A chick with a dick? Well, no shock value there any more. But how about a him with a quim? That’s still new and exciting. How do you feel about the phenomenon? I don’t mind admitting that I’m still coming to terms with it.

It wasn’t that long ago  – three years? – that I got the shock of my life. (And I’m not easily shocked). A couple of times in London clubs I’d seen a singer called Lazlo Pearlman. He was a tough-looking American with a beard who sang Jacques Brel songs in a naval uniform. Not much of an act.

Then I went to the Erotic Awards with nominee Rupert Smith and on came Lazlo again. “Oh, I’ve seen him before”, I said to Rupert. How little I knew. This time Lazlo didn’t sing.

He took his clothes off. Nice body. Then he dropped his trousers and OMG! No penis!! Shocked? Well, yes. But only because I’d assumed Lazlo was a man. It had never crossed my mind that he was a female-to-male transsexual.

We’ve become used to the male-to-female transsexual with her smooth and shapely body, often more perfectly formed than that of a biological woman, sometimes even complete with a convincing looking vagina. But female-to-male transsexuals have tended not to be as exhibitionist and the few we used to see were a bit strange.

Way back in 1992 I saw a film called Linda/Les and Annie in which porn goddess Annie Sprinkle met Les (formerly Linda) Nichols. Les was a brave guy, who’d undergone primitive sex-change surgery and didn’t mind everyone seeing the results.

When he stripped off, he revealed the mess his body had become. A “penis”, made of living tissue but only vaguely resembling a real cock, had been grafted on to his body. It was just a hollow tube of flesh and virtually useless. It didn’t get hard and Les couldn’t piss through it.

He lifted it up to show that he still had his vagina underneath. The audience gasped as Les inserted first a plastic tube then his thumb inside the mock cock in order to fuck Annie. My admiration for both performers was considerable.

Fast forward twenty years to another film about a female-to-male transsexual, this time a very famous one, Chaz Bono. In Becoming Chaz, Cher’s daughter Chastity, who’s now her son Chaz, appears to be a very well-adjusted man with a nice girlfriend.

He’s a big bloke who wouldn’t look out of place at a darts match. He’s shown at a conference, where a doctor outlines advances in gender reassignment surgery. Penis transplants still haven’t been perfected and Chaz decides to leave everything downstairs as it is.

Before Chastity became Chaz other transmen had arrived at the same decision. As Buck Angel, the best-known and until recently the only transman in porn, says, “It’s not what’s between your legs that defines your gender.”

That’s certainly true in Buck’s case. He’s not just a man, he’s so manly he makes Wladimir Klitschko look like Brian Dowling. Buck is a bald, bearded, tattooed, pierced, cigar-smoking, muscular superman.

It just so happens that he hasn’t got a penis. (Mind you, his clitoris is now so big that I wouldn’t mind having it myself). There are a few transmen like Buck, maybe not as hypermasculine and sex piggy, but most of them have fit, hairy bodies, deep voices and vaginas. If you’re into bears, they’re almost enough to make you think again.

Transmen are in all walks of life. One of the handsomest has got to be Joe Stevens. He and his girlfriend make up the music duo Coyote Grace. Noah Wagoner, who graduated from college earlier this year and is college boy cute, is a transgender activist on the US East Coast.

Alex is a 25-year-old nurse in Toronto, who’s recorded (as Xanderness123) her/his entire transition on YouTube. If he gets any sexier, he’ll be on the cover of QXMEN.

In the UK the transman community is still small but right now the horniest little bugger might be Jay C., who’s on YouTube as Junkpilej. In his latest video he talks about being on testosterone for a year (“Sex drive is fucking ridiculously high. I did not expect that.”)

It’s Buck, however, the original “Man with a Pussy”, who’s the transman poster boy, partly because he’s a pioneer, partly because his porn fucks with our brains in such a liberating way. Although he calls himself the first transman porn star, that’s not strictly true.

There was an all-transman cast in Alley of the Tranny Boys in 1998. Buck didn’t come along until 2005, when he did a sex scene with Tober Brandt and Logan Steele in Cirque Noir. That was the first time a transman had appeared in gay male porn.

Later the same year his scene with a transwoman in Allanah Starr’s Big Boob Adventure scored another first. (A man with a pussy uses a strap-on to fuck a woman with a cock. Follow that!)

Buck redefines the word versatile. He has active and passive sex with men, women, transwomen, other transmen and himself. Strictly speaking, he’s gay for pay. In real life he’s not sexually attracted to men. He has a female partner. So what’s going on here and is any of it gay?

These are Buck’s own words from 2009: “I have a diversity of fans. Many of them are women and quite a few identify as straight. Although I have made some with women, most of my films co-star men. The reason for this is that the bulk of my fans are gay men, and they want to see me with men, not women.” Wow!

“BUCK ANGEL’S SO MANLY HE MAKES WLADIMIR KLITSCHKO LOOK LIKE BRIAN DOWLIN”

There are now other transmen porn stars moving in on Buck’s territory. The hottest is Billy Castro, who has a fine physique but who (at the moment at least) only has sex with biological females.

In an interview last year, he said, “The holy grail of queer sex will always be fisting because there’s nothing hotter than putting your entire hand inside of someone and feeling absolutely everything inside.”

His latest film is Billy Castro Does the Mission and I doubt whether you’ll have seen anything like it before. This man is an animal. But is this gay porn? Well, er…I just don’t know any more!

You might want to dip a toe into the transmen world by visiting www.transguys.com. Here you’ll find some products you may not have come across.

There’s the “packer”, the false penis (made by the Fleshlight people) that goes inside bulge-enhancing underpants. It can be held in place with a harness or “packing strap.” There are pumps to get the clit Buck Angel-size.

There’s a page on how to chest bind safely and another on how to pee standing up. There’s news of awards and conferences as well as features on Joe Stevens and other transmen performers.

Later you may want to move on to www.trannywoodpicturestheater.com, where you can see the first films made by a company that brings together “a diversity of trans and other queer men.” Couch Surfers and Cubbyholes were both nominated for GayVN Awards.

Transman porn still has that “shock of the new” element and you may not be ready for it. But at the very least it makes you reconsider the meanings of the words, male, female, gay and straight. And exactly who we are and what we’re attracted to. And that’s not necessarily a bad thing, is it?