No Kid Needs Porn

Some “progressives” think “LGBTQ” kids need access to porn. No, they don’t. Period. End of Story.

Art by Arianne G. made with Gemini, 2026.

By Arianne G.

In June, I had the privilege of attending WoLF’s annual radical feminist summer camp. It was terrific! We talked about a wide gamut of topics. I gave a presentation on “Making Lobbying Fun and Easy.” Other speakers talked about science, RadFem foremother Ti-Grace Atkinson, religion, cancel culture, and activist strategies.

One of the presentations that has lingered most in my mind since the retreat is the one on pornography. Specifically, the discussion revolved around why so many progressives oppose laws that mandate age verification for online porn. We brainstormed various objections to such laws, and how to counteract them. We were not all on the same page all the time about policy recommendations. We had arguments among ourselves about whether such laws would be needlessly intrusive and promote the surveillance state. As it turns out, radical feminists don’t agree on everything. Surprise!

However, there was something we all agreed on, namely, that we should *not* use the LGBTQ community as an argument against such laws. Apparently, as I learned, some progressives want to do exactly that. Some progressives oppose age verification laws for porn because — get this — they would allegedly restrict the ability of LGBTQ kids to learn about their sexuality.

Good grief. I’ve heard a lot of bad arguments made in the name of “LGBTQ,” but it has been a long time since I heard one that hit me so viscerally on a personal level.

I am a millennial. I was part of the first generation that came of age with access to the internet. That means I was part of the first generation of kids to experience the callousness of the online porn industry when it came to child safeguarding. I remember the shock of seeing my AOL inbox flooded with “XXX” content, and the embarrassment of asking my family why this was happening. I remember my middle school social studies teacher warning us about the deceptive tactics adult entertainment companies use to lure kids. I remember double checking the URLs of websites to make sure the title about “Famous Asian Women” was about historical figures, not porn stars.

I am also a lesbian millennial. I witnessed the pornographication of the word “lesbian.” I witnessed how lesbian porn (mostly geared towards straight male consumption) increasingly cannibalized web searches for any sort of “lesbian” content. Indeed, I suspect this at least played a part in why so many homosexual women and girls dumped the label “lesbian” entirely and just called themselves “gay women.”

One thing I can say for sure is that at no point did access to porn help me as an LGB kid. Discovering you are LGB is a profoundly personal and grounded experience. Pornography, by contrast, is eye candy that dissociates us from real, authentic explorations of embodiment. Pornography is another person’s fantasy. In order to truly know your sexuality, you need to listen to your own body and imagination.

At least when I was growing up our elders warned us. Things are a hundred times worse for generations younger than myself. Not only is the proliferation of online porn worse, and the violence of the porn worse, but many of the so called-adults in the room are now using every excuse in the book to throw out safeguarding.

How did we get to this point?

I later learned this argument linking minors’ access to porn to LGBTQ rights was popularized by Leigh Finke, a trans-identified member of the Minnesota House of Representatives, when he testified against House File 1424. Watch his testimony here. To be clear, the argument Finke is making is not as shameless as “LGBTQ kids need porn.” Rather, Finke’s argument is that “pornography” is too vaguely defined, and such legislation will be used by Republicans as a pretext to restrict LGBTQ Sex-Ed content.

But it seems to me that any online content geared towards helping LGB (or TQ) minors should not be anything close to “pornographic.” If it’s so graphic that it could be mislabeled as “porn,” then maybe it shouldn’t be online for kids at all.

Most of the media I found helpful as a kid wasn’t raunchy. It was representative. Learning about LGB celebrities and historical figures. Coming out stories. Music by LGB artists (luckily, the legacy of 90s “womyn’s” music culture still was in the air when I was a kid). Innocuous, wholesome content that led me to accept that being lesbian isn’t “queer” at all, but a normal expression of the human experience. I learned LGB people can be talented, brave, but also ordinary. So can I.

Perhaps that’s what I find most insulting about the argument that Finke and his ilk are making. By linking LGB(TQ) rights to the dregs of the entertainment industry, we are undoing decades of progress de-linking homosexuality and bisexuality from deviance. Now, for some progressives, defending deviance is an “LGBTQ” issue.

After all, why isn’t anyone asking if straight kids need risqué online Sex-Ed lessons?