Trans ID Female BDSM Porn Star Apollo Moon Dead at 26
Her legal name was Forest Harader. She became a organ donor.
Trans identifying woman Forest Harader began making pornography in 2020, possibly due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Her porn X account, Apollo Moon, had over 230,000 followers. She recently, 4 weeks prior to her death, announced she wanted to leave the porn industry, because of the toll it took on her mental health, but she was financially dependant on the industry. She realized her self-worth had been rooted in her appearance.
Yet despite being dependant on the porn industry for her self worth and financial stability, fundamentally, the act of sex, the thing she was selling, disgusted her.
In fact, recently she stated she's completely lost her sex drive and recoils at the thought of being seen. This despite the fact that she needs to feel seen to feel worthy. Such a paradox would drive anyone mad.
Her last tweets suggest this may have been a suicide.
Sometimes, suicidal people will want to leave a note absolving loved ones of a sense of guilt over not preventing the suicide. It's also common for loved ones who survived a loved one’s suicide to struggle with survivor’s guilt. If it's resolved incorrectly, it can lead to a sense that it's OK to commit suicide, because the fear of causing other people to feel guilty had been holding them back, or they have an irrational sense that they're supposed to be next.
And here she seems to express some resentment for people who did not reach out often enough, which may be self-referential. Yet she ends with reassurance that their illness was predetermined in some way and they cannot truly change this outcome. She may have felt quite hopeless and paralyzed, unable to ask for help directly. Sometimes people struggling with suicidal impulses just want to find a way out of their current situation. She must have felt so powerless and trapped.
Her family has stated that her death was a result of an “injury” without elaborating as to the nature of it, just that it was severe enough to lead to brain death and organ donation within the last few days.
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Tragic.
The FtM-to-porn pipeline is something that deserves more scrutiny. It seems whole communities are building up across Twitter, Reddit, Discord, and maybe other places where a lot of these women are normalising this idea that porn (and sex work too) can be liberating and progressive and whatnot. Stamping a little trans flag on a bio or proclaiming that you only work with other "queer" performers seems to suddenly legitimise these industries.
A lot of these women seem to identify as gay men, even though from what I've seen on Reddit some of them claim to have been lesbian or bi prior to transition. (This raises questions about what exactly testosterone is doing to sex drive and sexual attraction, plus the parts of the brain that regulate impulsivity and inhibition.)
These corners of the internet are hyper-sexualised and it's all about being validated for a masc appearance. So I guess for some of these women, doing "gay" porn with male costars is the pinnacle of validation.
But then you discover it's not that straightforward for a few of them. Basically, I'm not surprised that this person was in the BDSM space. I keep seeing posts from FtMs talking about being a "sub", or getting off to pain and humiliation. These desires are clearly not divorced from the pathology that makes them want to transition in the first place.
In some cases, the FtMs want to be "punished" for not being masc enough. It's a dangerous headspace which so obviously opens up opportunities for exploitation. There must be a niche but growing subculture of men who are into FtMs (itself not inherently predatory per se, though it will most likely be based entirely around objectification and fetishistic desire), but moreover, there will be a fair few sadists who are just there because they've spotted an opportunity to easily access a vulnerable and self-deluded cohort of women.
I want Buck Angel to take some responsibility for this. She's been a terrible influence over the years.