Life Chances: HIV Criminalization and Trans Politics

odofemi:

I love that trans women have, in recent years, really banded together online and in print to name our specific issues and advocate for ourselves. However, I’ve noticed a very conspicuous absence of sex workers’ voices among those finding/creating representation. Little analysis is given to sex work. Even those trans women who are actively involved that I know are sex workers, rarely seem to mention this.

One of the things I’ve come up against again and again in trans communities, both online and in person, is stigma around sex work. The only acceptable sex work is through “queer porn,” which lately has become overrun by people with University degrees and tumblr accounts wanting to “create representation” — a topic for a whole other day. People don’t want to talk about sex workers, particularly street sex workers, unless we’re talking about them/us as being dead, like when we talk about TDOR.

Most of the things the trans community has today were created by sex workers. In Canada, for example, the first multiservice trans project run by trans people was created by sex workers (specifically Mirha-Soleil Ross) after the murders of sex workers (Deanna Wilkinson, Shawna Jr Keegan, and Brenda Ludgate), which went on to, over the years, be the first to push for and successfully gain access to women’s shelters for trans women in this country. And, of course, Sylvia Rivera and Marsha P Johnson, the patron saints of trans liberation struggles, from whose efforts were born the first trans radical activist organizations (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries).

Sex workers laid the foundations for not only all of transfeminist theory, but for a great deal of trans social services and arts culture, as well as for Anglophone queer culture generally. They created these positions, positions that they were forcibly and systematically pushed out of, replaced by a legion of mostly white trans men academics (and their cis femme partners — SIDE EYE like you have no idea).

Suffice it to say, I find it frustrating.