Whether discussing exploitation or cracking jokes at sex workers’ expense, people typically talk about sex work as women’s work. They default to saying “she” when discussing one of us conceptually, a phenomenon that is common with any female-dominated profession like nursing or childcare. Government officials pushing for stricter laws around buying and selling sex will place the debate into the category of issues surrounding violence against women and girls.
My maleness is called into question by most people the moment that they know I am trans, to a lesser or greater extent depending on the level of transphobia they have absorbed. Even those who pay lip service to the idea that trans men are men and trans women are women will see me as distinctly less of a man than a cis one. Once they are aware that I sell sex, this effect is magnified.
The psychology behind why transmasculine people who do sex work are seen as less male than those who do not is simple; knowing our profession causes people to think more about our genitals. In most interactions, cis people can forget our anatomy as long as we don’t bring it up and pass well enough in their eyes, but they can’t help imagining interactions with clients once they hear that we have sex with them for money. It should come as no surprise, then, that pregnancy causes a similar reaction.
Being a pregnant sex worker stepped up the misgendering I was confronted with on a daily basis by an order of magnitude, both in terms of implicit statements online and more direct comments made in front of me. Organisations dedicate resources to sex working single mothers, the midwives and obstetricians misgendered me to each other only seconds after discussing the date of my gender-affirming double mastectomy, and even friends began to change towards more neutral language about me where they had previously utilised the masculine. I had given people one too many reasons not to take my gender seriously.
When I was getting an STI check before starting to attempt to conceive, the nurse asking me preliminary questions was shocked to hear me tell him that I have sex with gay and bisexual men. Upon hearing that I was a sex worker and seeking to further assess my risk for certain diseases, he confidently said, “So, presumably most of your clients are straight?” I’d been off of testosterone for 3 months at that point, having held down multiple part time jobs when I was still on HRT where my coworkers thought I was a cis man. I couldn’t tell if it was the context or the effects of estrogen on my body that had prompted the remark.
During the months I was regularly meeting with my sperm donor, a former friend told me that she struggled to gender another transmasculine person correctly because she’d seen him with his kid and viewed him as too maternal for manhood. When that same ex-friend later became my boss, she disclosed my pregnancy to a co-worker after promising not to share the news, adding the comment that I was prettier since stopping testosterone. Not only was the feminization viewed as a positive – there was a desire to spread this view of me to others.
The time I spent pregnant and selling sex was like a torture simulator manufactured to tap into the worst parts of my dysphoria. I had gone from being stealth in many environments to having my gender assumed incorrectly by almost everyone I met. Clients went from gay and bisexual men looking for something novel and a smattering of chasers to straight pregnancy fetishists who were willing to overlook my flat chest and deepened voice. I couldn’t think about the effects on my body without feeling physically sick. I remember saying that if I had to suffer being treated the way I was long-term and stay unable to take testosterone, that I was worried I would kill myself. Knowing I’d have my baby at the end of it held me together.
One of the clients I saw whilst heavily pregnant was a man who’d booked me several times in the past, who called me “boy” during sex and told me I reminded him of an ex-boyfriend from his teens. I expected him to be more tolerable than the new clientele I was picking up, primarily because I assumed he would be less prone to misgendering me. After all, he never had before, even while inside me. There’s not a much more direct way that he could have been confronted by my anatomy – or so I thought. I turns out that pregnancy breaks the sort of mental leaps some people make in their minds to essentially view the trans men they are with as cis men who magically have a vagina.
In an extension of our usual dynamic but factoring in my pregnancy, this old regular of mine decided to call himself “daddy”. He had me call him the same. Before the end of the session, his dirty talked had included referring to me as a “mommy” on two occasions. I went from a reminder of a young man from his past to his fantasy wife giving him babies. My hatred at being viewed this way is visceral. I swallowed back the bile that rose up when he said it, then cringed at the reminder that pregnancy reflux was why it had come up so easily.
I found no relief from my dysphoria during pregnancy. It wasn’t a state that I could mitigate, like binding my chest when I still had breasts or wearing a packer so I could wear tight trousers without raising the question of where my dick was. Having clients misgender me simply pushed me over the edge into brief periods of despair – something I could not medicate with drugs or alcohol without harming my baby, which I was unwilling to do – and left me seriously struggling through the last few months.
Now that I am a father, things feel less overwhelming. I can take testosterone because it no longer poses a threat to my daughter’s health. Each day, the shape of my body changes again and steadily works its way towards more masculine proportions. Appointments regarding my pregnancy and the post-partum side-effects get further apart. I am taking a break from selling sex to recover and will no longer scare off most of my prior client pool by being pregnant when I return. There’s a future I can see where I feel comfortable in my body again and am more equipped to battle the relatively fewer instances of misgendering and feminization projected onto me.
Whether it’s transactional fucks or experiencing childbirth, my desires are the same; that no-one be seen as more or less of a woman for them.
[This piece is included in Transactional Intercourse, an anthology of trans and intersex sex worker writing, which comes out on April 27th and includes 30 contributors. Pre-order yourself a copy here.]
Jack Talks About Sex Work 