RN
Someone asked this in 2017 and got an answer built out of locker-room anecdote. That was a waste, because the question is one of the rare ones here that researchers have genuinely investigated, and the findings are more interesting than the guesswork.
A note on the words, since they are load-bearing
The title of this page uses a term that came out of the industry's category labels rather than out of anything trans people call themselves. It is a slur, and so are most of its neighbours in the older version of this article. It survives in the URL because the address is linked from elsewhere; it does not survive in the writing.
This is not a manners point. The category label shaped how the question got asked — as a paradox to be explained away, with the performers as the puzzle rather than as people doing a job. Ask it in plainer words, and it stops being paradoxical: some men are attracted to trans women, some of those men are otherwise attracted to women, and they watch porn featuring the people they are attracted to. That is the whole shape of it.
What the research actually found
The most-cited work here is a 2017 study in Archives of Sexual Behavior comparing men with a sexual interest in trans women against a control group of heterosexual men without that interest — 314 and 211 participants respectively.
Two findings matter. The first is that the men in the interest group reported strong attraction to cis women and weak attraction to men. On average they were roughly as attracted to trans women as to cis women. Whatever is going on, it does not resemble same-sex attraction wearing a disguise, which was the premise the question was usually built on.
The second is the authors' own framing: they concluded the pattern is better understood as an unusual variety of heterosexual attraction than as a separate orientation. That is a claim about how to categorise the data, not a discovery, and it is worth holding loosely — the same paper leans on the construct of autogynephilia, which is contested in the field and does not command consensus. A study can produce solid measurements and a debatable interpretation at the same time, and this one does.
Separately, survey work on trans-porn viewers has found that the population skews more supportive of trans people than the general public, in both dating openness and political attitude. That is correlational; nobody has shown which direction it runs. But it cuts directly against the assumption that this viewership is driven by contempt.
What is not established
Nearly everything else that gets asserted about it.
There is no sourceable figure for what share of this material's audience is heterosexual men, because the platforms that could measure it do not publish viewer orientation and could not verify it if they did. The claim that trans content earns more per view than other categories, which the 2017 article stated as fact, traces to nothing. Neither does the "research has shown" line about arousal to penises, which was cited to no one.
You will also see two competing folk explanations — taboo-seeking, and a supposed latent interest in being penetrated. Both are unfalsifiable as stated, both are applied to millions of people at once, and neither needs to be true for the observed attraction to exist. A simpler account survives the evidence: attraction to a body type is not a coded message about anything.
The part the original got worst
The old article explained the appeal partly by claiming trans women are more attractive than cis women, because they spend more on appearance, and more sexually available, because cis women are inhibited. Both halves are inventions, and the second is the older stereotype about trans women — that they are less inhibited and therefore less of a person — with the serial numbers filed off.
Trans performers are performers. The presentation is a job, the availability is a booking, and reading either as a personality trait of an entire population is the same error people make about every performer in this industry, applied to a group that gets less benefit of the doubt.
If you came here to find out what to watch
The directory keeps this current rather than freezing it into an essay: trans porn sites, the premium tier, and live trans cams if you would rather the performer be there.
And if what actually brought you here was the worry underneath the question — whether watching means something about you — the literature's answer is the boring one. Arousal is not a diagnosis. Nobody has found the hidden meaning, mostly because there is not one to find.