Trans sex workers have a smaller pool of potential clients than cis sex workers do, due to the way trans people are viewed as a sexual niche. Although our overall client-base is smaller, we gain a type of client who is interested in trans people specifically and often fetishizes us: Chasers.
The trouble with chaser clients doesn’t end at their fetishization of trans bodies or the insensitive comments they’ll make, but extends to the pressure they exert over which medical procedures trans people should get. For trans sex workers with a regular client-base made up of at least some chasers, they risk losing a huge chunk of their income if they change parts of their body. Often clients will openly admit that they would stop being attracted to the trans sex worker they’re seeing if they were to get genital surgery.
The trouble with chaser clients doesn’t end at their fetishization of trans bodies or the insensitive comments they’ll make...
Medical transition is an expensive process and plenty of trans people do sex work to fund it, whether that’s selling sex in person or making porn. Many trans people get stuck at one point in their medical transition despite desiring to go further, because getting certain surgeries may reduce their income. To afford further procedures they will often need to save all the funds they’ll require and then more to recover and survive after that point, because of this risk that the moment they get a procedure their client-base will drop significantly. Their clients might be funding their HRT, leaving them in a situation where getting one surgery could mean they can no longer afford hormones after, unless they have savings. It’s a vicious cycle.
Before I got top surgery, a few chaser clients of mine told me not to remove my breasts. Even clients for whom I never removed my binder, wanted the knowledge that my breasts were bound underneath it, even if they didn’t get to actually see or touch them. It was only after I found additional work, and the NHS began covering my testosterone, that I could safely take that potential hit to my income. I couldn’t rely on appealing to the wider range of clients that cis women can, so I had to think about losing part of the chaser contingent as losing half of my income.
It’s uncomfortable to discuss, especially for trans people ourselves because it can ignite feelings of dysphoria, but it’s clear that for many chasers what they’re attracted to is the perceived ambiguity of someone’s gender. They like the idea of having sex with someone who they see as having a mix of sex characteristics. So aligning them by having bottom or top surgery is something that turns many of them off. The closer a trans person is to passing, even while naked, the less we titillate chasers with our ambiguity. Plenty of chasers will be interested no matter what, simply because the knowledge a person is trans turns them on, but in my experience a majority of them have a particular obsession with our genitals.
I couldn’t rely on appealing to the wider range of clients that cis women can, so I had to think about losing part of the chaser contingent as losing half of my income.
When we talk about people selling sex, the average person will commonly think of a sex worker doing so on the street or in a brothel or from their home – who sees many clients. In reality, particularly among more marginalized people, a large proportion of those who sell sex will do so informally, with a small number of clients and may not even consider themselves sex workers. Depending on the situation, one chaser client with very specific requirements could be providing the entire income that barely keeps a trans sex worker’s head above water.
There are a scarce few pieces of media which show this issue, the show “Pose” being one of them, and it shows how the problem is not limited to sex workers. These pressures to avoid certain surgeries are also placed on trans people by their partners all the time, including in relationships which are not openly transactional but where the trans person is financially dependant on their significant other. Client relationships which can blur the line with genuine romantic connections and which are often agreed to be exclusive, like sugar daddy arrangements, place people in the most precarious situations of all. The loss of income stops being a calculated risk based on the number of clients lost, and becomes an ultimatum; if the trans sex worker gets bottom surgery, they are made destitute.
Long-term clients and sugar daddies may dangle future large payouts over the heads of the sex workers they have arrangements with, up to offering to pay for certain surgeries if they are done to their exact specifications. This can result in compromises being made, such as opting for forms of transition surgery which a trans person might find less desirable but which would be preferable to no surgery at all. This could be breast augmentation to a size the person would not otherwise have chosen, or top surgery where nipple placement is decided to the client’s taste. Whatever the decision made, the influence the client has in exerting their own desires over the trans person’s body is concerning.
Trans people already face a strong public pressure to pass. Clients’ own preferences will often differ from those, as doing something taboo and having sex with someone unconventional can be part of the appeal for them in hiring trans sex workers. Amidst these contradicting forces, our own desires for what we want from our medical transition can become lost.
The influence the client has in exerting their own desires over the trans person’s body is concerning.
There is hope, which comes in the form of trans sex workers supporting each other. The more we find new ways to advertise and expand our client pools, whilst sharing methods of access to transition care with less financial strain, the more we are able to make decisions about our bodies, and to modify them to our desires. We deserve to have our bodies look and feel as we want them to, without having to account for clients who view us as objects to be played with, altered and then discarded.
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