Sex Work and Being Trans: Exploring the Stereotype
The Systemic Issue
It seems like there are a lot of trans people (trans women in particular) who are in sex work. Trans people permeate what some would call “the seedy underground world of sex” from walking the streets to high-end escorting, from modeling to stripping. In her book Redefining Realness,the MSNBC host of “So POPular” and trans activist Janet Mock came out has having done sex work to make the money in order to afford Genital Reconstructive Surgery. The bigger question is, why are there so many trans people who are in sex work? The answer may surprise you.
Cisgender straight men are the largest consumers of transsexual porn. And transgender women are the largest demographic to face unemployment and homelessness in the nation (if not the world). There is a demand, and trans women are turning to the sex industry to fill it. The social and economic factors which weigh into the decision to enter sex work is astounding. According to adult model Miss Becca Benz, she entered sex work after she was let go from a position which she held for eleven years. Shortly after she came out trans, her position was reclassified and she was “no longer qualified” to continue working. The irony is she was helping improve the work environment for LGBT people at the time as well. Her employer found a way to break the anti-discrimination polices towards trans people. She went into sex work as a way to survive.
Becca Benz is not alone. Society tends to look at trans people through very strict gender stereotypes: a binary male/female. Anyone having feelings that don’t coincide with one’s assigned birth gender is categorized as a “misfit”, a “freak”, or even in some extreme cases, an “abomination”. This makes employment incredibly difficult to find. Don’t get me wrong — there are a good number of successful trans people out there who have never done sex work. Many of these people live “stealth” without exposing their trans status. Many trans people aren’t so lucky. Since there is a market for sex work, one must do what one can to make ends meet, and it doesn’t matter if the work is “legal” or not.
In the 21st Century, there has been a revolution surrounding transgender people. And like the Trans Women of Color who started the Stonewall Riots, trans people are giving society the finger and being who they truly are. This has not occurred without pushback, however. Trans people are still excluded from equal rights laws and protections that are given to other minorities simply because our gender does not coincide with what society would push onto us. Trans people are often rejected by their families when they come out, which deprives us of much needed emotional and/or financial support.
There are people who paint us in an extremely negative light, and even lie about us to perpetuate fear of transgender people and the inane idea that “something is wrong” with us. The media then frequently sensationalizes us for a profit. The reality is that hormones are not cheap. Neither are the surgeries some (if not many) of us desire. The stigma of being trans is so much larger than the stigma surrounding sex work. Coupled with the stigma behind being transgender, and the perpetuation of negative imagery coming from the mainstream media, the Christian right, and radical feminists, many trans women are unable to find employment outside the sex work industries.
You may be asking yourself “Why don’t trans people just keep trying to get a regular job?” Well, aside from a systemic prejudice towards trans people, our immediate circumstances often require the immediate infusion of cash. I spent over a year being unemployed. I have amazing qualifications and a stellar letter of recommendation from my former boss. I received two interviews in that time, and never was called back. I have seriously considered entering the sex industry just to pay for my hormones. The big thing is, a lot of the trans people in sex work would love to have a “regular” job. Our society just doesn’t support trans people. We’re continually marginalized, facing misogyny from both men and women, joked about on television, and harassed in the street. Coupled with the fact many of us do sex work to survive, once we are in the sex industry it’s very difficult to break out of it.
This now brings up a larger question: While society is beginning to loosen the stigmas around trans people, isn’t it about time to let go of the stigma surrounding sex work as well?
Eradicating the Sigma
The stigmas surrounding being transgender are beginning to fade, thanks to high-profile trans women such as Janet Mock, Laura Jane Grace, Laverne Cox, and Caitlyn Jenner. Unfortunately, this has yet to trickle down to the trans people who struggle to find work in today’s challenging economy. Grass-roots trans activist and sex worker Sabine Isca said this about finding work as a trans woman in a recent interview:
“Certainly finding work is difficult for a lot of people at the moment. But I do get the feeling that many employers would often pick a cis person for a job over us, in the same way as they would often pick a man over a woman, a white person over a person of colour, or an abled person over a disabled person. Also there’s the hurdle of us feeling like some workplaces would simply be hostile environments, even if we were able to get a job there. Jobs dealing with the general public especially, like retail, seem like they’d be an issue. Even if your employer is ok with you being trans, and your workmates are also ok with it, the public are always an unknown [factor]. Working in schools, nurseries, other jobs where you work with children are also likely to be a problem because of the way some particularly bigoted people perceive trans women as sexual predators/offenders. Lest we forget, Lucy Meadows was hounded to death (she committed suicide) by the media because she was a trans woman and a teacher.”
Clearly, trans women are at a severe disadvantage when it comes to locating employment. The media continues to fetishize us, and portray us as either predators or punchlines. This creates a general hostile environment in which the sex industry is often the only way for trans women to make the money needed for rent, food, and medical care. Mainstream feminists view people in sex work as people who need to be “rescued” — which is certainly true when it comes to human trafficking — but they ignore the people, both trans and cis, who are in the sex industry by either choice or circumstance. Sabine had this to say about feminism:
“[The largest problem with modern feminism] is the tendency to focus on the issues seen as most important by the loudest voices in mainstream feminism: largely successful, white, middle class, cisgender, heterosexual, and employed in the media.
There’s also a rather disturbing tendency to silence marginalized women like women of colour, trans women, or sex workers, who might have a different idea about what’s the most important thing to focus on, or indeed may even be highlighting harm caused to marginalized women by the course that’s been decided by ideology.
For example, the solutions proposed by most mainstream feminists to the issues surrounding sex work or misogynist abuse are often very carceral (involving the law and/or imprisonment), which obviously is not something that an anarchist feminist, a sex worker who experiences police as a threat, or a woman of colour who is a prison abolitionist, for a few examples, would support… It’s important to highlight that whether a person sees their sex work as empowering or not, should not really be the issue — it’s work. And whether we like our work or not it’s our livelihood.
The “sex work is empowering” ‘happy hooker’ trope has become a bit of a straw man that people use against us. Whether a worker enjoys their work or not should not affect the fact that workers need rights. People working in retail or in McJobs might hate their jobs and want to leave them, but that’s no argument that they shouldn’t have rights while doing that work.”
In short, sex workers’ voices are ignored. A long as sex work is stigmatized and sex workers are subjected to the constant threat of having their customers fined and/or imprisoned — and facing the same punishments themselves — only pushes the work of marginalized people further underground, making it more dangerous and thus sex workers, whether cis or trans, continue to fall through the cracks which this society has created.
There will always be a demand for sex, whether that sex is in a personal monogamous relationship, or a professional one. Trans sex worker Felicity Summer stated:
“So what if it’s sex [work that I do]? People have sex. Why is it ethical to have sex for free, or for security under a marriage, or to make children, but not to get paid? People have sex for all sorts of reasons and in all sorts of ways. Some are unethical. But sex work is work. I am a business owner marketing my brand. Sex is healing and therapeutic. I see my time escorting as closely related to social work.”
As long as this systemic issue around trans people exists, and sex work is stigmatized, criticized, and criminalized, we have little chance of being able to be successful. And when those with money and power continue to try to take away this source of income, it puts all sex workers at risk.
