Let Us Survive: An oral history of sex worker movements before and after FOSTA-SESTA
by The Hacking//Hustling Collective
Episode 4: The FOSTA effect
Intro
TINA: Here’s Elizabeth Ricks, the legal director for the Trans Life Care Program at Chicago House:
ELIZABETH: Everyone’s sort of adjusted to this, like using electronic mediums, but the fact that these restrictions are happening under the guise of national security is really scary, I think all the anti-trans laws are terrifying for trans sex workers because most sex workers have other identities, right? So any law that’s impacting communities that are present in the sex work community are scary. The internet stuff is really making people real nervous because it’s starting to feel like SESTA-FOSTA was just like an opening act for increasing the restrictive use of the internet.
MICKEY: Welcome back to Let Us Survive: an oral history of sex worker organizing before and after FOSTA-SESTA. We’re your hosts, Tina Horn and Mickey Mod. We’re sex workers and media-makers. In collaboration with the Hacking Hustling collective, Tina and I are covering the ten year period leading up to the introduction of FOSTA-SESTA, the passing of that bill into American federal law, and the aftermath of that passing.
TINA: Here’s Jared Trujillo, an associate professor of law at CUNY Law School, on what he wishes Congress had learned from FOSTA-SESTA.
JARED: I think the biggest lesson that I wish they had learned that they don’t seem to be learning, or at least most of them, just seem pretty blind to, is one, just listen to sex workers and to recognize that, again, just because something says that it’s anti-trafficking, that doesn’t necessarily mean that that’s all the law does or that’s what the law does. I mean, frankly, especially for the first few years after SESTA-FOSTA was passed. It wasn’t even really used by any state attorney general to go after the things that the law was intended, allegedly, to go after. So it wasn’t even really used to bring criminal penalties against anyone who was suspected of online sex trafficking. So even the purpose of the law, even if you have the most rosy view of the law, it didn’t even do what the law said was passed to do. And so the lesson that I really wish people would learn is to just be a bit more inquisitive. I mean, it’s literally your job to pass legislation. You should know what it does. But just for people to be more inquisitive, to think about what are some of the negative consequences of this, to think about who are the populations that are actually going to be served or harmed by this piece of legislation.
MICKEY: Jared’s right. In June 2023, the US Government Accountability Office released a mandated report on the efficacy of FOSTA-SESTA. It’s findings? The new law was used in just one Department of Justice case, brought against City X Guide in 2020. It was also used in just one civil suit, which had already been dismissed.
TINA: In summation: FOSTA-SESTA has barely been used for its stated purpose.
MICKEY: But it has done exactly the kind of collateral damage that sex worker advocates predicted it would.
TINA: Here’s Danielle Blunt, of Hacking Hustling, on what sex workers and their allies do need most moving forward:
BLUNT: Whenever you see an increase in fascism, historically, you also see increased policing around sexuality and gender. They go hand in hand. And I think, you know, we exist under constant criminalization and surveillance. And we adapt and then criminalization catches up to the way that we’ve adapted. You know, whether it be criminalization at the, at, from, from the state or platform policing from the platforms that we use to advertise on whatever we’re doing to adapt and make sure that we can work, make sure that we can hustle, make sure that our people are safe, eventually, you know, tech or the police will catch up. Um, and then it continues this cycle. And I think that this is also what really ties this. I think that this is something that I’ve been thinking a lot about in the criminalization, the increased criminalization of bodily autonomy that we’ve been seeing over the last five or so years is that these, our movements are so inextricably intertwined. You know, you really, we can’t be talking about sex worker rights without talking about trans rights. We can’t be talking about reproductive rights without talking about sex worker rights. They are so intertwined. And what I really want to see is more cross movement solidarity building and having these conversations together, having these conversations cross movement because our experiences are so similar and I think that sometimes we organize in these silos that are very counterproductive to movement work and I think that we cannot see, you know, our liberation and freedom as separate from those around us and those that we’re in movement spaces with.
MICKEY: Sex workers have been dealing with what we might call the FOSTA effect for over five years. But if there’s one shining ray of hope from what we’ve been through, it’s that many different justice movements — racial justice, reproductive justice, queer justice, and more — can find solidarity and get free together.
TINA: All that and more is coming up on the forth and final episode of Let Us Survive.
MICKEY: Episode Four: The FOSTA effect
Part One
TINA: So what is the FOSTA effect? Many people we spoke with agreed it has a lot to do with surveillance
MICKEY: When we talk about surveillance technology, we’re talking about cameras in train stations and street corners, yes.
TINA: And we’re also talking about social media, about cell phone text messages, about the increased ways that anything you do and say online can and will be used against you.
MICKEY: Here’s Marla Cruz on the role of surveillance in criminalization. And the methods she has seen, as both a reproductive justice activist and outspoken sex worker.
MARLA: Criminalization requires a surveillance state to go hand in hand with the police state. These are totally inextricable. So just like I saw when I was clinic escorting how the anti-choice protesters would film and take photos of people going in and out of the clinic, take photos of their cars and their license plates as a form of intimidation, that surveillance is part of what I think of as disciplinary violence. It’s meant to control you. It’s meant to change your behavior. It’s meant to make your behavior more predictable. You know, I am face in on my escort ads. I blur my face. I don’t show my face except for in-person to clients. And…The whole reason I’m face in, why I don’t show my face on my escort ads is because of this kind of surveillance that we see with anti-sex work laws. People think that the risks in prostitution are all about sexual violence, but they’re often more mundane. I am in a committed relationship and with my partner, I’ve had to have some very difficult conversations about how…I might not be able to cross certain borders. You know, we can’t make a trip to Canada because I’m scared of crossing in and out of that border because even though I’m face in as an escort, you know, I’m face out as a sex worker advocate. You know, part of why I got into advocacy is because I felt like I had nothing to lose. And with the surveillance state, you realize that there are risks that you could not have anticipated. with this rapid expansion of technology and technological surveillance of sex workers. When I was first starting off on Twitter complaining about my working club conditions, I posted pictures of my face not even thinking about how my face could be run through facial recognition software and I could be stopped in an airport and detained at the border somewhere. And that was something that I didn’t anticipate having to think about.
TINA: M of the Adult Performer Advocacy Committee shares so many of these everyday public-private anxieties: from border crossing to shadowbanning, from banks to housing.
M: As time has gone on, there has been so many developments in facial recognition technology. I think that’s really concerning, especially as I’m a dual citizen. So I worry about crossing borders if I want to go home. That is a concern, especially with how I think right now there are ways to opt out, even though it’s not really. … I’m very concerned about surveillance because that has become so, so streamlined. So easy for cameras to be everywhere. … Like so many ways of being surveilled are being more and more automated that I worry about if that will, again, reinforce this pipeline of incarcerating people. because they are recognizable by a machine. I think that is a big concern. I mean, doxing is a concern in some ways because of the civilian work I do now, but I talk about, I disclose the context of myself. And yeah, just anxiety I think really captures like the felt sense of that just uneasiness an inability to be unguarded having to be on guard constantly um yeah I would say the facial technology the shadowbanning I mean I feel like this is so shitty to say I feel like I’ve adjusted to the stress of shadowbanning even though that’s so shit It’s so shit. I just have to accept that like my quote unquote growth on platforms is forever going to be stifled by shadowbanning because of FOSTA-SESTA. I always worry about banking, you know, I always have to be like double, triple check like where’s my money at because you never know what banking institution will just choose to discriminate for who knows what. And I think associated with that financial insecurity is so real because you need to have proof of income to be able to have a home. Not even aspire to buy, like I live in fucking California, I’m not gonna fucking buy property here, let’s be real. But just like even renting, having a roof, being a housed individual, there’s stress around that, especially being a sex worker and knowing where my money comes from. So there’s a lot of anxieties around that…So yeah, that’s a lot of a lot of concerns love fears and anger around the ramifications of FOSTA-SESTA.
MICKEY: Jared agrees that the legacy of FOSTA-SESTA demonstrates how law-makers chip away at online speech through fear-mongering.
JARED: I think the biggest thing that a lot of other justice movements should learn from sex workers is to be really suspicious of the idea that there is benevolent surveillance. Um a lot of what these laws are at least how they’re sold to people and how they get uh some queer groups, um some gender justice groups and some other folks to really buy into them is this idea of we are trying to help you. And this is a very real thing. I know that, you know, online hate speech is, I mean, frankly, because of my sex worker, a lot of my work on sex work, like I’ve, you know, been attacked quite a bit. And, you know, like the effect of hate speech online is very real. I don’t want to say that it isn’t. It is very real. It impacts people in real, tangible ways. The idea of being doxed. All of that. I mean, it has real consequences for people. However, at the same time, I think that people need to be really suspicious when the government says, we have some benevolent surveillance and it’s going to actually help you. It’s gonna help the most marginalized members of your community. It’s gonna help frankly, some of the people that are, some of the more privileged members of your communities because as we’ve seen with SestaFosta, that benevolent surveillance really wasn’t all that benevolent. And I think that if people really thought, and they just really thought about what does this actually mean for my community? What does opening the door to this benevolent surveillance with bills like SESTA-FOSTA, how is that gonna impact me next? I think if people thought really critically about it and actually invested resources in fighting back on that, I do think that we would see a lot more muscle from a lot of these groups going into fighting back things like, you know, SESTA-FOSTA and the Kids Online Safety Act and the Earn It Act. Even these organizations that have started to care a little bit more, it’s a little bit more. I don’t really see them putting the muscle behind this that they ought to. These fights are something that everyone, that everyone should care about. Everyone who uses the internet — which is everyone — everyone should care about this. And I just, I still don’t see this being the sexiest issue for people outside of this niche group. And that’s a problem.
TINA: Jared gave us an explanation of the Earn It Act and its potential consequences on chilling freedom of speech online, especially for use by state attorney generals.
JARED: One of the biggest problems of the Earn it Act, especially as it was initially written, is that it would give state attorneys general this backdoor to encryption, this backdoor to encrypted conversations, enabling them to decipher what some of our most protected conversations are supposed to look like. And that is incredibly dangerous because this idea that they would only use this back door to weed out the bad people, to weed out the traffickers, which by the way, a lot of sex workers are oftentimes criminalized as if they were traffickers, simply for living or working together. But the idea that these attorneys general would only use it to go after the people that are scary to us and not use it for anything else is just preposterous. If you create a tool for people, if you create this mass surveillance tool for people to use, they are going to use it. …And so it’s just, it’s wild that even after SESTA FOSTA, people which really opened the door for doing all this sort of work, it’s wild that after that people are like, ah, yes, I want more of that. And so I think that, you know, whether it be the EARN IT Act or kOSA or anything like that, I think that’s really the biggest issue is that, beyond just the sex worker rights movement, which is again why I think that everyone ought to care about this. The idea that these laws are only going to have very limited use and trust the AGs of Texas and of Georgia and of Connecticut and of Illinois and of New York and of all these other states that all 50 AGs for time and memoriam are going to, are ad infinitum that all these AGs are only going to use this law the exact way that people wanted it to be used and it’s gonna have no negative consequences and it’s not gonna have a chilling effect, I just think is laughable and it’s just so intellectually disingenuous.
Part Two
MICKEY: On June 24, 2022, in Dobbs v. Jackson Women’s Health Organization, the United States Supreme Court ruled that Americans do not have a constitutional right to an abortion.
TINA: This decision overruled Roe v Wade and gave states the ability to regulate and ban abortions. It was a devastating turning point for reproductive rights, health care, and the struggle for bodily autonomy.
MICKEY: Here’s Jared on the deja vu that sex workers felt right away.
JARED: While there has been, especially with the overturning of Roe v. Wade I do think that, and frankly with some of the really harmful ways that prosecutors have been using people’s online communications in order to criminalize abortion choices. Well, I do think that there is more of a community that recognizes that, hey, there are some parallels. I don’t think that this is as big of an issue as it ought to be for a lot of people. I do realize that this world is still pretty niche and it really shouldn’t be.
TINA: When we asked Lakeesha Harris of Chicago Volunteer Doulas, what she would say to reproductive justice advocates who don’t think they’re fighting the same fight as sex workers, she had a pretty clear answer:
LAKEESHA: Child, there ain’t no damn high ground. There’s no high ground when the water comes rushing in. That’s one thing we know in New Orleans. There is no high ground. When the water come rushing in, it is going to affect everyone. It will touch everyone. Meaning, when these laws come in, it will gradually, it will gradually affect you. If it doesn’t touch you now, it will touch you. You aren’t no higher. You ain’t no higher than anybody else. So you think, and we can see that right now, right? Y’all did not never fight for sex worker rights. And here we are. Sex workers have been trying to tell you that to fight with us, right? We have been saying it over and over and over again that if you don’t fight with us, If you don’t stand with us, they’re gonna come for these abortions. And here we are 50 years later. 50 years later. And Roe is overturned. You have created a web of lies and deceit that you thought was secure your own behinds and you thought you had a moral high ground, but when the water has come in, it is touching now touching you. And sex workers told you.
MICKEY: So, what does reproductive justice have to do with sex worker justice? What does the Dobs decision have to do with FOSTA-SESTA?
TINA: Well, a lot of it comes down to the political issue of bodily autonomy. Who gets to decide what you use your body for? Who controls systems of access, of resources, of education, of civil rights?
MICKEY: Sex workers have been aware for a long time of the ways technology is used to police and surveil behavior, in ways abortion access providers are just starting to realize.
TINA: Here’s Desiree Collins of the Colorado Entertainer Coalition, with some sobering advice from the sex worker justice movement for the reproductive justice movement:
DESIREE: We already knew that the world kinda hates us. They love us and they hate us. They love the idea of us, but they also don’t want us to exist. And in that sense, I think the letdown of SESTA FOSTA. And I think that for… a lot of women’s rights movements, a big criticism has been that it’s not as intersectional as it could be. At least what you hear the most of is coming from this middle class white lens. And so I think the Dobbs decision really shocked people to no end because there was a fear because of all the last few years of things going on, but it was like, no, they couldn’t, they couldn’t. That was kind of the attitude that I was hearing. And then it happened, and they’re like, what do we do? What do we do?And so…If they were to learn anything from sex worker movement making, is always be prepared for the worst. Hope for the best, but have your plan for the worst. And I think that is how. We survived in a lot of ways, for those of us who did. Is there were old pros who were like this is how it used to be back before the internet. There was some kind of sense of, okay, if this happens, this is what we need to do. If this, then this. If that, then that. And I think if other movements, and especially like reproductive rights movements… God, it feels so icky to say. It feels so icky to say. To say, like, expect bad things to happen. But I think that is the biggest difference in those two worlds, is we were just like, yep, no one’s gonna listen to us. So what do we do now?
MICKEY: Here’s Chibundo Egwuatu, of HIPS in DC, on how the reproductive justice movement and the sex worker justice movement were never all that different to begin with:
CHIBUNDO: The fact that they were seen as strange bedfellows at one time is what’s strange and that’s things are starting to make more sense maybe the logical connections one would see that were never actual for reasons that no one quite know right are becoming actual and that’s that’s fabulous. So yeah the repro movement can learn is how to organize as criminalized people when you have a criminalized body, when your practices are literally criminalized… yeah, how do you how do you organize as a criminalized person, you maybe haven’t been used to being a criminal before. So you can have a lot to learn from criminals. Because a lot of us are still getting shit done…at they can learn from sex workers is like how to I guess work together under unideal circumstances too where I think a lot of sex workers have had to like um in the movement especially since like you know the 80s I would say maybe in the 70s um kind of like hold hands with folks who you know don’t really care about you make some concessions about like something for the moment, right? So like in this Repro moment right now, like well this moment where Repro is really really under attack in a serious serious way. Who are your allies here? And they don’t have to be for all time just for now. What are like maybe some systems you might have thought of? … 01:00:17.402) you might have assumed some things were below you or some people were below you or some engagements were below you. Like that’s just what it is to be a person who’s not at the very, very bottom society. And of course not all sex workers are at the very bottom society. Like Sesta Foss has made some sex workers who thought they were on a certain echelon who got knocked down a few pegs have to do things and organize in ways that might’ve felt below them or just not their reality. And it’s become your reality now. So, you know. being really scrappy, maybe also organizing without funding, finding new funding sources, like having a space where funders can’t define your intervention because a lot of the funders that you might’ve been working with or a lot of the groups you might be working, may have been working with with the past are in some collusion with the carceral state, you know? So like, yeah, I think that’s my big answer. It’s just not only how to like… Organize as a criminal bed, organize with other criminals. Because that’s what you’re going to be now. That’s what you are. Welcome to the crew. The chain gang. Hey, what’s up?
TINA: Remember way back in Episode 1, when Chibundo referred to FOSTA-SESTA as “the Digital Mann Act”? Well, here’s Melissa Gira Grant, author of Playing the Whore: the Work of Sex Work, on the relationship between the Mann Act of 1910 in policing sex work and policing reproductive rights. Big picture: anti-choice activists are trying to use the Mann Act as the basis for what they call “abortion trafficking bans.” They want to create laws that would criminalize travel from one state to another for the purpose of getting an abortion.
MELISSA: Much like around sex trafficking, there was a lot of panicked stories in the mainstream press about children being sold into sexual slavery. You can tell by the tag white slavery that there is a racial component of this that’s way up front and if you go back and you look at some of those stories and also some of the things people like Clifford Roe were saying about what white slavery was it was white girls like innocent white girls sometimes coded even as like country girls coming to the city um innocents who are being preyed upon by pimps and slavers. Ludicrously these pimps and slavers are often black, immigrants, and Jews. the kind of like blood libel revival that’s going on in QAnon of like Democrats are eating babies, they’re a secret cabal that runs the world, that is operating underneath this like white slavery panic as well. I don’t think it’s a coincidence that it blows up at a time of increased immigration of Eastern European Jewish people to the United States and also in the immediate afterlife of enslavement and political attempts to suppress any kind of Black freedom. And some were we’re really open about this, saying, well, white slavery is worse than that slavery because that slavery just stole your labor, but white slavery steals your soul. Like it is like a white people rehabilitation project after slavery. Just, just like bizarre, but like that is, I, would argue part of the function of the white slavery panic. So, okay. That law gets passed. It’s on the books. It’s still on the books. Various pieces of it have been, you know, made less objectionable over the course of court decisions that have hacked away on it. It would be very politically unpalatable right now for somebody to bring a Mann act prosecution. It’s just like, why would you do that? Also, you have all these new sex trafficking laws, so why would you use that? But the people who are paying attention to the Mann act are anti-abortion groups and some of the most radical ones. In Texas now, we’re starting to see efforts to revive the Mann Act, to go after people who are, the language of the Mann Act was to transport somebody across state lines for immoral purposes. And so now they are trying to revive that to prohibit people from traveling for abortion. And it’s in tandem with their attempts also to revive the Comstock Act, which made it a crime, and unfortunately this is still in the books, still a crime to mail anything that can be used to cause an abortion through the mail. So it’s like a sick sad joke to be like these old laws that I only know about because of sex work are now like on the minds of the anti-abortion Christian right.
MELISSA: And this idea of the facilitator, right? It’s not just like you’re doing sex work and you could be criminalized for it. It’s also all the people around you, people who kept you safe, people who exchanged money with you for rent, people who helped you advertise. It’s like a very parallel logic with abortion. It’s like the person who drove you and maybe the person who let you stay at their house to recover after, anybody who facilitates, that language should be ringing loud bells for sex workers. Like they’re reviving the same kind of language. And one of the reasons they’re able to do that is like if you wind back the clock to like the 1890s, they were all thought of as criminal in the same way. There was like a unity of criminalization, if you want to put it that way, around contraception, abortion, prostitution, gender nonconformity. Like these were all in the same mental bucket for anti-vice campaigners. Pornography, of course. But what’s happened in the intervening century is like we’ve started to think of these things as separate. And it’s clear from this effort to push abortion trafficking that for the right, like, they’re not separate. They still think of these as the same.
MICKEY: Here’s Blunt again, on the trainings she and Daly Barnett of the Electronic Frontier Foundation have been giving to the abortion access movement: what can they learn from sex worker organizing?
BLUNT: What can you learn from people who have been organizing in criminalized communities and criminalized economies and criminalized spaces for years? Daly’s been doing a bunch of amazing digital security trainings and talking about, you know, steganography and like how we can like hide messages in plain sight, we talk about how we’re adapting to these ever shifting algorithms of platform policing and shadow banning and like how can we organize, how can we share information in this environment where everything that we’re trying to share is repressed. And I think that we’re seeing this with the protests against the genocide in Gaza that are happening right now too, where people are seeing their content being repressed. These movements are so related, and especially because the way that we’re being repressed is so related, whether it be from the state or the platforms that are doing the repression. I think like some of the trainings that we’ve been doing with the abortion access movement, I gave a training on using a pseudonym and how to decide if using a pseudonym makes sense for you. How to decide if using your government name is too risky, if you need to develop multiple personas to do the work that you’re doing. I think when you’re organizing in a criminalized space, you have to ask yourself different questions and I think people in the reproductive justice movement, you know, have been for a while and more people are now after Dobbs and I think that there’s so much information that we can share with each other as well as just the fact that these, you know, people’s identities are not so siloed that they only exist in one movement.
TINA: Kate D’Adamo, a partner at Reframe Health and Justice, has a very pragmatic approach to thinking about criminal law. Criminalization turns acts into crimes, and makes some actions state sanctioned and others not. So if there is a change in the law that affects your job, or your health care, or your access to a human right, it’s beyond time to unlearn what criminalization means to you.
KATE: We have to recognize the oppression and the just web of the carceral system. And that, like, if nothing else, like, if it can be used to criminalize an assault survivor who needs an abortion, then maybe it’s not the tool that we think it is. And maybe giving it more strength is not something we should be gearing towards and leaning into. And I, yeah, I think that is, that is the thing. I’m hoping gets taken from this moment. I am not in community with plenty of people that I do not want to cause harm to. You don’t have to understand anything. And it’s true, like I hear this all the time where people are like, I don’t understand trans. I’m like, what do you need to understand? There’s nothing, there’s nothing to get if you don’t want to get anything. It’s a question of, do you want to be part of hurting people? And if we don’t have that shared value, you’re not worth my conversation. But if we can at least acknowledge, like you don’t know, no one has to be in community with anyone, but you just have to, like you don’t have to be in community with someone to actually just believe in their human dignity.
MICKEY: Melissa says she was shocked by all the pro-abortion activists posting online about their newly criminalized activity after the Dobs decision.
MELISSA: Like, it’s just so bizarre that like, this would even be treated as like, separate realities of your life. Like, I guarantee you if somebody is charged for their miscarriage and they go through their phone, which the cops will do, we know they’ll do that, and find out that they were also a sex worker, that is gonna be part of the story. That’s gonna be part of like, the reason they would go after that person. And the same way that they go after pregnant people who use drugs and have miscarriages, even if the drugs had nothing to do with anything. It’s like, well, you’re a criminal already, so.
TINA: Kate agrees that criminalizing the sex trade is connected to criminalizing pregnancy and abortion and drug use and so much more. The main connection is that those in political power test out strategies on the most marginalized in society.
KATE: I think the biggest thing that I constantly try to convey is that none of this is new. No one has to reinvent the wheel. And I say that specifically because when you look at the bills, when you look at reproductive justice, criminalization of reproductive justice, the tactics aren’t new. And it’s actually really predictable because they’re not taking untested strategies. when it comes to abortion legislation, it’s too serious and it’s too hard, frankly. Like, abortion is a very well-funded, very… Their comms are fucking in line. The public conversation around abortion is pretty settled, honestly. They’re not gonna take an untested strategy into that. And so by the time they make it to reproductive justice, they’ve been testing these bills, they’ve been testing what courts, they’ve been testing criminalization strategies on other populations. And so nothing is new by the time it gets to reproductive justice. And reproductive justice is so much bigger than abortion by the time they get to abortion. They’ve all been, they’ve already been testing it in other areas of reproductive justice. They’ve already been doing that. Yeah. I mean, when you talk about criminalization of, of pregnancy, I mean, they’ve been criminalizing pregnant people that use substances for. And so when we talk about the criminalization of pregnancy, by the time we criminalize abortion, they’ve been criminalizing pregnancy all throughout in plenty of ways. And so responding to criminalization is not something that they have that reproductive justice and specifically abortion access folks, because reproductive justice has been dealing with the child welfare system for decades, but abortion access folks, by the time it gets there, it’s been tested for a long time. And so there’s both the like, we are the upstream. And actually paying attention to the ways that people are criminalized for connecting and for staying resourced…That is not different. And so learning about what’s happening, anticipating what the tactics are gonna be is easy if you look at people who are more marginalized. And then moving forward, I think recognizing the ways that we respond to abortion or the ways that we have responded to criminalization are replicable. And also they’re gonna mean that… folks who are criminalized are in community with other folks that are criminalized. Whenever I talk about criminalization, I always start from a place of criminalization is the process of turning an action into something that gets state sanction. It is turning an action into a crime. That’s it. And maybe some of those things, we want to remain crimes. Maybe some of those things we don’t. But criminalization is just about what happens when you turn an act into a crime. And that means that everyone who’s criminalized has to respond in similar ways. And so that’s why it also means that criminalized people include sex workers, they include drug sellers, they include people who commit sexual assault, they include people who engage in arms trading. But the tactics to avoid criminalization… are actually similar for all of those spaces. And that’s uncomfortable for people who’ve never thought about criminalization before, but it’s true. And so being in community with criminalized people is something that they’re gonna have to deal with. And they can pick and choose what kind of criminalized people they can pick, but it means that having a relationship to understanding the process of criminalization as not a values-based, well, it is values-based, it’s not the way that they think it is. …Learn from the places that have been criminalized and while you do that, recognize that this movement is going to have to really have a serious conversation with their relationship to the carceral system overall. you have to unlearn what criminalization means to you.
MICKEY: Blunt echoes what Kate and Chibundo have said: these changes in the law reveal the false binary that criminals are bad people, while law abiding and law enforcing people are fundamentally good.
BLUNT: It is so important to gain a deeper understanding of criminalization and what’s at stake. I think that it takes time for people who are newer to living under criminalization to understand that what they were doing last year might require a completely different approach or protocol under criminalization as to what you did when it was not criminalized. I think that people have been doing this work forever and people are policed differently. Abortion was not always evergreen accessible for everyone before Dobbs. There is no reason to rebuild the wheel. I think it’s really important to learn from and build relationships with your sex worker peers, your drug user peers, and your heavily policed and criminalized peers and learn. Learn from the expertise of criminalized communities and elevate that lived experience as incredibly valuable insight. I think lived experience is such valuable insight, and it is something that people need to be paid for their expertise and experience. And it needs to be seen as just as relevant as the people who have the tech degrees, because you can…know the most about technology, you can be an amazing coder, whatever, but if you don’t know how the community you’re serving interacts with technology, it doesn’t really matter.
TINA: Blunt also has some tech-based suggestions for the reproductive justice movement going forward.
BLUNT: And so I think it’s really important that you learn from criminalized communities as well as threat modeling with your community and the people that you organize with. figuring out what threats you’re most concerned about and what you can do to address them. I think it’s a really helpful practice so that it doesn’t feel so overwhelming. So you can figure out what your biggest threats are and figure out how to target them and make actionable steps to making yourself and your community more secure. I have like a list of things that I suggest to people but it can be so different for everyone but I think these apply to most people in general would be figuring out multiple ways of staying in touch with the people that you organize with, with the people who give you money, with the people who share resources with you. Post FOSTA-SESTA, we saw just how fast you can lose access to these platforms. I pull my biggest tippers off of every platform I can. I get multiple forms of communication and contact with them. I want their phone numbers, I want their emails, I want an email list. I want to know that if one of my platforms that I use to make money goes down, that I will be able to shift a significant percentage of my income to a different platform. I think that’s where newsletters come super handy. I think backing up everything, backing up your social media, backing up your files, backing up your documents, backing up your emails, putting them on an encrypted disk is incredibly important. When you… can’t rely on these platforms, when you can’t rely on cloud-based storage, you need to make sure that you have the information that you need at your hands in a secure space so that you can use it in case a platform goes down. I think taking security really seriously, using strong passwords, getting a password manager, developing community standards for communication is really, really important. Sticking to them. deciding how you will talk about the activities that you’re doing. And if people won’t stick to them, consider if they’re a safe person for you to continue organizing with. I think this was something that I saw come up a lot after the Dobbs decision is that, you have to decide what you’re comfortable with and how you’re comfortable sharing information and making sure that you’re keeping the people that you’re… you’re working with and organizing with, or that are helping you access care safe.
MICKEY: Here’s Marla again, on how decriminalization is actually the key to keeping everyone safe.
MARLA: I think the issue of criminalization is a huge fulcrum point between the abortion rights and the reproductive justice movement and the sex workers rights movement and our advocacy for decriminalization. And when we abstract these issues so much, it becomes meaningless to me. You know, a lot of the debates and a lot of the rhetoric around prostitution, it means nothing to me because it doesn’t have anything to do with the policies that are gonna make us safer. You know, I’m not just pro-decriminalization. I’m not just anti-police. Like I’m pro-welfare. I’m pro-social services. Like I believe that, you know, the circumstances under which I have been in sex work, which is everything from…not being able to pay for college textbooks, to being a survivor of violence and having post-traumatic stress disorder and not being able to work your typical vanilla job. I know what’s going to make me safe.
MARLA: I mean, I had a lot of hope and in some ways I still do about how many people were radicalized in 2020 during the George Floyd riots, about the kind of power that the police have over our lives and how in many cases we don’t have any recourse when we’re violated by the police state and I have a lot of hope that people can take a moment like the George Floyd riots and kind of hone in on the issues that sex workers have been talking about for a very long time about how… A lot of people who are pro-criminalization, who think of prostitution as, even if they don’t want to criminalize the prostitute, they want to criminalize the clients. They want to criminalize the clients who are paying for our services. What they don’t understand is that the police are always going to be a point of violence because that’s the role that they serve in our society. They serve the class interests of the capitalists, the property holders, the people with all the wealth. And sex workers have always known that. Sex workers have been on the front lines saying that every time we interact with the police, they coerce us, they violate us, they commit all these acts of violence against us. They cannot be an entry point into welfare services or into exit programs, assuming we even want those. To me, exit programs is just another… means-tested welfare program. It’s just another public service that should be offered to anyone and everybody who needs it, not just sex workers who have been arrested for prostitution and, you know, who need to quit because now they’re under probation. Like, these kinds of social services should not be reserved for people who have had to go through violent experiences with the police. And so I think… the criminalization of people seeking and getting abortions and people who help people seek and get abortions. We need to be drawing these parallels with that level of criminalization to the levels of criminalization that sex workers and prostitutes have been facing since the beginning of the police state here. Whenever I was in college and, you know, abortion clinics were closing, Planned Parenthood had already been defunded in the years prior. We would have these anti-choice organizations come to our campus and proselytize about their anti-choice, anti-abortion views. And they would always wrap their arguments in these very esoteric abstract ideas about life and justice. They didn’t wanna talk about the police. They didn’t wanna talk about the fact that when they say that they’ll criminalize the abortion doctors, what they actually mean is that they’ll surveil the people trying to seek abortions, and that’s how they find the abortion doctors, and in fact, they’ll charge the abortion seekers with conspiracy and with their own criminal charges if they don’t comply with the investigations into abortion doctors. The same thing happens with sex workers and our clients. People want to take prostitution and make it so abstract as to where it doesn’t even apply to our lives anymore. I have been in sex work for about a decade now, for my whole adult life. And having to witness, you know, the overturning of Roe v. Wade and to witness these very concrete moments in policy and moments in, you know, Supreme Court cases like Dobbs and instances like Sesta Fosta happening and changing the landscape of sex work for all of us here. These aren’t abstract concepts. This is not To me, this is not about an argument about whether or not somebody should or shouldn’t be paying for sex or whether or not there’s any way to make that transaction coercive or not. I know the circumstances under which I’m safe. To me, there’s no collapsing the clients who have paid me for sexual services. Because the difference between a bad client and a good client is the difference between whether or not I make it home in one piece. It’s the difference between whether or not I’m traumatized by an interaction or whether I’m kind of bored with it. And I’m kind of just looking at my watch, waiting for the 15, the last 15 minutes to be up so I can go and eat a sandwich. Yes, boredom is the goal.
TINA: Here’s Melissa again, on the Comstock laws of the late 1800s, which restricted the sale and shipping of everything from contraceptives to sex toys.
MELISSA: Jules Gil Peterson, the incredible historian of medicine and one of the few people who can speak with any authority about the history of trans kids existence in the United States, she said something when we were having a conversation about the Comstock Act that was like, we need to like imagine a constituency as broad as Comstock imagined his enemies list. And that’s sort of how we’re operating. It’s like, so his enemies list is like pornographers, abortionists, prostitutes, Margaret Sanger. So anybody who talks about birth control, like it reminds me of sort of like how like the Christian right thinks of, you know, the abortionists and the gays all in the same bucket as baddies, like they got that from somewhere. And the irony is like, we aren’t often working together. So we’re gonna try. I think the threat is so real you know, there are people who are like looking to sex workers in a different way for some advice on how to not get arrested or how to live under criminalization, which is a different set of strategies. Like I think that’s the thing that people are having a mind fuck about right now. It’s like you don’t know if the text message you’re sending today is going to come back to bite you. And how do you live with that? How do you live your life without, you know, just crumbling under that? Like, let’s embrace the alleged conspiracy that we’re in and actually benefit from it, you know, like I get it, like I’m sure there are people in their desire to decriminalize, to de-stigmatize abortion, to try to make it seem exceptional, right? Like, this is like why we get like really bad framings like safe, legal and rare. And I kind of think of safe, legal and rare as the like empowerment narrative, how that functions in sex work, right? No, no, like I’m having a great time. And like, but with abortion, you’d be like, no, like it’s really terrible. And I’d never want that to happen. You know, it’s the abortion narrative of like choices that you make with your doctor rather than your own autonomy being valued. Like we gotta, we gotta drop all that. We know that, you know, that kind of politics of respectability does not save you. And I think actually the sex worker rights movement has like reckoned with this a little more publicly. The abortion rights movement is certainly reckoning with it publicly now.
MICKEY: We asked Lakeesha Harris what a coalition between reproductive justice and sex worker justice would feel like to her:
LAKEESHA: Oh, so what do I imagine it feeling like? Like a breath, like a, finally a deep breath, right? Like finally we can begin the work of organizing for real, for real around reproductive justice and birth justice. Like finally we are here. And I think that, It’s going to look like liberation. It’s going to feel like liberation, finally. And I think that it’s going to look and feel imperfect. It’s going to feel like new babies standing on their legs, a little wobbly at first. We’re going to have a little bit of conflict, right? Because what’s a movement without conflict? What is it? We gonna have a little, don’t be afraid of it. Go into, go into the conflict. Go with lean, lean into the conflict. It’s okay, y’all. Don’t be triggered by it. And it’s gonna, after all the conflict and the fighting, it’s gonna look so good. It’s gonna be so powerful. It’s gonna be so juicy and. You know who’s going to be afraid? It’s not going to be us. It’s going to be them people that has been in power for all this time, that tried to divide us all this time because now we will actually have the movement that they were fearing, right? The movement that they had defragmented so very long ago.
Part Three
TINA: FOSTA-SESTA changed the sex worker justice movement forever. Even though the law has barely been used, its existence has had a devastating effect.
MICKEY: But the way the movement responded also changed everything. Fighting FOSTA-SESTA made us stronger, and it changed how others perceive us. Many of the people we spoke with hope that strength will eventually help us to decriminalize all kinds of sex work in the United States.
TINA: For example, the mutual aid networks we developed were undeniably powerful. And when the COVID-19 pandemic hit the United States in early 2020, sex workers were ready to care for one another. Here’s Jared again:
JARED: I bring up COVID just because I think that those early hours of the pandemic really were some of the best organizing I’ve ever seen sex workers do as far as starting mutual aid funds in order to keep people safe or to reduce harm for people. And I think that even though COVID was the happy days, we didn’t know that COVID was going to happen, but at the same time, the idea of doing organizing like that, or even frankly doing this sort of organizing that groups like Red Canary do, where they’re connecting people to services and resources and information, there was a lot of fear that even just that sort of work could be either criminalized to the point of hurting the people that were doing that work or that SESTA-FOSTA could have such a chilling effect that work wouldn’t be able to even continue in the meaningful ways that it was already doing. So after SESTA-FOSTA…because I think sex workers were a lot more organized and were more galvanized and were just more connected to each other, you know, especially sex workers that tend to be more political. I think that a lot of that infrastructure actually enabled a lot of the mutual aid funds that I saw…are really…I’m sure those funds would have existed, even if some of the infrastructure that was built because of fighting back against SESTA and some of the other stuff happened. But I do think that infrastructure that was built really enabled a lot of those mutual aid funds to be as successful as they were. It certainly helped bring donations to those mutual aid funds. Organizing is a skill. it’s a muscle and having really exercised that muscle for the fight back against SESTA-FOSTA and then other bills that came after it or that were proposed after it. I think that the tools and the skills that people gleaned from those fights actually really helped a lot of the mutual aid and other organizing that happened because of the pandemic, I think that it made it a lot more effective. However, at the same time, there was also fear because people, again, you know, also with the pandemic, there were also other bills that were SESTA-FOSTA-esque, and I’m really talking about the Earn It Act, but there were also other bills that were really moving through Congress at that same time, or at least that we feared were moving through Congress at the same time. So to one extent, you had more infrastructure for organizing that certainly helped with a lot of the mutual aid funds. But at the same time, you also had a lot of fear of – could this go away right away or some of the information sharing? What is the impact of SESTA-FOSTA going to be with the information sharing that is necessary to do this sort of organizing? So there was the good and the bad.
MICKEY: But there’s strife within sex worker movement, too. It’s not just us against the world. Here’s zara raven of Hacking Hustling
zara: There is a lot of internalized whorephobia among sex workers. So I’m gonna be patient and I’m gonna talk to you and I’m gonna work through, support you when working through any fears or hangups you have. There are a lot of sex workers who are survivors who aren’t yet questioning criminalization as a strategy. That’s all they’ve been exposed to and don’t have other ideas yet about how to…keep each other, keep themselves safe. And so supporting people in accessing new strategies without shaming people for using whatever strategies that they’ve used to survive or that they continue to use to survive. … So yeah, so different strategies for different people depending on what level of power they hold and what their experiences are and what kind of relationship I want to have with them. There are some people that I talk to, and there are some people that I fight.
TINA: FOSTA SESTA affected everyone differently, but it affected everyone in the sex industry. There’s a term we use in the movement: Whorearchy, which refers to the social stratification within the sex industry, as well as inter-community stigma. When zara talks about “internalized whorephobia,” that’s the Whorearchy: privileged workers believing that putting other workers down will keep them safe. Instead of building solidarity. Elizabeth speculates that part of the FOSTA effect is the continued collapse of the Whorearchy:
ELIZABETH: This is a fucked up silver lining of SESTA-FOSTA. I would love to see, still acknowledging that different areas of the sex industry function in different ways and have different levels of criminalization and even with criminalized sex work, there’s lots of class and race differences there. I guess just like, I wish people would stop shitting all over like full service sex workers. If they’re in an area of the sex industry, that’s not explicitly criminalized, stop thinking that that means that you’re somehow, you know, superior, like the whole like hierarchy I would love to see demolished because if there was just like huge more numbers and like more people fighting and talking about this issue, I think we would all be better served. But like and I guess it’s coming from Chicago where there used to be a lot of stratification and a lot of know your rights workshops were really hard because people who weren’t explicitly full-service sex-workers would get very twitchy when I would say like you could also get arrested and it turned very quickly into like, but I’m not like those people. I think that has gotten a lot better, but I would love to see it get even more so… I can’t speak to other cities as well as I can New York and Chicago, but in like 2008, there was a string of busts on BDSM spaces in New York and Chicago. And I think that put a crack and then it sort of evolved over the years. But I think no one being able to really functionally use internet spaces and then also realizing that a lot of folks were using the same tools. brought people together. I would like this is probably very Pollyanna and maybe not realistic. I would like to think that some people recognize the like, absolutely backbreaking levels of work that full service workers, particularly black and brown trans full service workers were doing in terms of activism and like, putting themselves out there as like being out in media and like doing press interviews. So that everyone can benefit. I hope that at least some people saw that and thought like, oh, like I owe a lot to these folks.
MICKEY: Here’s M on how workers who are more privileged can recognize that they’re not immune from bad laws.
M: Thinking about whorephobia and lateral whorephobia and kind of the striations of privilege within different sex working communities. I think that there is like a group of really privileged folks that are like, well, it’s not my problem. right? Because I’m legal. I’m like, legal for now, bitch! Like, you really think you really think that this fucking system is gonna stop at what is seen as criminal for now? Like, in, I would imagine that in certain contexts and certain jurisdictions and states that like, being a content creator also probably encounters some of its own limitations as well. And, whorephobia across the board. It hurts everyone, it doesn’t fucking matter if you’re a legal worker or not. And I would say in my community, folks that I hold dearly, we’re never just one type of sex worker. We’re never just one type of sex worker. And so decriminalization benefits all sex workers. It benefits all sex workers because it challenges…whorephobia and sex negativity and misogyny in so many ways that sex workers, even in the legal sides of things, could benefit from. And it’s that lateral whorephobia that really, really just in some ways makes me really furious and also makes you really disappointed. But that’s real again, like in every industry, there are all sorts of walks of life and politics even within who would have thought, you know, even in like the adult industry, there is like a mix of that there too. And it is really disappointing at times when people try to distance themselves from folks who are less privileged because what the fuck are you using your privilege for? That’s great. You’re legal now. Awesome. What are you doing with that? What are you doing with that? You don’t have as much at stake as someone who is more marginalized, who perhaps is at more risk, be it because of their gender or race or financial situation or mental health, like, um, so many different things, like what the fuck are you doing with your privilege? That’s great that you are in a legal industry for now. But just as you had said, like, you know, sex workers, canary in the coal mine, I feel like full service workers are the canary in the coal mine when it comes to, like, the broad sex working industry, including, like, the legal, the legal sides of that. Yeah, what the fuck? What the fuck? Yeah, I feel like there is a sense of when folks refuse to acknowledge their power, the probability of them misusing it is so great. It’s so great. So check your fucking power. Check your fucking privilege.
TINA: Another “fucked up silver lining” of this era, again if you wanna call it that, is an overhaul in media narratives about sex work. Here’s Blunt:
BLUNT: But I think also something really interested happened from a media analysis standpoint where the coverage of sex work, I just noticed such a drastic shift in how FOSTA-SESTA was covered from anything else I’ve been involved in like 10 years of sex worker organizing. And I really think that because FOSTA-SESTA had the…potential to impact workers working in legal sectors and highly visible sectors of the sex trades with large social media following that the media coverage of FOSTA-SESTA was so different than equally harmful legislation that impact more criminalized and in-person workers. And I think that the protest was really, really visible because of sex worker use of social media. And you would see like the majority, well, there was like the really like star studded FOSTA-SESTA propaganda with Amy Schumer. There was also a large portion of the media coverage around FOSTA-SESTA had this huge shift where there were photos of us protesting or photos of us protesting in the streets instead of like bending car windows, you know, they would talk about sex workers resisting this legislation instead of prostitutes. And I think the language shift and the imagery shift that happened during this time was really, really huge. And I think it’s partially had to do with the visibility because of the impact it had on online workers.
MICKEY: In this era, journalists actually reached out to sex workers for quotes about FOSTA-SESTA. Many sex workers felt they could be real about their circumstances rather than play into stereotypes.
TINA: We demanded that media images accompanying articles stop using the same old disembodied legs in fishnets and heels stepping out of a car on a dark street. Instead, the focus should be on protests signs reading RIGHTS NOT RESCUE and SEX WORK IS WORK.
MICKEY: Same deal with language: while an individual might identity as a prostitute, or a hooker, or a hoe, if journalists were talking about labor rights, then they should be using the politicized language of sex work.
TINA: Here’s Kate on how that media representation changed her conversation with Congressional staffers:
KATE: I think especially with the amount of response, both publicly from sex workers, but also the level of media coverage and the way that it had been covered. I heard more and more that there was this feeling of, not just with staffers, but with organizations too, who all of a sudden were like, we thought we’d heard all the things from the experts. And the only people who were…not the only people who were not listened to, but we weren’t listening to the people who were affected and we weren’t listening to the people who were right about what happened. And I think that hit home after FOSTA-SESTA. It was just an epochal shift.
MICKEY: Melissa agrees that FOSTA-SESTA took things too far in conflating sex work and sex trafficking. The media was starting to get the picture: when it comes to labor, choice, circumstance, and coercion is a spectrum. And the pushback from the labor rights movement changed public attitudes, hopefully for the better.
MELISSA: I think it might be helpful to look at SESTA-FOSTA as sort of the capstone achievement of 10 years of advocacy and campaigning on the part of anti-sex work groups who kept hitting this obstacle over and over, you know, when they would conflate sex work and trafficking and try to go after both as if they were the same thing. They would get criticized for that. Sex workers were becoming very effective at getting through to the general public that these are different things. And if someone is coming to you saying, we have to go after sex workers because that’s how we fight sex trafficking. That argument, though it certainly still to this day motivates some law enforcement crackdowns on sex work, at least in the general populace, it was starting to fall apart.you couldn’t get people to just do whatever you wanted them to do to harm sex workers, to like abolish sex work, which, you know, in their minds was going after sex workers, even though they would say that’s not what they were doing. But that’s what we know happened when anti prostitution groups said we have to go after the sex industry, it was sex workers who paid the price. And so they started to pivot from sex work is sex trafficking to the sex trafficking of children is being enabled on these platforms that sex workers just so happen to actually be the majority of users on. And so they would try to sort of like push sex workers to the margin, like, oh no, we’re not talking about you… So the through line here is attacking sex work, and they’ve just… the kind of the sad, bittersweet thing about SESTA-FOSTA is… I think that was the moment that sex workers were finally able to make that connection. And certainly in like more progressive and liberals minds, you know, people who weren’t sex workers who were vaguely on the left. Maybe also generationally things were different, maybe millennials who kind of grew up online were looking at this differently. But like that’s the first time we start seeing polling where people are supporting things like decriminalization, you know, understanding that this was harmful for sex workers to be criminalized. The part that I think lawmakers were able to hide behind, though, was this line of, well, it’s not about you, it’s about the children. As if you could police this space and the people in it, only some of them.
TINA: By and large, American sex worker movements wants decriminalization. As we have explored in previous episodes, other strategies, like the End Demand model of criminalizing clients and managers, doesn’t make people safe. Legalization introduces more laws and regulations. Decrim is the removal of bad laws. Bad laws like FOSTA SESTA.
MICKEY: Here’s Elizabeth, on the importance of decriminalization to the sex worker justice. And how things might change if we listen to one another.
ELIZABETH: I think we need cohesive strategy among the states. I mean, obviously each state is different. We all have our own challenges. and we need broad coalitions. Like this can not just be like either criminal justice or public health, or you can’t just have one lane, it needs to be a broad table. Because those relationships that those folks have are so important. Because you never know who someone in a maybe movement like an organization that’s not traditionally seen as progressive may have a buy-in on this and then they may have relationships. So I think we need to really…build relationships with other justice movements and bring them to the table. And also just keep pushing. Cause it’s all, we’re always gonna have the blowback. Like the more progress we make, the more they’re gonna push back. And that’s just the way it is with like any civil rights movement. I mean, we’re seeing that in the trans rights space, a hundred thousand fold right now. But I mean, I think public opinion is changing. And I think that’s something that we can harness too. And not also just like not being apologetic because I think that sometimes happens in conversations about it where there’s a both sides instinct that I don’t necessarily think we have to have about decrim. We can be empathetic to folks who are very attached to End Demand because they think it is truly the right way to keep people safe. But we don’t have to say, well, this model that’s caused so much harm in other countries, like maybe there’s something to be said for it. I think it’s okay to say no, like that is. That is so harmful. It’s in some ways worse than criminalization. But we can also listen to like why they think End Demand is good. And I, most of those points, you can go to full decrim and be like, you can have that and more with this model. Because I have seen, I personally talked to three people in the last, I don’t know, eight months who were hardcore End Demand supporters. And then when they started digging into what full decrim looks like and digging more into what End Demand looks like they flipped.
TINA: Here’s Jared on what the future of sex worker movements could be:
JARED: So one of my most, the most frustrating things to me is that even though a lot of elected officials recognize: oh crap, we messed up with SESTA-FOSTA, this was the wrong thing, we shouldn’t have done it. I would hope that they would just repeal it, but that does not seem to be happening at least anytime soon. And the thing that frustrates me even more is that there are additional laws, like the Kids Online Safety Act, like a number of other bills that are always floating around, that lawmakers aren’t, for whatever reason, the muscle memory just isn’t there for them to recognize that, hey, hmm, we passed this law that was really bad. Maybe we shouldn’t do laws that are like it. It’s like any time that a new law comes up, the amount of time and energy that has to go into telling people maybe, Senator Blumenthal should stop trying to regulate the internet because he’s really, really bad at it. Like for whatever reason, there’s all of this energy that has to go into that, which I find deeply frustrating because there’s just so many other fights that we should be engaged in that we are engaged in, to be clear. But at the end of the day, there’s only 24 hours. And if you’re spending so much of your time ripping hairs out or trying to fight back against the terrible things that Richard Blumenthal or Lindsey Graham or a number of other people are trying to do, Marsha Blackburn or any of the other ones, it detracts from so much of the other works. So there are what I would love to see, and this is starting to happen in several places, but Sex Worker Protection Acts. There was a Sex Worker Protection Act that was introduced in New York City and in other areas I know that they’re looking into this as well, but just bills that would… give sex workers, whether they be legal sex workers, so people that maybe are working online or people that are in the criminalized sex trade, so full service folks or others. There’s just legal protections, not legal protections, but labor protections, protections around with banking, unemployment protections in case people are deplatformed for doing constitutionally protected speech. There are, I think there’s so much that we could be doing to build a better world for people that are in populations that are most likely to do some more marginalized sex work. So again, I’m talking about young people, young queer and trans folks, people that run away from home, people that are in the foster care system. I think there’s so much we could be doing to build those folks up. I think there is so much we could be doing for survivors that we’re not really doing right now. I just think that we could be, instead of constantly worrying about criminalization, I think that we could be more, we should be more focused on what reparations would look like for sex workers. And I say that word reparations really intentionally because, you know, while people say that sex work is the oldest, the world’s oldest profession, it’s also probably the world’s most maligned profession. The number of cases, the number of Supreme Court cases where the justices say, even if we’re giving rights to this group, certainly we would never do it for the whores. Just the number of cases where that exists is indicative of the society that we live in where sex workers are often maligned. And because of that, policing looks the way that it does, of the collateral consequences of being a sex worker, whether it be someone who does online sex work and you’re fired from whatever job, whether that be as an EMT or a judge, or I’m giving real examples that have happened in New York in the past few years, or you were a sex worker and as you did sex work in the past and as a result, you had your kids taken away from you by the family regulation system, or you have a record. So you can’t get a different job or find housing, or if you’re a non-citizen and you’re at risk of being deported. I think there’s just so much that we could do to really give reparations for those folks, to actually fix the systems that did them dirty in the first place, but then also to ensure that we’re building those folks up. There’s just so much that we could do if we weren’t spending all of our time, or so much of our time, on these fights that frankly people should have learned from with the fallout after SESTA-FOSTA passed.
MICKEY: Here’s zara on what it takes to create a safer world:
zara: We live in a context of anti-blackness, of cis- of transphobia, of homophobia, ableism. When I was in DC, a lot of my work was addressing sexual violence in public spaces, especially focused on street harassment and really supporting people and understanding broader community-based solutions. And I liked focusing on street harassment because it was one of those things where it was like, people could understand us. Like when we talk about rape, when we talk about intimate partner violence, those acts are criminalized, but street harassment isn’t criminalized. And so it’s an opportunity almost to start talking about what we could do instead. And one of our, one of the areas of my work was specifically sexual harassment on public transit. And often WMATA, the Washington Metropolitan Transit Authority, often wanted to, yeah, install cameras. Like that was like, oh, yeah, we’ll keep people safe because we can see them. We can watch. And or maybe more lighting, like these aesthetic changes. And what I’m interested in is cultural change. And I think that often in this context, in this, in the context of capitalism, in the context of policing, we’re taught that safety is a quick fix. Safety is a three-digit number away. Call this 911 and safety comes, right? And we’re not encouraged to think and to want more. And never mind the fact that often when survivors call 911 for safety from their abusers, that they’re the ones criminalized. Never mind the fact that when someone’s experiencing either a mental health crisis or just living with disability in this world and behaving in ways that are not normative or not expected or not promoted, that police come with guns drawn, that 50% of people killed by police are disabled folks. So nevermind all that. Call this three digit number and safety comes. And so what I’ve… been interested in is how do we create a culture where we keep each other safe, where we, if we see someone who’s feeling uncomfortable, we intervene, we check in, we support each other. And that is the opposite of believing in the stranger danger narrative. Stranger danger narrative says, you know, keep yourself safe, you’re, you know, stay in your little house with your little nuclear family. I’m pushing collectivism. I’m really thinking about like, how do we all build communities of care? How do we break through these silos? How do we interrupt anti-Blackness and love Black people? How do we interrupt cis-hero patriarchy and love Black trans women and Black trans femmes? How do we end ableism and attend to all of our different um needs and um abilities uh like and honor those and value those um so it’s just a completely different world that i want to live in and it’s not a quick fix it’s slow painstaking cultural change so the work that we did on the dc public transit was really mostly posters. We had a series of posters featuring Muslim women, Black trans men, and I think it just said you deserve to be treated with respect, these messages of respect and support for people who are often most likely to be targeted. You know, this was also around the time of, not that this time has ended, but Muslim bans. And and like just rising Islamophobia and anti-Arab racism, which we still see everywhere, especially right now. So yeah, I want cultural change. And that’s to me how we create safety. When I and my most disabled and my darkest skinned and my fattest friends can walk down the street and feel safe, and the cameras and cops are not meant to… protect us, they’re meant to police us, to get us to conform to what we’re not… You know, it’s me doing that inner work and doing that work in my communities and spreading that work far and wide to create a context where violence doesn’t happen in the first place.
TINA: Here’s Desiree on the relationship between decrim and harm reduction:
DESIREE: Immediately when I think about SESTA-FOSTA, I still think of it as like a backdoor law to like so many other things. It’s really easy to put the thumb on sex workers because we’re already hated and then to go into it. … Decriminalization in general, whether you’re talking about decriminalization of sex work or decriminalization of drugs, it’s about harm reduction. It. It is the first step because there’s so much more that can happen after that, but that is the dam that you have to break through before you can even address some of those root causes. So like criminalization of drugs doesn’t stop drug use. It doesn’t stop people from dying. If anything, it makes it harder. And that’s in…substance use spaces, like the idea of doing your drug of choice in a safe manner where someone can help you if you need it is literally life-saving. And so if you take that kind of… if you can wrap your brain around that of like something as tangible as overdose, bad, living life good, this helps live the life, and then just kind of plop that onto sex work decriminalization. If we can get to a place where we are not criminalized and have more sanctions and frankly like more areas that like put us into further debt, like how are you going to pay for your fines of prostitution without… doing more prostitution, all of those messy things and life-harming things. You can’t get to that until you have decrim. You can’t save the lives until you can understand the root causes, and you can’t understand the root causes until you make people feel safe enough to be vulnerable with you. And the you here being society in the legal system.
MICKEY: Here’s M on the ways criminalization makes us less safe: and how collectivism is the key to resistance.
M: Just because it’s criminalized doesn’t mean it stops, right? It may make things actually more dangerous, right? There will always be a need for folks to receive reproductive care. There will always be a need for folks to seek out sexual imagery or connection, you know, what have you, and consume or participate in sex work. be a provider as that is a valid form of labor, or someone who is seeking to consume that, as be it like a job, a client, you know, just a viewer, a patron, what have you. These things don’t disappear. Or rather, they, in some ways, they do disappear in that they’re less public, right? They have less support around that. So there will always be a need. for reproductive care, always. I think that the reproductive justice community can learn and probably is putting into application, like there has to be a way, there will be a way that will be just engineered by those who will continue to want to provide support and safety to enact resistance against… systems that want to control and take away choice. That resistance can look like so many different ways. And I think it’s so essential to always recognize like how folks sit in just the web of privilege and marginalization to see like, what can you do? What can you do? Like don’t just sit on power that is unnamed and relinquish that because you’re a little uncomfortable. Like use that because every individual working together is what will enact change. It’s never going to solely be on one individual.
TINA: We could work to get FOSTA-SESTA repealed, but without full decrim, that would only do so much. Here’s Blunt:
BLUNT: I think that if FOSTA-SESTA was repealed that we would have more resources. But I also think that FOSTA-SESTA did not happen in a vacuum. There have been so many fucking bills that have come out that are trying to like… exploit the ideas that we have around safety and our fear of protecting white children from trafficking that are being… All of these child safety bills that do nothing to protect children, that do nothing to address the root causes of trafficking, that are being used in this very fear-mongering way where they’re getting bipartisan support from legislators.that are just increasing surveillance, that are just reducing your ability to share things online and that will impact everyone. So I think like we can’t think about FOSTA-SESTA in a vacuum because there are some, I think legislators saw how effective it was to get support for that bill using language around stopping trafficking to protect the children. that is how we’re going to see bills in the future being passed that reduce the privacy and safety of everyone. There’ll be surveillance bills and it will be passed under language of anti-terror language, anti-trafficking language, save the children language. And I think that we really need to educate ourselves of how this rhetoric is being used to pass legislation that decreases our ability to move throughout the world without being surveilled.
MICKEY: We asked Desiree what advice she would give for sex workers getting started today in a post-FOSTA-SESTA world. She stressed the importance of sex workers supporting one another, even in the increasingly precarious world of online communication.
DESIREE: Do not follow the advice that I did where it was like, don’t make community. That was, you know, it seemed practical at the time for people to say like, oh, don’t get involved. Don’t, you know, just go in there, do your work and come out. But you have to find community. And especially with full service work, it’s more isolating than it is in the club. When I was first getting into full service work, I had some very supportive friends, but they were not sex workers. And they were my safety line. You know, I would tell them when I was going out, if I don’t respond by this time, call me if I don’t respond after that, da-da-da-da, you know, the whole spiel. But I could only talk to them so much about it. before I found community who were also sex workers and also full-service sex workers. I had one friend who we worked together sometimes … I think that we met online. I think it was through one of the subreddits. And she’s like, wait, you’re in Colorado? I just moved to Colorado too. Let’s work together because it’s an isolated profession. It’s such a freeing moment when you can speak freely about something that you are.
TINA: And maybe, just maybe, we can reclaim solidarity as The FOSTA effect. Here’s Jared:
JARED: So a year after FOSTA passed, there was also just a lot more optimism in rooms and in spaces that I was in. People just, I mean, getting sex work decriminalized and getting a lot of these other collateral bills passed, it just, they felt, I don’t wanna say inevitable because it’s 2023 and we haven’t gotten everything yet, but it felt like, okay, it’s not a, are we going to win? It’s a, when are we going to win?
Outro
MICKEY: Caty Simon, of Whose Corner Is It Anyway, thinks that sex worker organizing is getting better at not focusing on decriminalization as the “happily ever after.” As important as decrim is as a goal, Caty wants us to ask ourselves another question:
CATY: I think we’ve gotten better at this, at not just having this monomaniacal fixation on decriminalization, as if legislative change by itself will be sufficient, you know, and not imagining what does the day, what will the day after decriminalization look like?
TINA: We loved this question from Caty, so we asked several of our interview subjects: what does the day after decrim look like? Here’s Blunt.
BLUNT: I would take the day off. Maybe a celebration. But I think that, you know, decriminalization means that people can labor without fear from the police, which is a leading source of violence that people in the sex trades experience. It means more access to safety, community, and resources. And I think that it would keep folks safer, it would reduce stigma. And I think it’s really important that when we have these conversations about decriminalization, that we’re also talking about decarceration and abolition as well. I think less fascism would be helpful. I know, but I think that continuing to push media for like by and for representation of sex workers, you know, I think we’ve seen some amazing documentaries come out this year that are very different than documentaries on sex work that we’ve seen before. I think the continued push to media to do a better job covering sex work to really explain the complexities of criminalization and the harm that it causes and the intersecting relationship between stigma and criminalization and marginalization and why people do sex work. I think that media can really, really shift public perception. And I think that it has. I think with what we’ve talked about with the coverage of FOSTA-SESTA, the media has changed how sex work is talked about. I see it in my friend groups. I see it in my family. I see it in how sex work is covered online.
MICKEY: Here’s Jared.
JARED: So I think the day after the most immediate need is to get people’s records cleared because we’ve had criminalization for so long. I think that most real decrim bills or most decrim bills that I would support have a record clearing provision of them. Now the bill that I write are the bill that any activist writes might be different than the bill that actually gets passed. But ensuring that people’s records are cleared in a meaningful way to ensure that folks that maybe are in immigration proceedings, because sex work is what’s called a crime involving moral turpitude, which makes it easier to deport people or makes it a lot more difficult for people to adjust their status if they have that on their record. I think the biggest thing is to make sure that we are taking care of the people that have a prior record. And again, because of collateral consequences. uh, collateral consequences being, uh, the non, you know, the parts of a criminal record that aren’t just throwing someone into jail. I think that for sex work, because they’re so broad from, um, everything, uh, from, um, someone’s of what involvement in the child, family regulation system looks like as far as getting someone’s children taken from them, um, to housing consequences. In New York in particular, there are specific… housing laws that really impact sex workers disproportionately. I think that just making sure that people aren’t still suffering from those collateral consequences is really step one. One of the biggest issues with criminalization is also stigmatization. And then a lot of laws that are geared towards people that might just be suspected of potentially being sex workers. In particular, I’m talking about unlicensed massage laws in New York, in New York in particular, the practice, there are 36 licensed professions in New York, being a lawyer is one of them, doctors, midwives, lots of other professions. But the only two that are really criminalized are midwife free and unlicensed massage. And there’s even a whole special paradigm for how to criminalize unlicensed massage that is literally written into the education law. And the education laws where these offenses are criminalized, 95% of the people that are criminalized for it are Asian women. And it’s very intentional. These are people that are suspected of being sex workers. But we need to not just get sex work decriminalized, but laws that look a whole like that are meant to also criminalize people that may or not be sex workers, decriminalize as well, and then also look at the collateral laws around that. And then I think there needs to be a real distribution of resources. And so recognizing that. Decrim is great, but this criminalization paradigm has created a whole lot of harm over a whole lot of years. And so making sure that we’re investing in people that are sex workers. Some people that are sex workers, that is a job that they wanna do and they wanna continue doing that for the rest of time. And that is okay. And there are some people that are doing sex work because they’re black trans women and they were fired from several different jobs. And this is a job that will enable them to have some sort of…basically way of paying for their rent, recognizing that we have to serve both of those sets of people and maybe you’re a sex worker that doesn’t wanna do it anymore, but you just don’t have the means to do something else, making sure that we have support for those people, labor protections and everything else, and then also supporting the people that wanna continue doing the work. And then even if we decriminalize sex work in New York today, could people do it safely? Well, one of the issues of people, well, SESTA-FOSTA is unfortunately preventing people from having all of the safety tools that they might be able to use. And so there’s also, you know, the state policy is so important, but then also repealing laws like SESTA-FOSTA, making sure that they don’t happen. Also just creating harm reduction tools and other mechanisms for people to do this sort of work safely. You know, Decrim, Oftentimes, Nordic model and prohibitionist supporters, these are folks that allegedly want to decriminalize sex work for the provider, but not for customers. The reality is that every bill that they’ve ever proposed anywhere in the world, it’s they still criminalize sex workers that live and work together and other folks, and they still get people caught up at the surveillance state. But a lot of those folks accuse decrim supporters of wanting a wild west for sex work after sex work decrim and that’s really not what we want at all. We want you know a framework where people are actually supported and have protections and I think that really building that infrastructure happens of course the day after sex work gets decriminalized but is also happening in tandem and frankly I actually think a lot of that infrastructure is going to be built before we even get to full decrim.
TINA: Here’s Desiree:
DESIREE: I would love to think that it would be a beautiful and magical. But maybe my realist side is like, we would just all be like, toasting with, with our friends, probably over Zoom, because a lot of us are spread out all over the world who do this kind of work. Um, so yeah, but I think it would be at least within community a moment of immense joy and celebration, and then there would be immediately, all right, what do we do now? Like, because of that dam that it has just been broken, okay, what do we do now. It would be racial and ethnic justice and clubs and it would be labor laws. There would be so many different things, all those different intersecting movements that are within the community would start to pop up and that’s when we could really get some real work done.
MICKEY: Here’s Red, of Hacking Hustling:
Red: For me, and for trusted co-conspirators that I’ve been organizing with, it is absolutely essential to remove barriers to survival right fucking now. And that means getting these criminalizing laws of all forms of survival right off the books. So there should be no laws that target folks that are trading sex to survive, that are selling, trading, doing drugs to just exist in this world. There should be no laws that prevent people from accessing whatever kind of temporary or permanent housing they need to feel safer, right? Young people who do not feel safe in the home should be able to leave that home and go where they feel safer. And any means that they need to use should be at their disposal, and we should protect, defend, and run to their aid. Right? Trans folks should be able to access, right, all the kinds of health and wellness and bodily care that they need. We should be able to have access to… the kinds of robust, creative and educational opportunities that the fucking wealthy have, right? All of these things are actually paths to ending criminalization, right? Like when we have resources, when we have labor that doesn’t exploit us, right? When we have the means to organize and self kind of determine what happens to ourselves, our bodies, our families. Like we have a better shot at not just surviving, but heaven forbid, thriving and having the kind of power and energy and capacity to really make change because we are nourished, right? We deserve all of those things, sex workers, queer folks. Black folks, indigenous folks, disabled folks, like, deserve the whole world. And in the meantime, barriers to survival and access have to be struck from the books, full stop. Not in these watered down, you know, like paltry crumb laden ways. But like actually struck from the record. Because if we create laws, like what some people are putting forth in legislation, right, toward decrim, and you can pick decrim of drugs, you can pick decrim of houselessness, you can pick decrim of sex work, whatever iteration of decrim you wanna choose there. And you look at some of this legislation, it’s like, decrim for some. But then it still negatively impacts folks without papers, folks who have records, folks who, you know what I mean? Folks who need to access, victim services. They have to perform this other kind of victimhood in order to get what they need. They can’t say that I was a sex worker and then something bad happened to me because then you can’t get resources, right? You can’t defend yourself against a violent client because then you’re going to be seen as, you know, criminal monster that then is incarcerated. Like there are all these things that prevent people from surviving, right? And then being punished for any acts of survival. So that stuff has to be struck. And it can’t be watered down and It can’t come from a place of white saviorist rhetoric and moral policing. It has to just be about people surviving. And that is a tall order, and that is why I currently do not involve myself with electoral organizing or legislative bill organizing. And I’m so thankful for people that are in that lane and do that work. That is not my lane. I have moved far out of that lane, far to the left of that lane. However, we need those things to happen because it’s so long as there are laws on the books that people can be prosecuted under, right, and by, you can be sure that law enforcement will do their damnedest, right, to round folks up and to punish them. That being said, do I think that the day after Decrim, law enforcement will magically, divinely, uphold any type of protection or accommodation that decrim belies. No. And no one should think that either. Okay? Because so long as we have cops, so long as we have ICE agents, so long as we have borders, so long as we have prison guards or prisons, right? Or detention facilities or parole officers or truancy officers or any other type of law enforcement… right, that wield guns and make it their entire identity to do violence and brutality to those most oppressed and marginalized, experiencing mental health crises, experiencing houselessness, trying to hustle, walking outside, wearing spaghetti strap tank tops or leggings, carrying condoms, right? Having a little pot on them. The list goes on and on. So long as we have agents of the state who are armed and whose literal vested interest is to protect private property and the state, we will not see real measurable change. We will still see this kind of violence because we know that that’s what those agents do. And it doesn’t matter what laws are on or off the books, they will still behave with this kind of impunity and behave with the authority that is vested in them by the state to do violence to working class people or to working poor people. And so the day after decrim is gonna look like the day before decrim until we get rid of the cops and a whole bunch of other stuff. And I think it will also mean that we will have to have an even more heightened mutual aid and care response. I think it will mean that we have to continue doing what people have already begun doing. which is building our own methods of advertisement and work, it will have to mean that we control and determine the means of production, right? Not to get all, you know, Marxist, but I will, sorry, not sorry, but like, unless we self-determine everything, we will not see change. I don’t say any of this to not sound hopeful. I am incredibly hopeful because it is within our capacity and it is within our imagination and it was within our lifetimes that I think and believe that we will see this kind of demonstrable change because I’ve 35 short years, right, already seen and experienced and felt things I never thought would come to pass, good and bad. And so I know that radical major change is possible. I want us to be ready. I want us to like ready our hearts and like ready our minds and our bodies and take care of each other. My fucking god, we need to be so much more gentle with each other so that we can do this for the long haul. And I think it’s possible, but we have to want it and we actually have to do the work to make it happen. No one is gonna gift liberation to, like we have to make it and do freedom work all the time, all the time. You have to make it about the work all the time. And that looks a lot of different ways. And I think that’s so beautiful. And I think that’s a testament to the power of solidarity, the power of our capacity for creativity. There’s so many ways to do this work and to be in struggle and to lend support. We also know this is not popular, but we need class traitors because we need cash. So if you’re listening to this podcast and you have money, you need to move that money to the right folks at the grassroots level, not the big nonprofits. You need to move money to the grassroots so these mutual aid and care networks can keep people alive and not just that, but able to rest and ready themselves for the next struggle, for the next thing on the horizon. These years, I’ve been organizing actively since 2008 and a little bit before that, just attending stuff, not organizing, just like attending and like going to things as a young person, but actively organizing since 2008. And the language and rhetoric has shifted around sex work. Could it move more? Of course. Could the discussion around decrim, the discussion around the criminalization of survival, around abolition, of course we could see more. But my God, can we take stock for a moment of where we were and where we are now, you know? Like that’s, I really want people to take hope and to take heart in that
TINA: One important thing that we can never forget is those who didn’t live to see a reality of decrim. December 17th is the International Day to End Violence Against Sex Workers, a day we honor sex workers who have passed in the previous year. Lakeesha spoke of the New Orleans Black and Brown second line held annually on December 17th.
LAKEESHA: The second line in New Orleans, is a celebration, right? After a funeral, you’ll have what’s called a main line or a first line, and it’s a somber event to the funeral or to the cemetery, right? And then when you come back, the second line is a celebration. And the second line is something that happens all the time. On Saturday, there’s second line. It is a celebration in the street. And so I wanted to have a celebration in the street for the sex workers who had passed on, to say their names and to celebrate them and to dance in the street and sing in the streets for the lives that they had lived and lived fearlessly. Memorialize Black and Brown sex workers who were killed every year, read off the list of names. And there’s power in that gathering, right? The remembering of like, oh no, we’re not just going to allow sex workers to be killed and not remember who they are. That these are people, they are community members, they are loved. We remember your name. We’re gonna say your name and speak it out loud and let people know that sex workers matter, black and brown sex workers matter, right?
MICKEY: After asking what would the day after decrim look like, we asked a lot of people about their hopes for the future.
TINA: Here are Elizabeth’s hopes:
ELIZABETH: I would love to see more support for individual activists, and more support for sex worker-led orgs in mentorship. And like for folks who want to organize and do policy work and do media, more mentorship, more development for free. Like I have a skill to share, like skill sharing from other activists, but also folks at nonprofits so that there can be a strong sex worker led movement for decrim and other policies. I would love to see those policies pass with full-throated support. I would love to see non-sex working people use their mouths more in like social situations. I would love to see robust rallies and actions because I know in Chicago, most of the things we have like 20 people show up.
MICKEY: Kate hopes the movement gets over its internal strife and trauma coping
KATE: I hope we work out our shit. I think a lot of the internal pain and a lot of the lateral violence that happens is not just about trauma. It’s not just about the fact that a lot of us have learned horrible coping mechanisms that we play out on other people. I think that that is a piece of what is undergirding certain things. I also think that one of the most compounding experiences of trauma is that people feel like they don’t have an impact on other people. And one of the things, and this is just my speculation, my guess, but especially in seeing a lot of harm and a lot of who causes harm, I think it often comes from people who have been screaming into the void for such a long time that they’ve forgotten that they can hurt people. And that might be true when you’re talking about systems and that is not true when you’re talking about people. And so I hope a lot of things. I hope that there’s healing. I hope that there’s more collaboration. I hope that as access and money and resources do move more into the movement, that it doesn’t create more scarcity and more feelings of scarcity. I hope that we have faith in abundance. I hope we have faith in all the goodness that is here. And I hope that even the people that I wanna stay far away from have… feel heard and seen enough in the pain that they have weathered to remember that they do have an impact and they are important and they are valid. Because I think that that is a very significant piece of why people… to impact other people in the ways that they can, not positively.
TINA: Here’s Blunt with her hopes for community and freedom:
BLUNT: I think I definitely hope for a future where bodies and labor and community are not criminalized and where everyone is free… I hope for a future where I don’t have to fucking think about what I’m posting online and if it’s going to risk my entire income. And like beyond just like, I hope that we can like dream outside of just thinking about what we would do without all of this like surveillance and all of the shadow banning and all of the like platform deletion and all of the criminalization. But I hope for a future where it’s just so easy to build community and everyone has the things that they need to take care of themselves and thrive.
MICKEY: Desiree hopes that sex worker rights become more a part of a larger progressive ideology.
DESIREE: You know, those signs that say like, you know, this house, we believe this, like Black Lives Matter, that sex worker rights will be somewhere in that narrative. Like people won’t even think twice to say like, of course you have to think about sex workers. That’s just what a good progressive does.
TINA: Jared is hopeful that all this suffering wasn’t for nothing.
JARED: So my biggest hope is that we realize that we’re all in this together. And I do think that there has been that reckoning, but I don’t think that has been everyone. And I also hope that it doesn’t die out. So there’s a lot of populations of sex workers. I provide legal information to a lot of gay male sex workers. And these are people that I don’t necessarily see, cis gay men came in, I don’t always see a lot of them in the streets or doing a lot of the organizing work often. I hope that a lot of them get more involved. I hope a lot of other sex workers that maybe have more privilege that maybe will tweet about KOSA once or twice, like upping their participation tenfold. I really hope that… some of the most privileged sex workers who still are impacted by criminalization, who are still impacted by SESTA-FOSTA and certainly have their own fights to deal with, also recognize that we are really interconnected and that we don’t lose out on that. The progress that we’ve made as far as getting more people involved in these movements, I hope that progress doesn’t die down once we start getting more wins. I really just hope that people that are able to do, that want to do sex work are able to do it as safely as possible. And for people that have been sex workers that don’t want to do it, are able to find other jobs. I mean, really, I hope that we live in a society where, you know, people, I’m going to get into too much into Marxism now… labor just looks different. Yeah, I think that ultimately the sex worker liberation movement, it’s, you know, one of the things that I, one of the reasons I find this movement just so beautiful is because yeah, it’s a sex worker rights movement. It’s a worker rights movement, but it’s so much more than that. It’s about racial equity. It’s about gender equity. It’s, you know, worker equity, of course. It’s about art and it’s about speech. And it’s about just so many of the things that just make us so intrinsically human. It’s about connection. It’s about so much that I really do hope that one of the flowers that grows out of this movement is just a real recognition of the humanity of the people that do this sort of work and just ensuring that we’re building systems that uplifts that humanity.
MICKEY: Thank you for listening to Let Us Survive.I’m Mickey Mod.
TINA: And I’m Tina Horn.
MICKEY: This has been a production of Hacking Hustling.
TINA: This podcast was hosted, produced, written, recorded, and edited by Tina Horn and Mickey Mod, with additional productional support from Christopher Holloway.
MICKEY: Thank you so much to our interview subjects, Danielle Blunt, Red, zara raven, Lakeesha Harris, Desiree Collins, Jared Trujillo (tri-he-o), Chibundo Egwuatu (Chi-boon-doo Egwa-too), Elizabeth Ricks, Melissa Gira Grant, Marla Cruz, Caty Simon, Kate D’Adamo, and M.
TINA: Thanks also to the people and organizations in sex worker movements all over the world.
MICKEY: To find out more about this project and many others, please visit Hacking Hustling dot org