With respect to bigotry against sex workers, misogyny comes to mind long before misandry does. There are, however, a large subset of those who oppose sex worker rights who want to criminalize the sale of sex for reasons they attribute to their radical feminism and open hatred of men. This group are referred to as SWERFs (Sex Worker Exclusionary Radical Feminists).
Clients have far more power than sex workers do, even under different forms of criminalization, and the impact of making it illegal to buy sex is always that sex workers are worse off. Our clients become less willing to share information about themselves, making them harder to screen, and the rate of violence against sex workers goes up because if the total client base shrinks then we have to accept riskier clients.
The impact of making it illegal to buy sex is always that sex workers are worse off.
Radical feminists are well aware that the vast majority of those who pay for sex are men, and they would theoretically be arrested under laws against the purchase of sex . Advocacy for client criminalization isn’t about protecting sex workers or victims of sex trafficking; it’s about punishing men for feeling entitled to pay for sex. We know this because despite the data showing time and time again that client criminalization does not lessen violence, like in the Médecins du Monde report on the French law from April 2016 criminalizing the purchase of sex, SWERFs continue their support of it.
Our concern with curtailing men’s entitlement should always be secondary to the safety of women. Even if we were to take SWERFs claims at face value – that sex is bought only by men and sold only by women, which it is not – their aims would be harmful to the very women they claim to desire to protect.
The reality is that while most clients are men by a wide margin, the skew is not so great for sex workers. There are a significant number of both cis and trans men who sell sex, as well as non-binary people. This does not fit in with the narrative that SWERFs would like to portray as to how prostitution works, as a form of gendered violence. If it’s not about men in general having an entitlement to women’s bodies, but instead about a subset of men who have entitlement to the bodies of people of all genders – or more accurately a subset of men who want to pay for sex for a plethora of reasons only some of which are entitlement – suddenly “the sex industry” is no longer an effective rhetorical tool for them to use to justify their hatred of men.
The reality is that while most clients are men by a wide margin, the skew is not so great for sex workers.
Reality is often an obstacle for dogma. Instead of re-evaluating the radical feminist ideology they are clinging to, SWERFs have to make some adjustments to how they see reality to keep their world-view. The men who sell sex must somehow be grouped in with the men purchasing it, or at least separated from the women selling it, to continue treated sex work as gender-based oppression. The way they typically do this is to argue that cis men are co-opting women’s oppression when they sell sex and to rely on old homophobic ideas about gay men being ‘perverted’ and therefore enjoying selling sex as a means to encourage objectification. As for trans men, they argue we are not men at all.
Very quickly, these ideas lead radical feminists towards a lack of respect for trans people, and often to detest us. They treat trans women as sexual deviants, rather than reckoning with how their ideas about misogyny lean too heavily on a belief that all discrimination against women stems from biology. They dismiss trans men entirely as confused girls seeking to escape sexism. A trans man selling sex breaks even these basic SWERF ideas, because surely if we were confused or misguided and transitioning to escape sexism, we wouldn’t choose to sell sex. We would not choose to be subject to the stigma which comes with it, by men that SWERFs insist must all view us as women and want to objectify us. Thus, we are treated as uniquely broken women who seek out our own abuse, out of a misguided desire to mimic cis gay men.
Very quickly, these ideas lead radical feminists towards a lack of respect for trans people, and often to detest us.
For transmasculine sex workers who are men, or whose genders include some level of affinity for the masculine, our desire to be viewed as our gender is framed as a desire to be a part of the group which is sexually entitled and violent. To be the same as our worst clients. At the same time, our transness is invalidated and we are encouraged to imagine ourselves as misguided women who seek out abuse whilst simultaneously trying to escape it through transition. Reading SWERF propaganda as a transmasculine person is a minefield of navigating dysphoria and self-hate.
Radical feminists cannot allow trans people to demonstrate the flaws in their anti sex worker ideas, and so the more a group of us does so, the more convoluted their propaganda against us has to get. In the same way, sex workers often demonstrate flaws in transphobic rhetoric, and so TERFs must propagandize against us too. The journey from SWERF to TERF is not only one-way. Think of it less as a pipeline and more as a bridge, across which SWERFs and TERFs alike are enticed. The reality is that trans people are more likely to sell sex, because we are discriminated against in society and end up in circumstances which prompt us to do so more often. Parsing this requires SWERF arguments to be dismissed in line with radical feminist ideology, so TERFs begin to oppose sex workers.
Transmasculine sex workers need to speak up as part of the process of pushing back against this bigoted coalition. Often, transfeminine sex workers are thrust into the spotlight and forced to defend our entire community, and they bear the brunt of being ridiculed in popular media and by SWERFs and TERFs alike. We need to point out how our existence proves their ideas wrong. The gender politics of sex work are so much more complex than radical feminist groups would like to reduce them to, and transmasculine sex workers are a part of that.
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