biggest accomplishments in recent years.

“This is one of those changes that really needed to happen,” explains Hart, “but then once it has happened, nobody thinks about it anymore,” because it doesn’t upset everyday operations.

But that doesn’t mean Elevated X’s updated gender category options aren’t a big deal. “This has the potential to make a lot of performers feel safe and heard in a world that previously would have rejected them for being anything other than ‘normal’ genders,” Rey noted.

“If websites can present models how they want to be identified, it makes the models happier,” Steven Grooby, the owner and operator of a network of prominent trans porn sites, told xBiz, reflecting on this category overhaul. It also makes “the site more authentic and helps educate and widen the knowledge of those viewing it” of gender diversity.

“Having those diverse gender possibilities represented could effectively ‘normalize’ people who don’t fit into [common] binary categories.” — Jiz Lee

“If a porn site’s usually presumed straight and white male audience has a chance to see gender categories that they might have considered niche, especially if it’s in content that is not limited to gender-identity-fetishizing tropes,” says Lee, “then having those diverse gender possibilities represented could effectively ‘normalize’ people who don’t fit into [common] binary categories.”

“Maybe that will allow viewers to feel more confident about their own gender identities,” they added. “For some, it may even encourage the option of coming out” as beyond the cis binary.

Of course, Jokubauskaitė and Stegman, the porn scholars, pointed out that making it possible for porn sites to reflect gender diversity is only one small step towards opening up space for better accommodation and representation within the adult world. Many sites, accustomed to framing gender in a narrow light for their audience, simply won’t use this new categorization option. Or, they might choose to present gender diverse performers in limited ways that highlight their difference for gawking viewers, which would only further other, not normalize, gender diversity.

“The promotion and celebration of diverse content would be a good next step,” Stegman noted.

But everyone Mic spoke to for this article acknowledged that, with a simple tweak to its gender tag options, Elevated X has opened up a world of new possibilities for creators like Hart, who do work with gender diverse performers and producers and are dedicated to trying to present people as they want to be seen. They’ve also shown how even basic, largely invisible back-end changes can have profound effects on the world and the way it’s presented to us. And they’ve demonstrated the need for all of us to be vigilant about wonky technical systems that mediate the way the world is presented through our ever-present digital lens.

Because just one ping, like Hart’s email, could be enough to spark a small-yet-massive change.