The choice over whether or not to disclose being trans and/or intersex to sexual partners can be a difficult one for many people, but the risks and pressures are especially high for those who sell sex. Instead of solely navigating the possibility of gendered violence when disclosure comes up during unexpected flirtations or planned casual sexual encounters, sex workers have to weigh up these issues against the harms that come from poverty if we cannot see enough clients. Insisting that trans and/or intersex sex workers owe information about our identities to clients will never be convincing when those sorts of concerns naturally have to be secondary to staying fed and affording shelter.
The reality of sex workers deciding not to disclose our assigned sex, medical history, or sex characteristics which are not readily apparent, is notably different from the stereotype. At the same time, sex workers are a group who are the most likely to have it applied to us because we’re likely to have sex with a higher volume of strangers than average. Across various forms of media and in online discourse we see the idea of a “trap” as a trope primarily applied to trans women; the viewer is encouraged to picture a trans woman who gets sexual satisfaction out of sleeping with straight men who she knows would react poorly to her transness. One of the main archetypes for these characters is that they will be sex workers.
While the term “trap” itself was popularized in the early 2000s to refer to anime characters, the concept it builds on is much older and broader. Supposedly the initial intent in anime fan subcultures was that the word would only refer to male characters who were convincingly presenting themselves as women, thereby tricking others into being attracted to them. A common narrative is that they will trap men by getting them to make sexual advances, at which point there would be a reveal resulting in shock and horror. Sometimes this is played off as accidental because the character assumes the other already knows the truth of their identity, however intentional deception is more common.
Even this original use of the term trap came with transphobic ideas baked into it. Characters were often portrayed as desiring to be seen as women in ways that made their expression indistinguishable from that of hypothetical trans women, with the framing of their encounters where they were outed mirroring real-world transphobia and misgendering. Due to the prevalence of transphobia among the people creating these stories, we cannot necessarily rely on anything being cleared up by the words of writers or animators. Within the space of a few years the terminology had spread to other kinds of fictional media, porn, and labelling public figures who were trans or gender non-conforming.
Rhetoric that not disclosing assigned sex amounts to a predatory trick has existed long before the most recent label for the stereotype. The objection to non-disclosure is almost always framed around a potential sexual partner having the right to know if a woman they’re sleeping with “used to be a man” or “is really a man”. A disgust reaction to this sort of realisation is ingrained in the public through the media we consume, from films like Ace Ventura: Pet Detective to episodes of Law and Order: Special Victims Unit.
Trans women who are able to be stealth during sexual interactions, either because they have had bottom surgery or because the sex acts they engage in don’t involve their genitals being seen, are not being deceptive about their gender. What is being kept a secret is a medical history, a birth assignment, or status as a member of a marginalized group. Rather than being titillated by going stealth as is implied in fiction and stated outright by newspaper headlines about trans panic murders, trans women in real life are much more likely to be terrified of a partner finding out because they might enact violence if they do. It is this potential for violence at a significant scale that keeps trans sex workers from being open. For those selling sex, there is no benefit to the additional intimacy that can be gained through honesty and openness.
If a trans woman who sells sex does disclose her transness, she will most likely make efforts to inform clients before she meets them face-to-face. Those who advertise online have a much easier time with this, because they can include it in their profiles on escorting websites and make it clear in their tag lines and usernames. If they work in a brothel environment, the choice over whether to disclose may be made for them by the “maid” (secretary arranging bookings) or by the brothel owner. With these platforms and other people as a buffer, clients who become angry will express that emotion at a much safer distance and hopefully seek another outlet for their sexual frustration instead of resorting to violence. On the street, telling clients in person is the only option and the proximity carries an added level of risk.
If a trans woman who has had vaginoplasty advertises heavily featuring the fact she is trans, clients will expect her to have a penis. She can explain her bottom surgery results in the main body of her advertisement, however many clients skim and do not fully read the information presented to them. This can lead to them becoming angry for a different reason if a sex worker does not clarify multiple times over text or the phone, feeling misled, and walk-outs from bookings. Chasers who only meet with trans women are the most likely to react this way.
When it comes to clients who do read a trans woman’s entire profile where she mentions being trans and having had vaginoplasty, who are interested in both trans and cis women, they are still less likely to book her because of the effects of cis privilege. As they see it, if they’re going to pay for sex with someone who has a vagina there’s no reason to see a trans woman when they could see a cis woman instead. To compete with the way these cis women are seen as more desirable on the basis of being presumed not to have received surgical intervention, a trans woman may have to lower her prices and see more clients to earn the same amount of money.
Cis people having a total lack of awareness of gender diversity among trans people also puts many non-binary sex workers into the difficult position of having to choose a box to shove themselves into so clients won’t click away from their ads. In practice, this means transfeminine non-binary people either have to market themselves as binary trans women or as men who crossdress. Trans women have more earning potential out of these two options, in no small part because of the chaser demographic, so this means most transfeminine non-binary sex workers face the same issues as the trans women who are their peers whilst having access to less concise language to explain their struggles.
Intersex women frequently suffer as a result of the same prejudices that trans women face, though the challenges and their options to combat them differ. While the average client is likely to be able to conceptualize the body of a trans woman with or without bottom surgery, though they will probably fail to grasp how bodily functions are changed by HRT, they typically have no frame of reference for what an intersex body might look like.
Intersex women who have genitalia that it not easily distinguishable from cis perisex women may be targeted by clients over secondary sexual characteristics and the effects of hormones (like facial hair, height, deep voice), largely as an objection to perceived gender non-conformity. Those who have genital differences are more likely to be assumed trans, including if they have had surgery at any stage in development. Scarring around the vulva combined with other signs of being intersex may cause clients to assume that the intersex women they see are actually trans women trying to work while stealth, because that is the only possibility they are familiar with.
Among the intersex sex workers I have known, most of whom are women, there is a great deal of solidarity with trans sex workers. It is not always paid back in kind. Issues they are also impacted by are framed as misplaced transphobia, rather than being understood as intersexism which overlaps with transmisogyny to produce similar effects. When intersex sex workers are able to explain their identities to clients, it is not as though they are suddenly accepted and face no threats of violence.
Non-disclosure may function differently among trans men, intersex men and some non-binary people. Though exceptions exist, as those of us who’ve given paid blowjobs in bathrooms at clubs can attest, most transmasculine people who hide our transness to sell sex do so by claiming to be cis women. Going stealth to sell sex is rare because it simply doesn’t pay as well to be presumed to be a cis man selling sex as it does to work under the guise of being a cis woman or even to be openly trans. The demand for paid sex with women is much higher than the demand for paid sex with men.
Some intersex men may also be able to claim to be cis perisex women for work, but those who cannot are left in the complicated position of having to navigate the gay men’s world of escorting whilst being passed over based on assumptions of transness. Many trans women wait until they reach a certain point in transition before changing over their escorting profiles from gay men’s sites and advertising as women, so intersex men with breast tissue or other traits associated with the use of estrogen HRT may be assumed to be doing the same and lose out on clientele. If these traits don’t become apparent until after meeting, explanations given in the moment are likely to be disbelieved or taken as excuses.
Transphobic and intersexist clients can still become angry upon the realization that someone they booked is a trans and/or intersex man, so the threat of violence does not disappear because of the difference in circumstances. For trans men, a client’s frustration that they didn’t book the cis woman they believed they’d chosen is typically combined with a lack of belief that trans men are actually men. This means that the narrative about deception can’t be mapped onto trans men as a group in the same way it is mapped onto trans women. The framing instead is that the clients have been ripped off somehow, since the sex worker they met with doesn’t fully live up to their fantasy by not being feminine enough. For intersex men, clients may view them as men based on the assumption that they are perisex and assigned male, yet still be disappointed over the changes they presume the sex worker will go through as they transition because of incorrect assumptions about their transness. Either scenario can lead them to lash out.
It is important to remember that these strong emotional reactions to finding out a person’s assigned sex or intersex status are manufactured rather than inherent. Punter forums (review forums for clients of sex workers) have entire threads dedicated to investigating whether certain sex workers are trans, sharing details about their anatomy and encouraging each others’ disgust. You can find clients in these threads who had a good time with a sex worker who others expect may be trans being berated if they are unbothered by the prospect, including with homophobic insults thrown at them. Transphobic vitriol is thrown back and forth alongside speculation about “imbalanced” hormones which amounts to theorizing about whether the sex workers are intersex, despite correct terminology very rarely being used. This is a matter of bigotry, not of capability to consent without knowing someone’s full medical history related to their sex.
Once we factor in all the considerations that trans and/or intersex sex workers must make about our safety, it is no wonder that some of us make the decision to present as cis for work. I am equally unapologetic about the few times I’ve allowed clients to assume I was a cis man when offering handjobs and blowjobs at saunas as I am for the couple of years where I let significant numbers of them believe I was a cis woman. I also will not condemn the intersex and trans women I know for maintaining privacy about what procedures they’ve had or what letter is on their birth certificate, nor will I throw intersex men and non-binary people (intersex or perisex) under the bus for not trying to explain concepts their clients don’t care to learn about in the first place.
When people who want to be allies to sex workers speak about the trope of a sex worker hiding their transness or being intersex, I do not want to see them denying that we ever lie about these things or falling for the rhetoric that doing so makes us bad people. The issue is not actually whether some trans and intersex sex workers avoid disclosing irrelevant medical history; it’s one of motivation. In the name of self-preservation rather than sexual gratification, we may choose to lie rather than face physical violence and poverty. If we want to stop that from being necessary, the goal should be to end intersexism and transphobia – not to turn hookers of marginalized genders into martyrs at the altar of clients’ entitlement.
The prompt to write this article came as a result of common responses to a survey I conducted, “What Are Your Thoughts About Sex Work?”, the purpose of which was to gather ideas for the most useful themes for Transactional Intercourse, an anthology of trans and intersex sex workers’ writing.
If you want to see a variety of other resources and extra articles stemming from that survey, you can sign up here on Substack where they’ll be posted very soon. You’ll get updates with more information about trans and intersex sex work and the launch of the anthology on Kickstarter. You can also sign up to be notified on Kickstarter directly here, if you just want to know then the project goes live.
Jack Talks About Sex Work 