F1NN5TER, Fetish, and Trans Femininity on the Internet

If you’ve spent some time on any of a few very different corners of the internet, you might have heard of former Minecraft YouTuber F1NN5TER, who recently came out as gender fluid (he/she pronouns). Those disparate online communities all reacted to that in the same slightly irritating way, boiling down to ‘I called it.’ The reason? Because up until that point, F1NN5TER had essentially been the face of femboys or crossdressing on the internet, a position attracting a huge amount of controversy and attention – controversy which has remained remarkably unchanged since her coming out.

ID: Thumbnail of F1NN5TER's video 'Coming Out'

F1NN5TER created his YouTube channel in 2015 and began to regularly upload Minecraft videos, reaching 10,000 subscribers in April 2017 and dropping out of A-Levels to dedicate herself to Twitch streaming and Youtube. In 2018, the unexpected success of a makeup challenge video led to him making content in the e-girl persona Rose, causing explosive growth in popularity. In 2020, she began the Twitch campaign Girl Week, later becoming Girl Month, in which viewers would fulfil increasingly large donation goals to extend the amount of time he would dress as a woman full-time, continuing until she ended it in 2023, saying that rather than crossdressing it just felt like dressing as himself. For a short time, viewers could donate $1000 for F1NN5TER to thank them in ‘girl voice,’ and she turned down a $300,000 donation to get breast implants. His stream became increasingly popular among trans women and she became an easily pointed to example of a cisgender straight man (he is none of those things) who was trans-positive and comfortable performing femininity. In 2023 she started an OnlyFans, collaborated with a viewer to donate $50,000 to the UK private gender clinic GenderGP to provide private healthcare to trans people who couldn’t otherwise afford it, and secretly started feminising hormone treatment himself.

In March 2024, she uploaded the video ‘Coming Out’ to YouTube, attracting an enormous amount of attention. The Times promptly published an article attempting to connect his charitable donation to private clinics’ continued treatment of trans teenagers (now horrifically banned and criminalised, a ban which the Labour government has extended indefinitely) and discredit that and trans people through the idea of her being a ‘sugar baby’ – which I find almost hilarious because it’s such an unoriginal effort at transphobia. F1NN5TER responded by pledging to repeat an equivalent donation and, frustrated with GenderGP, is in the process of setting up his own charity to provide medical care to disadvantaged trans people.

ID: Screenshot of a Twitch stream by F1NN5TER

So obviously British tabloids and their target audiences don’t like F1NN5TER very much, but she’s also been targeted by queer people influenced by the same age-old stereotypes of AMAB queerness as The Times invoked. People being harassed for stupid reasons on Twitter or Tumblr is nothing new, but I think this case is interesting as an example both of how deeply culturally ingrained many stereotypes about queerness or ideas of purity are and of how different people view performances of femininity online. The Tumblr argument against F1NN5TER (I’m not about to use Twitter to find examples) is that he propagated damaging stereotypes about transfemininity being a fetish by playing into his largely male audience’s ideas of forced feminisation with Girl Month and other aspects of his stream. The idea is that his enormous profits from this, partially enabled by his then performance of cisgender masculinity, is unethical while large numbers of trans women live in relative poverty. After Girl Month, the creation of his OnlyFans enabled new criticism of her sexualised content and his continued appeal to those who view feminisation as a fetish without herself being trans – criticism that continued undeterred after his coming out. 

The root cause of this, I think, is a sort of tribalism. It’s very easy for people from small marginalised groups to become hostile and defensive towards people seen as different and potentially threatening. F1NN5TER is gender fluid, but even many trans people’s conceptions of gender are strongly rooted in cultural stereotypes of binary gender, arbitrarily excluding her from the perceived tribe of ‘pure’ trans women. The other thing that people react against is sex and specifically sex work (although, F1NN5TER barely even does porn and he first got fully naked on OnlyFans only about a month ago. (Note: Please don’t read this and think that I watch Twitch streamers doing porn – she just made a big deal of it on social media. I like F1NN5TER for his personality, not his boobs. (Mostly.))). Queer sexuality and sex work has endlessly been portrayed as a perversion and used as a weapon against queer people, especially in the context of protecting the supposedly threatened innocence of children. This is something now easily appropriated to attack anyone falling outside binary cisgender perceptions of gender. It is easy now for queer people to fall into arguing for a sanitisation of queer spaces to make them more palatable to cishet cultural norms, problematising F1NN5TER not only for being a supposedly bad role model by making content targeted at adults, but also for not having a comparatively easy-to-explain-to-cis-people gender identity like just being a trans woman.

ID: Twitter photo of ICKY and F1NN5TER

But what F1NN5TER does is no different from many cisgender e-girls who don’t attract so much attention or criticism, or from other trans influencers. Her girlfriend ICKY, for instance, started her career on OnlyFans before beginning to create content targeted at helping trans people. Sex work has always been a compelling option for transfeminine people thanks to the refusal of our cishet-normative society to accept their presence in everyday life or other careers, but also its secret fascination with their bodies. The increased public awareness of trans people in recent years has not reduced the stereotyped basis of this fascination, with trans people continuing to be seen as inherently a sexual perversion, titillating because of their deviation from bodily norms. The ever-growing interest of predominantly cisgender men in trans sex work has led to an abundance of wildly unrealistic porn, while also launching extremely successful careers for people like F1NN5TER and ICKY. Of course at some level trans sex workers have to play into the wants of their audience who view them as a fetish, but simultaneously they disrupt an otherwise cisgender norm and, through their existence and popularity, spread awareness of transness and encourage people to look past their prejudices. Their success in sex work also enables them to act to help trans people, such as F1NN5TER’s charitable donations. But also trans sexuality should be celebrated, not hidden away as if it’s something to be ashamed of. I had a lot of sleepless nights in my early teens wondering if I was just some sort of horrible pervert, because that’s all that society and my family had taught me trans people were.

So, I just think F1NN5TER’s really cool. Obviously people on social media are always going to find something to be angry at, but I find this little silly controversy interesting to think about. F1NN5TER is someone who’s turned stereotypes of transness to her own benefit and is educating people and doing a lot to help other trans people in need, and I think that’s brilliant.

 

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