Raycast not rotating with object it casts from

I'm trying to build a generic aiming script for weapons, binoculars, and anything else that you would want to point in a specific direction. To accomplish this I'm casting a single ray in the direction I want bullets/eyes to go, and to ensure it fires from the center of the screen (where my crosshairs are at), I fire the ray from the main camera, as follows:

 public LayerMask playerMask;
 RaycastHit hit;
 void Update()
 {
     Ray ray = new Ray(transform.position, transform.forward);
     Physics.Raycast(ray, out hit, 10f, playerMask);
 }
 
 void OnDrawGizmos()
 {
     Gizmos.DrawLine(transform.position, hit.point);
 }

The problem I'm having is that when the player rotates around, the ray doesn't rotate with it, but instead remains pointing in it's original direction. My assumption is that it's using world coordinates, not local coordinates, but I thought transform.forward always gave you that gameobject's local transform, so I'm not sure what I'm doing wrong.