Bryon Noem, husband to former US Secretary of Homeland Security Kristi Noem, was recently exposed in a Daily Mail article for having a ‘bimbofication’ fetish. The story has generated a lot of conversation online, much of it ignoring the actual root cause of such fetishes and how they do not represent the LGBTQ+ community.
If you’ve been on the internet this week, there’s a pretty good chance that, amidst the KitKat heist and Raye’s new album, you’ve seen the latest nonsense to come out of the American government. This particular instalment is notable for just how comedically perfect it seems to be. Former Secretary of Homeland Security (the leader of ICE essentially), Kristi Noem, is once again in the public eye as her husband was recently exposed for having a ‘bimbofication’ fetish. Images leaked to the Daily Mail show her husband, Bryon Noem, pouting with a 2012-esque duck face and large balloons stuffed down his top. While this is something that usually would rightfully be an invasion of privacy, when you’re directly involved in the continued pogroms against anyone who isn’t White, I find my outrage is not present. The discourse online has been full of the expected memes and the low hanging fruit of yet another conservative man being exposed for having some perceived proximity to queerness, but I am here to dispel this misinformed take.
Who are the Noems?
Before we dive in, though, allow me to inform you of just who the Noems are. Kristi Noem served as governor of South Dakota from 2019 until 2025, when she left the post to lead ICE. Under her leadership, ICE has been responsible for atrocities and human rights abuses that are far too vast in number to fully recount. During her time as the head honcho of Trump’s personal racist militia, the organisation has murdered multiple US citizens, been accused of countless cases of sexual violence against undocumented women, and abducting children. While Noem herself is not directly responsible for the actions of individual ICE agents, she makes no apologies for their misconduct. Nicknamed ‘ICE Barbie’ online, Noem, in her tenure, took as many opportunities as she could for photo-ops at ICE detention centres, severely minimising the inhumanity of ICE. Apparently unaware that nobody is illegal on stolen land, Noem also actively rescinded legal status for over 500,000 political refugees from Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, and Haiti within the first days of her time in the role.
Noem’s brief stint as head of ICE ended with impeachment due to a litany of misconduct. This includes allegations from Noem that Alex Pretti, a US citizen murdered by ICE, had engaged in domestic terrorism. Led by Illinois Representative Robin Kelly, it was also found that Noem had engaged in self-trading, obstruction of congressional oversight of ICE centres, and violation of public trust. She was fired by the Trump Administration earlier this year. Throw in ongoing speculation of an affair with one of her chief operatives, and it would seem that the Noems are quite the messy household.
Okay, so let’s talk ‘bimbofication’
Bimbofication refers to the fetish act of cis, typically heterosexual men, presenting in ways to emulate femininity as a form of submission. Similar terms such as ‘crossdressing’ and ‘forced feminisation’ describe similar sexual acts. At their core, they predicate on the idea that a man displays sexual submission through presenting the idea of femininity as inherently weak or beneath masculinity. Like most fetishes, it is practised differently from person to person but can range from superficial modifications like clothes and makeup to the use of saline injections to temporarily give the appearance of breasts. The fetish typically explores aesthetic play, theatrics, and, in some aspects, identity exploration.
While it is obvious that individuals are free to explore their own desires behind closed doors, the bimbofication fetish is deeply evocative of a society that continues to malign femininity as weak and submissive. The story was broken by the Daily Mail, which analysed thousands of messages Noem sent to three sex workers, whom he allegedly sent over $25,000 to in exchange for engaging in bimbofication play. He wrote ‘you turn me into a girl’ and that he enjoyed ‘huge, huge, ridiculous boobs’. Again, he is allowed to explore his sexuality, but it is clear that even in his mind, by emulating women, he is inherently objectifying them. As a femme-presenting non-binary person, and as a former sex worker, it is something that I have encountered first hand.
Does this make him queer?
Something that people are getting seriously misaligned in the conversation about Bryon Noem is the misconception that these behaviours equate to a queer identity of some sort. While it is of course possible that his interest in the fetish he has been engaging in may be evocative of a deeper need to explore a gender-divergent identity, I doubt it. Namely, the Noem family, in their time as public politicians, have actively harmed the LGBTQ+ community through aggressive legislative rollbacks on queer rights. One of the most notable is Kristi Noem’s signing into law a ‘religious freedom act’ that allowed discrimination against LGBTQ+ people in South Dakota in the name of religion.
A version of femininity through a crossdressing fetish does not mean he is suddenly a secret drag queen, or trans, or non-binary, or gender queer in any way. At his core, he is still a straight man. Through my lived experience as a former sex worker, when I encountered men with similar proclivities to Noem, the emphasis was always on a narrow and hypersexualised view of womanhood, femininity, and particularly of AMAB femme people. The idea of a bimboification or a crossdressing fetish is often misunderstood, even by these men themselves, as being synonymous with trans identity. It is something that they then would project onto me. They view my femininity as an inherent weakness. For me, as someone in a queer space, but often who attracts the attention of certain straight-identifying men, the reality of that experience is that they often view my gender expression not as a legitimate part of who I am and my personhood, but as a performance of a submissive sexual identity that they want to exploit and abuse.
The reality of it is, they only perform this fetish because their interest is in submission. Frankly, it is not our place to debate his potential queerness, even if he is aligned with some pretty awful social views and is married to a woman with the blood of innocent lives on her hands. The reason Bryon Noem is on the Internet with balloons shoved down his top is not that he’s trying to navigate some kind of gender dysphoria. It’s because he is a deeply, deeply conservative, straight White man associating femininity and the performance of femininity with submission. This has nothing to do with the actual queer community.
Fetishes that view femininity as something to be subjugated, as something that is inherently weaker or lesser, are a direct product of a deeply misogynistic culture. While I was a sex worker, and more broadly when I still used dating apps, these ideas about performative hypersexualised femininity were thrust upon me very frequently. Men in these spaces do not view transwomen or femme non-binary people as actual individuals with fully actualised and nuanced identities. We exist in their minds as the real-world manifestations of porn-brained fantasies about either enacting sexual violence on us or using our identities as a conduit to engage in crossdressing fetishes, as Noem did. The assumption that my appearance has nothing to do with my actual gender identity, but instead, is a performance of a sexual fetish for their enjoyment, is deeply, deeply frustrating.
Femininity as submission
While this is a humorous conversation, particularly given the person it involves and the circumstances around it, particularly if it is true that an undocumented immigrant was the person to leak this information, the real life implications of it are not to be overlooked. The conversation has inevitably gone into a place where it misrepresents trans and non-binary people. It also deeply misrepresents the idea of what sex and submission are. A man like Noem has moved through the world with more inherent privilege than most people will ever know. Perhaps it is only inevitable that a man like him would view the idea of submission as arousing, and for him, what is more submissive than portraying a mangled image of femininity that reduces women to an amalgamation of superficial parts like large boobs and typically female-assigned clothing. When you exist in a world that was built by people like you, for you, of course, the place to go for release is in performing a hypersexual version of femininity. The use of the bimbo as the central motif of his acts isn’t accidental either.
The bimbo is a social role that encompasses so much of how the patriarchy reduces the identities of women. While the term has enjoyed reanalysis in recent years, with creators like Chrissy Chlapecka reclaiming the term and making it central to their branding, it still holds the sexist origins from which the term was coined. The bimbo is a woman of low intelligence, of little consequence, only interested in the superficial and her appearance. We all know that this idea is yet another in a collection of so many that sideline women based on their looks. When looking for the archetype most shameful, Noem and men like him run to the bimbo because to them there is nothing more taboo than being a woman who is interested in her physical appearance. Naturally, men like this also don’t think women are capable of anything more than deciding what lip gloss they wear every day – despite his wife holding and abusing one of the most politically sensitive offices in the United States government.
Degradation is a mainstay of many kinks and fetishes, and it is not wrong if that is what someone genuinely wishes to experience. The idea of degradation or submission is often explored to navigate trauma or for escapism. It is not lost on me, though, that for conservative men who drink a glass of misogyny every day for breakfast, the most degrading thing they can think of is to be a woman. My place is not to say what is or is not permissible between consenting adults, but the acrid taste of disgust in my mouth cannot be ignored when there is nothing actually submissive about femininity, and the conception that there is has inherent structural patriarchy at its core. The most degrading thing he can think of, and people like him can think of, is this mismatched, mangled version of femininity, this sort of hypersexualised, hyper reductive image of womanhood or femmehood.
Homophobia and transphobia are not ironic, and they aren’t our fault.
Amidst the discourse around Mr Noem and his oversized balloon boobs has been the overwrought idea that anyone who displays any kind of secretive behaviours like his, or publicly expresses homophobic and transphobic talking points, is secretly LGBTQ+ themselves. While that can be true, the line of argument and the continued conversation around it are problematic. What this does is take the onus of homophobia and transphobia, projected by cis-het people and kick it squarely onto the LGBTQ+ community. I get it, there is something satisfying about when a blatant homophobe is exposed for being the thing they claim to hate the most, but we cannot forget that this is not the case for every person who expresses hate towards queer people. Sadly, most people who hate us do so without having any actual connection to the community. Any discussion about homophobia or transphobia being self-perpetuated means that these people never actually take any accountability. It ignores that hatred of LGBTQ+ people is reinforced by patriarchy, by religion, by neoliberalist capitalism, by all of the things in our society, in our global society, that make it so that the most degrading thing men can do is express any kind of gender queerness, or any kind of femininity.
We’ve all seen the phenomenon, the memeification, of this idea that Grindr servers crash at every conservative convention. The hypocrisy is apparent, but even still, if you publicly stand against us, I don’t think you belong to us, even if you’re on your knees for other men behind closed doors. The onus of it is still deeply problematic. It basically positions the problem of homophobia onto the LGBTQ+ community. Even though there are issues within the community around transphobia and bi erasure, it is inherently a straight problem, not a queer one to solve. The overarching root cause of the problems that LGBTQ+ people face is not all the gay people, but straight people. Plenty of straight men are just homophobic. There isn’t a deeper story there. There isn’t a reaction to gay people because they themselves are gay, and they haven’t yet come to terms with it.
Homophobia and transphobia originate, at least in the Western world, from Christian influence over how we have sex and understand gender. It comes from eugenics, social Darwinism, which dictates that obstinate heterosexuality is natural, and that queerness is not, despite its observance in hundreds of species across the tree of life. The impact of capitalism and of colonialism cannot be ignored, too, which both have massive hands in how they have shaped the queer identity, commodifying it, suppressing it, streamlining it, and narrowing the remit of what is deemed acceptable within the LGBTQ+ community. This is particularly true when we discuss gender identity. Far too often, as an AMAB femme person, my identity has been policed, not for my queerness inherent but for my femininity. With all this in mind, I don’t think that the internet’s newest favourite shamed conservative is really cognisant of all of this. Frankly, I don’t think that conservatives have the social intelligence to understand the intimacies of LGBTQ+ identity, or the misogyny that often underscores our oppression. Even in his lime green leggings and with his pouty duck face, Bryon Noem is still a homophobe.
When we look at someone like Bryon Noem, and we immediately start rushing to have a conversation about how he’s in some kind of closet, or he has some kind of gender divergence, we harm actual queer people. We fail to recognise the fact that he’s performing this fetish, not expressing a trans or gender-queer identity. I can’t comment on his internal dialogue, but I would heavily suspect he hasn’t even connected the dots between his sessions crossdressing with the LGBTQ+ community. He’s still at his core a straight man, a straight man that’s got a left of centre submission kink. We cannot continue to position queer people at the heart of a story like this, and particularly at the heart of homophobia and transphobia that comes from conservatives.
So… does this actually matter?
In one way, it doesn’t really. Ultimately, people with crossdressing fetishes, for the most part, are not actually doing people harm. In my personal experience, they can be very offensive and very reductive, but that doesn’t mean everyone who has this particular sexual interest is. Oftentimes, they fall into the category of chasers. Chasers are men who seek out transwomen and femme non-binary people for sexual relationships. They are very frequent in the dating experiences of transwomen, and I have encountered countless chasers in the wild myself. Again, like the men I have met with crossdressing or bimbofication fetishes, they reduce the complexities and the beauty of the trans and non-binary experience into an inherently sexual identity. So often, the assumption is that, as a person assigned male at birth, I am always open to sex with anyone who offers it to me. They don’t care about us as people, merely as a warm body that appeals to their specific fetish.
Naturally, not everyone interested in dating or sleeping with transwomen and femme non-binary people is a chaser, but many are. They reduce our humanity and our personhood. It ties back into the idea inherent in Noem’s bimbofication, that femininity equates to submission, and that when a person born male identifies with womanhood or femininity, that doing so is the ultimate act of self-degradation. My femininity is where I draw my greatest strength. It is in my experiences as a femme non-binary person that I find my most authentic moments. This whole aspect of kink that relies inherently on forced feminisation or bimboification, or any of these terms, creates a Buffalo Bill-style mimic of non-binary and trans people. Our lives and our identities are misappropriated for something that actively dismisses the real strength and self-determination that living authentically in a world that continues to want to erase us has.
When I first saw the images of Bryon Noem, my first thought wasn’t that I saw someone like me, but the polar opposite. I saw a straight White conservative man who needs to play dress up and pay sex workers for the privilege because he has never known a real moment of true subjugation in his entire privileged life. Reading the discourse online and the well intentioned but harmful jokes about his apparent transness or queerness didn’t make me laugh; it just breeds more frustration and misunderstanding of transwomen and non-binary people. It pushes the conversation right back onto us and expects us to have some kind of answer for this behaviour, despite being entirely removed from it. The bimbofication fetish is inherently a man’s experience, not mine. So connected to patriarchy and misogyny, it dehumanises women and feminine people, reducing us to a few cheap clothes and temporary body modifications that come off when the bedroom door opens. My femininity is not a performance; it is my life. Bryon Noem and men like him have no conception of that, and we cannot allow them to be grouped into our experiences. My femininity is not submissive or shameful; it is assertive, and it is joyful.
