A significant number of trans people engage in sex work at some point during their lives. We’re more likely to do so because we face a perfect storm of being discriminated against in employment and rejected by our families whilst being fetishized and seen as sexual novelties. Whether we sell sex on the street, work for phone sex lines, make porn, or sell sexual services in a variety of other ways, our transness has an impact on the reasons we choose sex work and the way we do it.
The high prevalence of sex work in the trans community does not mean that all trans people support sex workers’ rights, unfortunately. As sex work is highly stigmatized, many trans people do not want to be associated with with it and will go out of their way to distance themselves by participating in whorephobia. When doing sex work as a trans person is seen as evidence of the sexual deviance that transphobes are constantly accusing us of, I can see why some trans people lack solidarity. That does not mean it isn’t a mistake to refuse to stand up for sex workers.
When you accept the premise that selling sex or doing porn are morally unacceptable acts, within a context where it is a verifiable fact that transgender people are more likely to do it, you are only furthering the idea that there is something wrong with us as a demographic. Even if you can convince individual transphobes that you are a good person among a sea of sinners, you will still be harassed and mistreated by anyone making these associations who doesn’t know your positions and is aware that you are trans.
Instead of trying to be one of the good ones, it’s time for trans people to refuse to condemn sex workers. We must combine the movement for trans rights with the movement for sex workers rights, twining them together under the umbrella of the fight for bodily autonomy.
What do the sex workers rights movement and the trans rights movement have in common?
- Demanding Bodily Autonomy
Our bodies are not government property and so what we do with them should not be up to legislators, whether we want to take HRT or to use our bodies to provide sexual services. When ownership of our own bodies is undermined for one group, it is undermined for us all.
To demand that we have a right to decide what we do with our bodies, we must also recognize that we are capable of making decisions about them in the first place. It is often claimed that sex workers cannot consent to sex with clients because being paid makes it inherently coercive, and this rhetoric is similar to the claim that trans people cannot consent to medical transition because we are delusional and therefore cannot give informed consent. In both cases, our autonomy is ignored. We are treated as if our agreement and decisions are worthless. - Suffering From Censorship
Online platforms frequently seek to censor trans people’s bodies by treating them as inherently sexual, even when we dress and pose in ways that are treated as innocuous for cis people. This is a transphobic double standard, made worse by websites having restrictions on sexual content which result in trans people being banned or suspended.
When sites disallow any kind of sexual content, primarily targeting sex workers, the knock-on effect is that queer people are censored because discussing our sexualities and genders is considered to be adjacent to material depicting sexual behaviour. If your existence is reduced to a fetish, as so often happens to trans people, any ban on sexual content will result in your expression being suppressed. - Experiencing Employment Discrimination
If an employer finds out that an applicant is trans, they may choose not to hire them on that basis. The same goes for if a potential employer finds out about an applicant’s history of sex work. This, combined with the fact that an employer may fire someone who comes out or who starts doing sex work whilst already employed, makes it more difficult for trans people and sex workers to find employment or stay employed.
The arguments used by employers to deny us jobs are similar – that they consider the way we live our lives to be immoral, concern about what customers will think, and a belief that we will be less capable of doing good work because of stereotypes they believe about us. - Requiring Healthcare Access
Trans people on HRT need access to blood tests to know their hormone levels. Sex workers need access to blood tests for regular STI screenings. We are often not well-served by our GPs and need specialist clinics where the staff are non-judgemental so that we can access the care we need, alongside treatment if we test positive for an STI or have hormone levels that are too high or low.
The existing healthcare system is not built with trans people or sex workers in mind, which means that cis people are able to access HRT much more easily than trans people and the frequency of STI testing accepted by clinics does not account for the volume of clients that many sex workers see. - Abuse From Police
Trans people and sex workers alike are often targeted by the police. Police raids are conducted on brothels, traumatizing the workers there, and police officers have been known to leverage their position to coerce sex workers into sleeping with them or to sexually assault sex workers during arrests. Trans people who are taken into custody will often be assaulted or subjected to degrading treatment, such as being insulted during strip-searches or forced into gender-segregated prisons which do not align with their genders.
Both trans people and sex workers are taken less seriously when we report hate crimes or sexual assault.
Sometimes the police will use loitering or solicitation laws that were created to criminalize sex workers as an additional tool to target trans people (particularly transfeminine non-binary people and trans women). As the laws regarding solicitation are vague and up to police discretion, a trans person who is simply walking down the street may be treated as soliciting based on the clothing they wear or the area they are walking in. Being visibly trans might be used as evidence of an intent to sell sex.
Supporting sex workers is not only the right thing to do, because we are a marginalized group who face constant abuse, but it is also beneficial for trans people who do not do sex work to ally themselves with sex workers. We have common struggles. Alone, both sex workers and trans people are relatively small groups, and when we work together we gain strength in numbers.
Transphobes and those who want to abolish the sex industry often work together, frequently under the banner of radical feminism, and we cannot afford to make sex workers or trans people into easier targets by treating our causes to obtain rights and destigmatization as separate.
(If you’re interested in reading about the spectrum of experiences that transmasculine sex workers have, rather than just my own thoughts on this blog, please check out my current project Working Guys: A Transmasculine Sex Worker Anthology!)
Jack Talks About Sex Work 