Morgan M. Page

Most of my time is spent around queermos, trans folks, lefties, and feminists, people who spend a lot of time talking about oppression and privilege, social justice and anti-capitalism. People who try to make themselves aware of how things like racism, misogyny, classism, and transphobia work in the world and in themselves.

It really raises me up to be around people like this, and I listen intently to what people say about these things, both formally and casually. Engaging in these discussions teaches me so much about the world and the privileges that I carry around it, but almost every time I end up leaving the conversation frustrated. For all the anti-oppression talk that goes on, people seem to feel entitled to get their hate on about one subject: religion.

I get where it comes from. Growing up in cultures based around Christianity, Judaism, and Islam, can be tough for queers, trans folks, women, especially in more socially conservative places. And when these religions are used as justification for the erasure of your identities or for the enactment of violence upon your body (in all the myriad ways that queers, trans folks, women, and people of colour experience violence), it’s hard to not just throw up your hands in frustration at “religion,” hard not to paint it all with the same brush.
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Being a trans hooker is hard work these days. Not only do you have to navigate a potentially dangerous work environment, try to stay out of the criminal justice system, possibly deal with being HIV+, often live precariously without immigration status in the country you work in, worry about violence and harassment from other sex workers, and deal with a society that puts so much stigma onto your profession that you might not be able to get stable housing, you also have to hear just about every non-sex working trans person alternately use your existence as a political pawn in their campaigns for middle-class privileges (often called “rights”) and condemn you for either being a victim or making the movement look bad. As I said, it’s hard work.

All sex work is survival sex work, in exactly the same way that I could describe all jobs at McDonald’s as survival food service jobs.

Here are some of the dumbass things you’re probably going to hear regularly when you enter non-sex working trans spaces, especially trans activist spaces (and these activists will, of course, lament the lack of involvement from sex workers in their efforts).
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