Happy Sex Worker Pride Day!

On Sex Worker Pride Day - September 14th, we acknowledge the continued fight for our rights. We celebrated Sex Workers Pride by sharing some of the fantastic sex worker writing already here on the blog and invited you to share your own stories of Doing The Work with us. We’d love to hear from you, our brilliant, funny and talented community! Do you want to write for us? We started the Tryst.link sex worker blog to help amplify the voices of those who aren't often handed the mic and bring attention to the issues y'all care about the most. Got a tale to tell? Let us know! 

Sex Worker Pride Day joins other historic events among the sex working calendar, like 3rd March (International Sex Worker Rights Day), 17th May (IDAHOBIT), 1st-31st July (Disability Pride Month) 2nd June (International Whores Day) and 17th December (International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers), amongst many others.

We love hearing your feedback

Last month we made some accessibility improvements to our buttons. While keeping an eye on your feedback (we love to hear it!), we noticed some folks asking for easier access to the things they use the most from our navigation, like managing photos or tours.

This prompted our product team to do some research and see what the most used navigation and dashboard items were. We sampled 50,000 clicks over a 7 day period to see what you are trying to access most often. We learnt a few interesting things:

• We moved the account settings page into the pill as it is useful to access but didn’t need to be taking up a main slot.
• We used our two newly freed up spots in the main navigation to bring photos and tours up. You can now access them both directly, without needing to go to the dashboard first.

We found basically no one was using the transaction/balances link so we moved search into its position in the “pill” (the white oval in the top right corner) to free up a spot in the “main” nav (the bar that appears across the bottom on mobile).

We kept an eye on the stats afterwards and within less than 24 hours we saw a huge improvement in the number of people getting directly where they wanted to go without needing to stop by the dashboard first. Fun fact: it took less than 2 hours for the new Tours link to see more usage than the lowest used button has seen in 7 days previously!

We love hearing from you and your ideas for changes, improvements, or new features! You can send us a feedback message with your ideas. We already have some ideas about how we could give you faster ways to navigate the platform and are exploring them. Want to get an opportunity to be invited to research sessions with us? Opt into our beta program from your account management page!

Other improvements this month

• We’ve removed all uses of “₮” in favour of showing the TLC acronym (Tryst Love Credits). The symbol we were using is the currency symbol for Mongolian Tögrög which we chose in the early days of the platform before we knew it belonged to an existing currency. We don’t want to appropriate this symbol or create confusion, so we decided to remove it.
• Your most recent conversations will now appear first in your inbox. Most messaging apps organise your conversations by the most recently interacted with conversation and now Tryst Messaging does too!
• We fixed a small bug that caused your list of available days to be squished on mobile devices. We’ve fixed that up and given it some nice breathing room and easier to tap on.
• We updated our list of social accounts to remove old Twitter/X accounts we no longer use and add in Bluesky.
• We fixed a bug that was preventing some clients from sending replies via Tryst Messaging, we resolved an intermittent messaging issue affecting clients
• We got the brooms out and did some spring cleaning on both the client and provider dashboards, removing some old information and better arranging current information for clarity and ease.
• We’ve made it possible for providers to see the new conversation page for their own profile again, rather than showing an error. You won’t be able to message yourself, but you will be able to see the same information a potential client sees when starting a new conversation.

Recommended media from the Tryst Team

• Watch: Madam on ThreeNow
• Read: A Gynocentric Gang of Winsome Warlordettes by Daemon Demimonde
• Listen: Julia Fox's Memoir "Down The Drain" audiobook

In the community

There's always a lot going on in our amazing community! Here are some of the latest events, news, and resources for workers.

Are you involved in an event? Do you have some news to share? Are you aware of an industry initiative that deserves a shout-out? Let us know!

• AMSWAG Petition - sign here to end racist immigration raids, border profiling and turn backs 
• Corkys x Club Sandwich - LGBTQIA+ Strip Club at Pony Club Gym - 16th November 9pm, Naarm - book tickets here 
• SWOP NSW -  Mental Health Peer Skill Share Workshop - 16th Oct, 3:30pm - further details available here
• Vixen - Gender Blender (online) - 17th Oct 6pm AEST - RSVP here 
• Respect Inc - Crimson Clinic QLD - 23rd October - further information here
• Smut - Naarm, 24 Moons Show 7th & 8th of November - tickets available here for Thursday show and Friday Show  

In the media

See below for the latest industry news pieces and mentions in the media.

• ‘The downfall of wishtender: where do we go from here’ - Miss Mirage, for ‘Petit Mort’
• ‘At Atlanta’s Only All-Trans Strip Night, the Dolls Reign Supreme’ - Nicholas Goodly, for ‘Them’
• ‘How porn performers feel about Trump, Harris, and Project 2025’ -  Andy Hirschfeld, for ‘Mashable’
• ‘How ‘Anora’ Got Sex Work Right’ - Seija Rankin, for ‘Hollywood Reporter’
• ‘Best Films About Sex Workers’ - , for ‘Curzon’
• ‘Deplatforming Doesn't Make Sex Work Safer’ - Elizabeth Nolan Brown, for ‘Reason’
• ‘Approach online sex work as just another job’ - University of Amsterdam 
• ‘What Charlotte Shane Learned from Sex Work’ -  Lili Owen Rowlands, for The New Yorker
• ‘Tips for dating a sex worker’ - by  Madelaine Horn , for ‘The Georgia Straight’
• ‘All ‘Hookers Go to Heaven’ navigates the changing world of sex work’ - Noelle Perdue, for ‘Xtra Magazine’

Don’t forget to check back in a month’s time for our next update!