Losing Online Platforms Means Trans Sex Workers Lose Out
Having a community of other sex workers who can share resources and advice is vital for the safety of those selling sex, particularly when they belong to demographics who are especially vulnerable to violence and discrimination. Trans sex workers often have extra needs which are not being fulfilled either by services for trans people or by services for sex workers, so they often rely on other trans people who sell sex for support.
Currently, many sex workers make contact with each other through social media. As those platforms place more restrictions on adult content and suppress discussion of sex work through their algorithms, whilst also permitting significant amounts of harassment - those sites no longer remain viable options for building community among sex workers. Some people who sell sex, particularly cis women who are citizens of the country they sell sex in, can find organisations dedicated to their needs. Organisations they can turn to when online platforms are no longer viable as an avenue to connect with others. Trans sex workers often don’t have this same access, so we need to build our own communities and find different ways of sharing information.
Tumblr was once a hub for sex workers to advertise themselves and simultaneously meet each other and create support systems. As a website with a large trans population, this naturally meant it was full of trans people who sold sex and trans people who made porn. Then Tumblr was pressured into banning porn, which meant sex workers had a much harder time finding each other on the platform and eventually left. Reddit permits a significant amount of explicit content and many sex workers use it, however the amount of virulent transphobia on the platform makes it difficult for trans sex workers to be publicly visible enough to connect. Reddit also does not allow the direct posting of escorting advertisements. Then there is Twitter, one of the last social media platforms which allows full service sex workers to post their advertisements, and which has a large trans user base.
Twitter is collapsing before our eyes since Musk’s takeover. We are about to lose an incredibly useful tool for trans sex workers to form communities with each other. Without such platforms, trans sex workers are rendered invisible online and must turn to other methods of finding each other. For the new generation who have always used the internet to meet people and disseminate information, this reality can be jarring. It is often up to older trans people, who recall the methods used before social media, to build new support networks.
To understand the methods trans people who sell sex are using to build communities, we first need to look at how this happened historically and what conditions have caused us to need to do so again.
In 1970, Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR) was founded by Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera. The two of them are often mentioned in the context of discussing the Stonewall riot or trans activism. Both Marsha and Sylvia were trans sex workers who were frequently homeless. During a sit-in protest at New York University, in response to the cancellation of fundraising dances for the gay community, Sylvia came up with the idea for STAR. After a fundraising dance that same year, the Gay Liberation Front and Sylvia raised enough money to buy an entire house which became STAR house. They provided housing to queer homeless youth, who were often sex workers.
Information about STAR was often spread via word of mouth and through pamphlets and flyers. Social media didn’t exist as a way to promote the organisation, so networks of homeless trans people shared details with each other directly, instead. STAR house was only active for a year and STAR’s campaigning for trans inclusion, and housing and workplace discrimination protections, ended by 1973 due to the opposition of some of those within the gay liberation movement. Despite that, their legacy lives on and has inspired many similar projects which have spanned decades.
Since then, many things have changed for trans sex workers, but many have stayed the same. There are still contingents of gay activism which oppose trans inclusion, and homeless street sex workers are still criminalized. We have gained social media platforms to more easily share information, alongside forums and sites where sex workers can advertise - but those same spaces online are regularly censored or taken down by new legislation like SESTA/FOSTA.
We can learn many things from the activism trans sex workers were doing in the past, both emulating their successes and avoiding their mistakes. In the wake of SESTA/FOSTA, trans sex workers are forming communities in similar ways to activists who supported each other prior to the invention of the internet.
Trans sex workers find each other in person as well as online. We find each other in the waiting rooms for blood tests at free walk-in trans clinics; at one clinic, waiting to get my testosterone injection, I overheard one trans girl advising another on how to convince her sugar daddy to pay for her facial feminization surgery. We find each other at protests; I received a pamphlet about how to use PrEP as a transmasculine person, including details about which clinics would give it to me and which ones were sex-worker friendly, at a protest against anti-trans coverage by the BBC. We find each other at sex worker events; I shared my number with trans people I met at a Sex Worker Breakfast event, which allowed us to text each other with advice.
Part of why it is so vital that we find each other and form communities is that trans sex workers do have additional needs and concerns when compared with other sex workers. Safety needs which might otherwise be niche in a larger group of sex workers, like gathering warnings about known violently transphobic clients, can be catered to. As WhatsApp group chats or meetups in local parks grow larger, these groups are able to split and grow again until there’s an entire web of interconnected support networks.
Brothels and agencies often do not accept openly trans people, which means that when we lose access to our advertising platforms we have much more limited options than cis sex workers. This means trans people are more likely to turn immediately to street based sex work if advertising indoor work is no longer viable, and once we are on the streets we are in additional danger. The only people who know which streets are the safest for trans people or how to assess clients for transphobia are other trans sex workers.
Another method transgender sex workers use to provide aid to each other is to create a sub-division within a larger existing organisation. Again, taking a tactic from Sylvia and Marsha achieving some of their goals through alliances with the Gay Liberation Front or Rebelesbians, trans sex workers will get larger queer organisations to prioritize trans people who sell sex. This could involve anything from convincing trans organisations to provide workshops on how to avoid getting prostitute cautions as a trans street sex worker all the way to organising public speeches about trans people in sex work.
Even though trans people are over-represented in sex work, we’re still a minority and are often rejected or forgotten by the broader sex worker rights movement. Depending on the organisation, it may be easier for trans sex workers to convince trans rights organisations to consider sex workers’ needs than to get sex worker rights organisations to be more trans-inclusive.
There’s still a long way to go with regards to recovering from the impact of legislation like SESTA/FOSTA, and more harm still being done as we slowly lose platforms like Twitter, but trans people have supported each other without these platforms before and we will do so again.
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