{"id":4458,"date":"2014-01-30T09:00:10","date_gmt":"2014-01-30T14:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/janetmock.com\/?p=4458"},"modified":"2020-12-23T09:34:14","modified_gmt":"2020-12-23T14:34:14","slug":"janet-mock-sex-work-experiences","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/janetmock.com\/2014\/01\/30\/janet-mock-sex-work-experiences\/","title":{"rendered":"Sex Workers Matter: Sharing My Own Complicated Experience"},"content":{"rendered":"

At 16 years old, I began trading sex for money. The money I earned I used to pay for the vital medical care my family couldn’t afford. This essay is not a confession. Neither is my book Redefining Realness<\/i><\/a>. I do not believe that having engaged in the sex trades or being a former sex worker is a confessional matter.<\/p>\n

I do not believe using your<\/i> body \u2014 often marginalized people\u2019s only asset, especially in poor, low-income, communities of color \u2014 to care after yourself is shameful. What I find shameful is a culture that exiles, stigmatizes and criminalizes those engaged in underground economies like sex work as a means to move past struggle to survival.<\/p>\n

***<\/p>\n

I was 15 the first time I visited Merchant Street, what some would call \u201cthe stroll\u201d for trans women involved in street-based sex work. At the time, I had just begun medically transitioning and it was where younger girls, like my friends and myself, would go to hang out, flirt and fool around with guys and socialize with older trans women, the legends of our community.<\/p>\n

The majority of the women I idolized engaged in the sex trades at some time or another \u2013 some dabbled in video cam work and pornography, others chose street-based work and dancing at strip clubs (an option reserved for those most often perceived as cis). These women were the first trans women I met, and I quickly correlated trans womanhood and sex work.<\/p>\n

I perceived the sex trades as a rite of passage, something a trans girl had to do in order to make the money necessary to support herself. I had also learned (from media, our laws and pop culture) that sex work is<\/i> shameful and degrading.<\/p>\n

Sex work is heavily stigmatized, whether one goes into it by choice, coercion or circumstance. Sex workers are often dismissed, causing even the most liberal folk, to dehumanize, devalue and demean women who are engaged in the sex trades. This pervasive dehumanization of women in the sex trades leads many to ignore the silencing, brutality, policing, criminalization and violence sex workers face, even blaming them for being utterly damaged, promiscuous, and unworthy.<\/p>\n

So because I learned that sex work is<\/i> shameful, and I correlated trans womanhood and sex work, I was taught that trans womanhood is<\/i> shameful. This belief system served as the base of my understanding of self as a trans girl, and I couldn\u2019t separate it from my own body image issues, my sense of self, my internalized shame about being trans, brown, poor, young, woman.<\/p>\n

Though I yearned to be among women like myself, I also judged them for doing work that I swore at 15 I could never <\/i>do. The work and those women didn\u2019t fit my pedestal perched Clair Huxtable portrait of womanhood.<\/p>\n

Yet my economic hurdles were real and urgent, and I couldn\u2019t deny that witnessing the women of Merchant Street take their lives into their own hands, empowered me. Watching these women every weekend gathered in sisterhood and community, I learned firsthand about body autonomy, about resilience and agency, about learning to do for yourself in a world that is hostile about your existence.<\/p>\n

These women taught me that nothing was wrong with me or my body and that if I wanted they would show me the way, and it was this underground railroad of resources created by low-income, marginalized women, that enabled me when I was 16 to jump in a car with my first regular and choose a pathway to my survival and liberation.<\/p>\n