It’s a common misconception that people would never willingly choose sex work, mostly because they don’t see it as work. Either it’s a last resort, or it’s trafficking. Similar to tools used in anti-trans rhetoric, providers often encounter the blanket assumption that people who choose sex work only do so because they experienced childhood sexual abuse or other traumatic abuse in adulthood. 

Funny enough, those things did happen, but I didn’t choose sex work out of the pain of those experiences. I chose it from a place of power. When I first started asking around about sex work, I was in the middle of a season of restructuring. Life had been rough for the few years preceding. 

Not feeling valued by my family, loved ones, or society at large left me feeling defeated. No matter how much I applied, branded, or upskilled, there was no sustainable work. None of my needs were being met, even though I spent all my waking hours taking actionable steps to improve my circumstances. The resources I sought out for help indicated something was wrong with me. 

So I transformed my mindset about those barriers and took advantage of the restriction by leaning into reflection. 

I used my slow time to “do the work” of emotional healing. I gathered tools for boundaries and communication. I set new goals. I rested and reevaluated my needs. I volunteered for community initiatives often. I spent my days trying to build a foundation of unshakeable belief in my ability to thrive no matter the circumstances.

However, as I tried to integrate back into keeping up with capitalism, I was again struck down by the reality of survival. I still did not have capital. Changing my mindset was not enough to overcome systemic limits. “Healing and reflection” was not a good enough excuse for a growing resume gap. Just because I had new boundaries didn’t mean others were happy about them. 

I was, as I began, an exhausted Black queer fat and disabled femme living in Los Angeles in the last hoorah of my 20s working incredibly hard without anything to show for it. More than anything, it was clear that no one would come to save me. 

A Good Fit For the Job

Sex work offered me flexibility and a creative use of my strengths to get my needs met. It aligned with my dominant energy and skills as an accepting person who listens deeply and makes people feel taken care of. The monetary and material potential was a huge draw, but never guaranteed. At the time I decided to create my sex work persona, the industry was the slowest it had been in years. 

Contrary to the jokes I’d come to know as low-hanging fruit during hard times, sex work was no quick money. It is and continues to be a lot of work. Still, I chose sex work because I needed more agency, and through talking to sex workers, I saw glimpses of a fuller, more determined self. I liked their confidence. I liked the way they talked about getting their needs met. They weren’t annoyed by me speaking up about what I wanted. Instead, they affirmed me and encouraged me to go after it. 

I have been conditioned to accept crumbs in interpersonal relationships, but sex work raises my standards. It teaches me to see my time and energy as valuable resources, instead of accepting the indoctrination into working for free, or in spaces where I don’t feel appreciated. I had struggled to deal with past sexual trauma, but in sex work, I found tools for keeping myself safe in multiple scenarios. That safety helped me build the capacity to embrace the parts of myself that were harmed instead of letting them run my life out of fear. 

Sex work also bolstered an uncompromising commitment to my boundaries. As a bare minimum, my boundaries keep me safe from harm and burnout in this work. But as a committed practice, it builds self-trust and belief that I deserve to have my boundaries respected, period.

To be clear, I am not currently a street-based sex worker. I am a housed and independent-survival sex worker. My drug and alcohol use is not currently intertwined with my work. I had been engaging in sex work in my early twenties before I knew what it was or could identify power dynamics, mainly by exchanging sex for housing and food. Those experiences were lonely, informed only by my cultural upbringing and need to survive. 

By the time I decided to formalize my business, I had much more language and experience. My friends who were already active in the industry happily pointed me toward information and compiled resource lists so that I could continue building my business safely. 

Through online networks, I expanded my circle and accessed substantial education. These networks helped me contextualize my prior experiences, refine my skills, and determine what felt right for me moving forward. Unlike other fields, there was no barrier to entry other than my own willingness to research.

I also learned early that existing in the margins required constant discourse and adaptability. So being around each other, swapping stories, and organizing resources is critical to our survival. Being in community, especially with queer and trans sex workers, was like meeting someone at a party for the first time but feeling like you’ve known each other forever—a kismet collision of freedom and comfort that opens your eyes to the depth of your belonging to the universe. 

Sure, helping people feel at ease is a skill many in-person sex workers have and would consider essential to the job. But when we come together, bringing all of the things that make us beautiful, different, resilient, and creative, it’s not just easy in the sense that I feel alright existing as I am; it is a testimony to the fact that I am essential. 

For this article, I spoke to six providers of varied experiences in the industry. Most have been doing this work for 10 years or more. Some have civilian careers, while others do sex work full-time. Regardless of their background, they have all found joy, a sense of self, and power through community in sex work.

Finding Community and Setting Standards

Ms Robey is a Chicago-based half-indigenous queer femme sex worker of varied disabilities. She has been an independent, full-service sex worker for nine years and began dabbling in online work last year. For the bulk of her career, she didn’t have social media and only knew a couple of other in-person sex workers. The lack of community not only dampened her experience but also limited her exposure to resources for screening clients. 

Since a fellow in-person sex worker urged her to join Twitter and other online networks a couple of years ago, she’s been “hooked,” stating that the community is “super crucial for my wellbeing.” Robey made many friends and visits with them whenever she travels to cities. She’s also shared clients with friends in her network, growing her client base overall. “It’s so nice not having to explain anything to people,” Robey said. “We are literally keeping each other safe and alive.” 

Robey began working at 27, and the opportunities sex work has afforded her have been life-changing. She feels hugely grateful to be able to travel for pleasure with friends to places she never thought possible. But Robey finds the most freedom in the everyday living that people take for granted, from being able to pay her bills to eating something every day to even affording a dog.

“I am proud of things that were out of my reach before this experience,” she reflected. “It’s amazing to me even now that I don’t have to beg anyone to keep my job if I’m sick.”

Community has a way of supercharging your intentions. In my case, I was attracted to the aspects of this work that require you to set your own standards and boundaries because I’d felt so disrespected in my civilian life. As a very young woman, my partners regularly compromised my safety. I have dated people who were comfortable making demands, but always shut down conversations about my needs. I have experienced pushback when I shared things that would bring me more pleasure. 

My happiness, comfort, and ease didn’t matter. So I found it empowering—and even healing—to see other providers implementing their standards despite the complicated backgrounds they come from, and even when it goes against the norm. 

Tania Tonsorial is a prime example of someone whose commitment to her boundaries has guided her success in the industry and supported her in doing one of the hardest, highest-risk jobs in the world—being a mother. Tonsorial grew up in foster care around different cultures and never really fit into a box. She started as a stripper, and in her 25 years of doing sex work, she has provided full-service, kink/fetish, and full-body sensual massage.

“The fact that I was able to be a single mother and spend time with my kid has always brought me pride,” Tonsorial shared, “because I [saw] other single mothers that were doing three different jobs, making minimum wage, and not be able to spend time with their kids.” 

She thinks of herself as having two separate personas: her real self and who she becomes when she puts on her stripper heels. “It is like an acting role,” she said. Tonsorial also practices clear boundaries in her work. For instance, she refuses to be submissive professionally, reserving it only for her personal life. “I’m not going to do something I wouldn’t be okay with,” she asserted. “If it hurts, I’m not gonna do it […] I don’t care how much you’re gonna pay me […] Safety is my number one thing.”

These boundaries also bleed into Tonsorial’s personal life. The dehumanization she feels when clients try to manipulate or attack her is also found in relationships where she exists as her true self. It’s not just clients who are capable of being dangerous. At times, there is a greater fear of violence or retaliation in personal relationships. In particular, she shared that it’s been difficult for loved ones to accept that she still has feelings or not to look down on her for doing her job. 

“They have trouble separating […] sex for work from sex for fun,” she said. So she has spent most of her career hiding it from loved ones to prioritize safety while continuing to provide for her family. But with her daughter now an adult, Tonsorial no longer feels the need to hide her work. “When I first started doing it, I had to question myself: Am I doing something wrong? Should I feel bad about this?” she reflected. “I don’t feel wrong about it […] It’s everyone else that feels wrong about it, but it’s my body.”

Criminalization and the Conflation with Human Trafficking

Threats to safety are universal for all sex workers in different capacities, especially in places where it’s criminalized, which is, unfortunately, most of the world. At the same time, it affords us a big picture perspective. If I am unsafe as a sex worker, unsafe in my civilian life, and even more unsafe when I exist in both spaces at the same time, then my sense of agency is my greatest power, and my resolve is my greatest act of resistance. 

The inherent and undeniable risks are not a reason to accept abuse as part and parcel of the trade—they are reasons to become proactive about creating a space where I can live freely.

Sex work is not always empowering. When my need is greater and my options are limited, I am forced to consider an even more oppressive circumstance. This is especially true of my experience before I formalized my business. I was even more vulnerable because I didn’t see myself as a sex worker or erotic laborer. After all, it didn’t match the stereotypes I’d been fed by a media-centric dominant culture. 

The kind of agency I draw from my personal identity and politic as a sex worker may sound like it’s all roses, but the reality of being an enemy to the state and culture at large takes its toll. I still encounter violent men and frequently hear stories of people who are attacked or robbed even after completing lengthy screening processes. The last substantial systematic review of violence against sex workers reported that “workplace violence ranged from 45% to 75%.” When I first started, most of the advice and resources I received from other industry professionals were safety-related. 

Whenever I receive a message from a prospective client that is carrot-dangling, wasting my time, threatening me, or demeaning me, I’m reminded of times I encountered similar things in my personal life and accepted them before I knew better. I’m reminded of how my family and the Christian church indoctrinated me into accepting abuse. I’m often scared to see how persistently and viciously dedicated to harming people can be when I do not obey or give them what they feel should be free use. 

It’s also confounding how often this violence is committed by people who initially expressed interest in my services, but were met with requirements for accessing me. Sometimes, they’re people who begged for an hour with me as if they couldn’t live without it, but flipped like a switch when I said no because I felt unsafe, even going so far as to call me ungrateful. 

Now more than ever, media and online discourse play a significant role in the stories we tell ourselves about these kinds of violence. Stories that sensationalize poor, helpless victims with true crime, offer highly detailed reenactments of graphic violence, or pick apart the constant loop of men who seem fine on the outside but have done terrible things behind closed doors are a staple in the American media landscape. Stories that depict sex workers as full human beings who may choose a high-risk job to provide for themselves, but are not naive, are sorely missing. 

The Stroll (2023), where Black and trans sex workers in New York’s meatpacking district tell their own stories, represents some hopeful progress. But the highly celebrated and mainstream Anora (2024), which swept award season, offers a depiction of disciplinary violence against a character who, as Marla Cruz writes in her review, is “cut whole cloth from client preferences” and lacks a community to point out how “the dramatic power imbalance in her new marriage could pose a threat to her safety.” 

There are no repercussions for the abusive clients in the film, or the men who are enacting class violence, even when it seems like affection. And there is no exploration of the systems that condone that behavior. Instead, as Cruz notes, “Anora shows us the immiseration of a sex worker but it shirks any responsibility to help the audience understand it.” These kinds of surface-level depictions are breeding grounds for regressive ideologies about sex work, but what most people fail to understand is how that affects everyone, not just people in the sex industry.

In the US, the 2018 FOSTA/SESTA law—known broadly as the “Allow States and Victims to Fight Online Sex Trafficking Act”—is a prime example of using language to play off public fears of safety without actually addressing the root of the problem. The vague wording of the act targets prostitution, but the congressional campaign to pass the law relied almost exclusively on the language and stories of child trafficking. It also retracted immunity for online platforms that host content promoting or facilitating prostitution. 

Without much definition or delineation between the terms, any exchanges of a sexual nature became a much higher liability for online platforms. 

Sex workers, human rights organizations, and LGBTQ organizations have all warned that a law like this would operate as a backdoor to the censorship of digital freedoms for all. Now, more than ever, we are realizing that they were right. Trump’s barrage of executive orders upon inauguration, one of which specifies censorship of free speech, uses a similar tactic to the FOSTA/SESTA rhetoric that is appearing to champion the vulnerable as a means to implement fascism.

When they’re experiencing stress and restriction, people often make jokes that they’ll just stand on a street corner or engage the next older man who hits on them. Or I sometimes hear women in heteronormative relationships—feeling constantly exhausted, unseen, and underappreciated—idealize erotic laborers who’ve secured luxury, or even just stable, “arrangements.” It is as if people know that there can be value and freedom in sex work, but it’s easier for them to make sex workers the scapegoats and undermine our skills than it is for them to accept their own lack of agency. 

Whether you’re a liberal queer feminist attempting to draw a line between good and bad sex work, or a right wing extremist who hires sex workers and actively funds those they stand against, the inability to accept us reveals major contradictions in our systems and a societal discomfort with bodily autonomy, femininity, and sexuality. 

Emily (pseudonym) is a first-generation college student and veteran sex worker producing FOSTA/SESTA research with the support of a major higher education institution in America. She has been active in the sex industry for 15 years and is an artist, student, and anarchist. Emily started as a stripper and full-service provider, then collected regulars over time and transitioned into long-term sugar relationships. 

Like Robey, Emily also found agency and financial independence through sex work in ways that traditional work settings do not offer. When I asked about her perspective on how these systemic contradictions show up in our daily lives, she pointed to the larger systems of state-sanctioned violence that are inherently white supremacist, patriarchal, and capitalist. 

“The amount of times that a straight man has [said] ‘oh, if I just had a pair of tits, I could do what you do,’” she recalled. “No. You absolutely couldn’t. This is not just about body […] Sex work is magic. I provide so many services. I have a beautiful mind, a beautiful body […] Why am I being devalued? […] It’s because that’s […] a threat.”

The media and our legal structures fortify this idea that all sex work is forced through the conflation of sex work with sex trafficking. For Emily, this willfully misleading and elusive language claims to protect by playing off public fears. She sees the same tactic in Trump’s plan to ban porn and is in alignment with Siri Dahl’s statement to The Nation that Project 2025 is “doing more to enable sexual exploitation than anybody in the modern porn industry has.” 

“Ignoring [the reality] that sex workers engage in sex work consensually is ludicrous,” Emily said, “especially because a lot of these policymakers hire sex workers. Cops hire sex workers. And, also, sex work is often used as a tool to leave more exploitative scenarios like domestic abuse and trafficking.”

Sex workers aren’t the only ones affected by anti-sex work laws. Hypothetically, Emily explained, under this law, if you’re using Zoom to have digital sex with your partner, you could be penalized for facilitating prostitution. So, in an increasingly censored digital space where algorithms are constantly shifting and content moderations change overnight for everyone, the safety resources created by sex workers who have been dealing with this kind of censorship since day one will be relied on by the general public. 

Researchers at the intersections of sex work, activism, and organizing found significant changes in content moderation following the 2020 uprisings against the ongoing police murders of Black people. Given the current administration’s relentless obsession with erasing trans people, listening to what sex workers have to say could be life-saving. Especially concerning online organizing for vulnerable populations, protests, and health-related resources like gender-affirming care.

Through her studies, Emily has learned that the larger issue with human trafficking is actually labor trafficking into domestic work, but that it gets overshadowed and contorted by the unquestioning assumption that all human trafficking includes sex. Millions of women are being trafficked into hotels or nail salons, she pointed out, yet lawmakers use the stereotypes and fearmongering of sex trafficking to “fuel policies that criminalize rather than protect, disregard […] sex workers’ lived realities, voices, and agency, which is fascism.”

Capitalism’s Worst Nightmare: Mutual Aid and Community

For Sophia C., a queer indigenous witch who moves in the world as a white woman, sex work is “capitalism’s worst nightmare […] It’s one of the few careers where you’re actually paid […] close to a reasonable wage for your time.” She added, “sex workers are so good at mutual aid and […] making sure […] everyone’s taken care of and fed.”

Sophia C. is also a board member for the Sex Worker’s Outreach Project (SWOP) in Los Angeles, an organization by sex workers for sex workers. Their membership includes professionals of all identities and specialties including porn, full service, and BDSM, with a focus on street based sex workers. They host outreach strolls, peer support groups, community building events, and public policy development, and serve as a community partner for established research institutions. Sofia C. is currently on hiatus but has done various online and in-person work, including escorting and pro-BDSM.

As a neurodivergent person who struggles with deciphering hidden meanings or building trust when “beating around the bush,” Sophia C. also finds a different level of acceptance among fellow sex workers. “They’re freaks and they’re weirdos and they’re, you know, people who have been otherwise ignored or discarded by the rest of the world,” she said. “The sex workers that I’ve had the privilege of […] being in community with will […] tell you how they feel [and] say it how it is […] especially when it comes to conflict. There’s just a communication difference.” I asked Sophia C. about how the conflation of sex work with sex trafficking affects SWOP LA’s resource interventions as a government-registered 501c3 organization in a criminalized state. 

What she described was akin to crossing a minefield just to help each other. To run their abortion support program, they have to be hyper cautious of the ways they give money to people and advertise services. As an organization, they could get charged with pimping and pandering for giving money to the community because of laws that do not recognize sex work as work. Also, anyone who participates in the stroll (handing out condoms, lube, money, and other resources to street sex workers) is at risk of being arrested for soliciting prostitution. 

I also asked Sophia C. what it’s like for the volunteers at SWOP-LA who are using all the tools at their disposal to help take care of each other even when it’s dangerous. “We don’t really have another choice,” she responded. The sex workers volunteering 15 hours of their week have more means, resources, and/or protection than those most marginalized. So it’s a symbiotic relationship. 

“Sex worker criminalization […] is targeting predominantly Black trans outdoor working providers, but it’s not gonna stop there,” Sophia C. added. “So if we can protect [them] right now […] we’re benefiting from each other. We’ll just all end up in jail, or […] none of us can end up in jail.” 

Part of the issue with the conflation of sex work with trafficking rests on the fear of youth being trafficked unknowingly or out of survival. Instead, many industry professionals would argue that our collective unwillingness as a society to engage with sex in an honest and healthy way is the real source of these issues. A lack of information and exposure increases the risk of young people being groomed by adults or seeking answers alone without safety knowledge. 

Sophia C. started sex work when she was 13 by meeting men on a fetish site and eventually realizing she could make money from those interactions. When I asked what would have helped her then, she said, “to not be doing it.” “[Starting sex work as a minor] definitely impacted […] my development [and] my sense of self,” she reflected. Those experiences add to her drive for sex work advocacy because she believes that she would not have entered sex work at that age if sex were normalized. “I wouldn’t have felt such a need to be seeing what this taboo thing was,” she shared. 

During her time at SWOP-LA, Sophia C. has been involved with the sex work parenting project. They recently launched a ProMomme zine, which focuses on “celebrating intimate labor in all forms” and talking to children about sex. She doesn’t think that she should’ve been garnering a sense of agency from doing sex work at a young age, but she does think “if we empower[ed] [adult] sex workers and work[ed] towards being more of a sex neutral society, I wouldn’t have been in that situation in the first place.” 

Sophia C. continued doing sex work in college, and it was through community with other sex workers that she learned about her worth. She shared, “By being able to talk to other sex workers about […] what they do and don’t put up with […] It makes the market […] more secure for everyone [because] everyone’s […] not putting up with the same bullshit.” Where Sophia began in sex work as survival has now transformed into a sense of wholeness and community she “can’t imagine living without.” 

“Where else do you find someone who can teach you how to change a baby diaper, perform CBT [Cock and Ball Torture], and do your taxes?” she asked. “We bring so many lives together in a world that likes to keep things in neat, orderly boxes. Sex work is care work […] and when I think of a future where sex workers are valued and respected, I feel so warm because that means the value of care above all else is respected.”

A Crucial Part of Our Cultural Liberation

Daniela Sawiki Rivera, a Licensed Marriage and Family Therapist, a Honduran American, and former sex worker, is one of many who feel called to bring their skills in care work to therapy. For the past four years, Sawiki Rivera has been finding joy in working with individuals who think “outside the box,” and “are able to step into alignment with what feels right for them despite what society may say.” 

Kelly K, a Black queer cis woman raised by Southerners in the Pacific Northwest, is also part of a growing sex worker/therapist community. For 15 years, she moved through the industry in various capacities by doing street sex work, camming, porn, sugaring, stripping, Domme-ing, and full service. Most recently, she has begun building a business as a licensed therapist. 

Her experience as a sex worker, who, she said, most people deem “the lowest of the low,” has given her the skills to “create a non-judgmental space for people.” Sex work expanded her horizons through access to travel and new spaces. In addition to paying off her sister’s student loan debt with her earnings from sex work, her greatest sense of pride lies in everything she has learned from other professionals. She shared, “I have always felt [grateful for] Black trans women who organized, advocated, and fought for all sex workers. I am proud to be able to take part in their legacies.”

I asked Kelly K and Sawiki Rivera about how we can support the cultural transition from ‘maybe sex work is work’ to ‘sex work is happening all around us and valuing sex workers is a crucial part of our cultural liberation.’ For Kelly K, that means dealing with how habitually puritanical we are on a deeper cognitive and somatic level. “A lot of people use the word ‘repressed’ and don’t really understand the extent to which we deny and are ashamed of our sexuality,” she explained. “Because of that, we shame and envy others who are able to express their sexuality out loud.”

For Sawiki Rivera, while sex workers face many unique challenges, it is crucial not to exceptionalize us as a monolith, a “mythical other,” in her words. “We’re more alike than not,” she said, “and I believe that the ways society tries to polarize sex workers […] to frame an ‘us vs them’ mentality is part of what adds to sex work being devalued.” She highlighted the importance of sex work, explaining how several people desire sexual liberation behind closed doors but don’t know how to embrace it due to the shame and social stigma surrounding sex. 

Sex workers deserve so much more credit than what they’re given,” Sawiki Rivera added. Like all of the experts, she too posited that if sex workers were valued, protected, and trusted, it “would mark the beginning of a necessary shift in movements toward liberation.” 

“To value and protect the community is to […] grant everyone the same rights […] and grapple with what needs to be done to make the world more equitable,” she said. “Sex, intimacy, companionship, and the erotic are an inherent and vital part of the human experience […] anyone offering to cultivate or hold space for those experiences is doing important work.”