Moving Past the Binary of Trans Sex Work

“I know sex work to be work. It’s not something I need to tiptoe around. It’s not a radical statement. It’s a fact.”

This is what Janet Mock wrote in response to her speech at the 2017 Women’s March on Washington. When Mock was brought on board to assist in the planning of the event, she insisted that her contribution would be the inclusion of sex workers, particularly transgender sex workers. However, in a series of edits that were made to the event’s governing documents, Mock’s inclusion of sex workers was removed.

While Mock’s contributions eventually returned to those documents, and she still spoke at the event, this stigmatization and exclusion of sex workers – particularly transgender sex workers – highlights how two more marginalized groups are still stigmatized and excluded even by other feminists.

This post will explore how academics and activists have reframed transgender sex work and also look at how positive media representations of transgender sex workers have contributed to this conversation.

Past the Sex Work Binary

Even in feminist discussions of sex work, there is often a reliance on a binary that assumes sex workers have either been forced into the trade through trafficking or that they are of lower moral character because they have chosen to willingly participate in sex work. Much as how people rely on framing trans identities as “tragic” or filled with struggle, there is a tendency to frame transgender sex work as being tragic. One reason for this is that people often assume that trans people choose sex work as a desperate means to achieve sex reassignment surgery.

While there is no one narrative of what trans sex work looks like, and some trans sex workers have been coerced into the trade either by violence or financial constraints, it is important to explore narratives of sex work as a spectrum of experiences.

Nihils Rev and Fiona Maeve Geist are two academics that are contributing to a reframing of trans sex work away from the “tragic” narrative. In their essay “Staging the Trans Sex Worker,” they highlight dominant misconceptions about trans sex workers, including the fact that trans people, because of how they are generally stigmatized, are read as being hypersexual and therefore engaging in sex work because they lack moral character. This is dangerous, because it not only strips these trans sex workers of respect, but also potentially limits their access to STI screenings, contraception, and resources that other sex workers have. However, they argue that dwelling on these misconceptions and other negative aspects of trans sex workers portrays all trans sex workers as victims, stripping them of agency.

To move past this, and to view trans sex work as a spectrum, they say requires looking at the intersection of issues such as the prison industrial complex, neoliberalism, and capitalism. They write, “Taking trans sex work seriously, therefore, involves illuminating the connections between sexuality, commerce, legality, nation, race, and gender and attentiveness to their particularity rather than dwelling on narratives rooted in pathology, criminality, and decay, which posit trans sex workers as metaphors for wider social concerns.”

Because both sex work and trans identities are stigmatized and pathologized as symptoms of greater issues, trans sex work is constructed as a symptom of the disease caused by someone’s “tragic” trans identity. Viewing trans sex work as a spectrum of experiences that accounts for all the reasons a trans individual might choose sex work can help counter this pathologization.

Beyond the work of academics like Rev and Maeve Geist, are activists that work daily to provide resources for trans sex workers. There are informal and formal networks that exist to support trans sex workers, that are run by trans sex workers. These organizations and informal networks promote positive narratives of trans sex work. Some are confidential health care providers and free community clinics. Others are networks advocating for the decriminalization of sex work, which would benefit trans sex workers because of the higher likelihood that they would be targeted by police. Still, others are campaigns dedicated to promoting these positive narratives on social media.

One organization, the St. James Infirmary, is known for writing a handbook on health and safety guidelines for sex workers, and has regularly published trans-specific health and safety guidelines. They also advocate for the decriminalization of sex work. Rev and Maeve Geist argue that these organizations are important because they lessen the stigma around sex work, and within the sex work community, they lessen the stigma that trans sex workers face by including them in their resources.

Similar to how these organizations can be helpful, positive media representation of trans sex workers can also counter harmful narratives and spread accurate information about the spectrum of experiences that trans sex workers face.

Positive Media Representations of Transgender Sex Workers

Mock’s speech at the Women’s March was not the first time she had vocally spoken in support of transgender sex workers. In her memoir Redefining Realness, she wrote about her experiences as a sex worker in Hawaii. She recounts her experiences as something positive that helped her pay for her medical and surgical transition and her pursuit of higher education. She in many ways chose this sex work, and met friends and learned about her own identity through finding a community of other trans sex workers.

Shortly after the publication of Redefining Realness, she wrote an essay about what it meant to her to “confess” her history as a sex worker. She said, “I do not believe using your body – often marginalized people’s only asset, especially in poor, low-income, communities of color – to care after yourself is shameful. What I find shameful is a culture that exiles, stigmatizes and criminalizes those engaged in underground economies like sex work as a means to move past struggle to survive.”

Mock does write that she faced violence and scrutiny from police officers who patrolled the streets where she worked, and that several of her friends were either charged or arrested. However, in many ways this confessional memoir was a positive media representation of transgender sex workers, because she highlighted how in many ways she chose it as a form of work that enabled her to do things that were affirming for herself and her transness.

Her memoir, and her later essays and speeches about sex work, are not the only positive representations of transgender sex workers. In 2015 Tangerine, a comedy-drama film was released and premiered at Sundance. The film, which was entirely shot on iPhone cameras, follows a transgender sex worker and her friends on a quest to get back at a cheating boyfriend/pimp.

According to the director, Sean Baker, the trans women who the film stars are close friends with the city’s actual trans sex workers, and therefore guided the film in a direction that could positively and holistically reflect their lives. Baker quotes one of the actresses as saying, “I trust you, I want to make this movie with you, but you have to promise to show the harsh reality of what goes on out here. These women are here because they have to be, and I want you to make it hilarious and entertaining for us and the women who are actually working the corner.” While these actresses make it clear that the experiences of their friends are not glamorous, it was important to them for it to still be funny in order to be realistic.

When books and films show more than just the tragic and the economic hardship, they portray a closer version of real life. Mock’s writing and artists like Baker and the trans women Tangerine focuses on, can help explore how trans sex work is positive, is a choice actively made by trans individuals with agency, and can help in the fight for respect and resources that trans sex workers are leading.