Progress Report: From Chelsea Poe's Petition to Grooby's Re-Brand

SAN FRANCISCO—Just as much in the adult industry as everywhere else in modern society, social change takes time. Three years ago, for instance, Chelsea Poe offered up a Change.org petition which gently asked that adult companies and others "Remove Transphobic Language from Pornography." A lot has changed since that time, including one big step forward earlier this month: Trans company Grooby.com announced two weeks ago that it was changing the name of its flagship site, ShemaleYum.com, to the much more trans-friendly GroobyGirls.com. "The use of transphobic language within pornography furthers the stigma that all trans people face in all walks of life," Poe noted in her petition. "Trans women have the right to identify as they want and market their porn how they want. Non-trans people have no right to profit off of these slurs; thus this petition is calling for removal of terms like 'Shemale' and 'Tranny' from all non-trans-owned porn sites." That, of course, is quite a tall order. There are literally dozens of trans-oriented sites and quite a few adult trans series on the market that employ at least one of those terms in their title, and even more that use those words in the box cover copy, likely without realizing that at least some members of the adult trans community consider those terms to be offensive. Of course, the majority of those series were begun in the early to mid-2000s, before trans performers made known their dislike of the terms, but now that the trans community is becoming more outspoken, the question is whether those companies will take steps to avoid offending the very people that are their bread-and-butter. Just after the switch was made to GroobyGirls.com, site owner Steven Grooby was interviewed by top publicist Kristel Penn regarding the evolution of those terms from when he first began his site to the present. "There were a few minor sites when we started," Grooby said, "but the newsgroups were all ‘shemale’ and the other porn available on VHS were often ‘Shemale’ and ‘Tranny’ titles. The first other websites I saw were Shemalexxx.com and Planet Shemale. We actually started coining ‘Tgirls’ earlier than anyone else in porn, and have really been instrumental in that usage. "I think the transgender porn industry has done more to bring more girls to be authentic to themselves and embrace their gender earlier, than any other industry," he added. "Media is still catching up, almost every portrayal of a trans person is still problematic and doesn’t show them as more than a misinformed stereotype... We’ve had to recognize that the word ‘shemale’ can be considered offensive by a lot of our models, and even though they’ve continued to work with us, our aim has never been anything but to show them the utmost respect and to create an environment and company which they will to love to work in." Of course, the normalization of transgenderism in modern society has taken on added importance of late, after a certain tweet that declared transgender individuals have no place in this country's armed forces. Said tweeter recently amended his bigotry to order that no new trans people be allowed to enlist, but the fate of trans servicemembers who are already serving is still up in the air. (There's a petition about that too.) And it's not uncommon on some untra-conservative religious websites to find language like, "Trump's uncomplicated defense of common sense is nothing if not conservative," wrote George Neumayr of The American Spectator website. "He doesn't need 'commissions' to tell him whether or not enlisting men who pretend to be women and women who pretend to be men hurts military readiness. Anyone with five senses and a functioning intellect can see that it does." Or this from the Witherspoon Institute's Public Discourse website: "In today’s culture wars, yesterday’s common sense is often tomorrow’s bigotry," wrote Scott Yenor, until recently a visiting fellow at the Heritage Foundation. "No one thirty years ago imagined same-sex marriage; now opposition to it may be officially proscribed. Yesterday every kindergartener knew that boys have a penis and girls have a vagina, but the ascendancy of transgender rights seems to render questionable—even demeaning—some of the most familiar aspects of life, like sex-specific bathrooms and showers." The point is, just about anyone who reads religio-conservative websites or listens to religio-conservative radio and TV programming is already in virtual total ignorance regarding what it means to be transgender, and one of the objectives of Poe's petition is to prevent that ignorance from spilling over (to the extent it hasn't already) into the one genre that, on its better days, celebrates all of the various genders that populate our planet, and the sexual preferences they share. (Poe's petition currently has just over 2,000 signers, even with very little publicity within the adult community.) But the Grooby changeover caught the attention of Vice.com, which on August 25 posted an interview with Kristel Penn that, in addition to lauding Grooby's action, discussed how people who are unaware they're offending the very people to whom they're attracted can be guided to a more correct path. "Because of the nature of my job in particular, I work with a lot of performers one-on-one in a variety of different scenarios," she said. "Some people say, 'This is not who I am, this is porn, this is temporary.' But I have had performers who are uncomfortable with the terminology who feel it doesn't fit their identity. … What I'm in the process of doing on my end is[,] I'd like to have more education so we don't shame people who are using those terms to get to us, however they get to us. But I want to be able to put something on our site that explains, [if they got there using those terms], 'If you're looking for this kind of content, which we think you are, why don't you visit these sites?' Then we'd list our sites. I think that part of the problem is, people are ignorant and using these terms, and if we shame them as part of our process, it might turn people off from it." But Grooby himself wanted to make it clear that he's not trying to tell others what they should do regarding the offending terms. "Making these changes was a decision for our company only," he told AVN. "It was in no way intended to manipulate other companies to follow suit, as each company has its own gains and losses, as well as their own opinions on what words should be used. Having a brand like Grooby already in place helped us make a change, so if other companies were to do the same, I'd expect them to look at their existing IP and brands and see if anything fits.   "Grooby has been developing over many years into the brand that it is now, which includes a lot more than websites," he added. "Finding a suitable name that allowed us a wider platform and that importantly made the models that we work with happier became a priority. Other companies that perhaps only specialize in porn may be able to function by continuing to use 'shemale' as a brand, without having any issues." One thing's for sure: This controversy will continue as long as even some trans fans don't listen to the people whose performances they enjoy. Pictured: Kristel Penn (left) and Steven Grooby (right) at the Transgender Erotica Awards (TEA Show), photos by Chris King/@ReelSeduction; Chelsea Poe in TS Bad Girls (Transsensual/Mile High Media).