There is a recurrent subject, an open secret, among our community that hasn't been broached here in our subreddit. It is a delicate subject, since it touches on the most personal aspects and decisions one can make as it regards the use of their own bodies to make money. I am speaking about transgender sex work.

If this 2023 National Institute of Health study is accurate, some 41.8% of transgender people end up doing sex work during their lives. I'll take their word for it, because it corresponds to what I know through personal experience.

Recently, I read a post on another platform, from a former transgender sex worker. Although posted anonymously, I have since communicated with her and she is allowing me to identify her as Mz. Charli, a performance storyteller and former sex worker from Lansing, Michigan.

Charli has kindly permitted me to repost her writing here as it may be helpful to others in our community.

Let me state up front: I am very sex positive and I'm not anti-sex work. But there are dangers and pitfalls and subsequent scars left by it. Scars that cannot be seen.

Charli is far better at explaining this than I ever could. So, please read her post below and consider her words.

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LEARNING TO FLINCH

"I spent four years of my life as a sex worker. I didn’t plan it that way, but gender transition has a way of causing things like job termination and being effectively blackballed in an industry, at least it did 15 years ago. And a girls gotta eat, so you do what you do to get by.

It’s a unique experience being a trans sex worker. For starters, it’s complicated having a job you can’t talk much about. To be sure, one of the things I love about the kink community is that I can talk about it here, and that it will be respected and validated. So talk I shall.

It’s a complicated business, and a complicated bargain with oneself. Fetishes are amazing things, meant to be shared and explored. The problem is, a trans sex worker IS the fetish. That’s not a matter of sharing, only the fetishizer is gratified in the transaction, the fetish just gets paid. So you keep your mind on the money and one eye on the door.

But it impacts you on an emotional level. Every interaction, every meeting, every trick you turn reminds you of who you are and how the world sees you. Reminds you that your womanhood has an asterisk after it. At first that stings, but you power through and move on. You wish you could talk it out, but therapists with the background to understand sex worker specific issues are hard to find, and talking with friends in the trade is more commiserating, vital but not complete. You push through it, you find a way, often a less than healthy one.

Eventually you grow numb to it. Not acceptance so much as you just let it fade into the scenery. Just a bad backdrop like the cheap motels and the bad date lists you check on the regular. That numbness makes the job easier. Unfortunately that numbness is the result of internalizing the stigma on a very deep level. What started as a job hazard has become baggage you will carry long after you step out of the trade.

I still carry it.

On dates a guy will be trying his best to get to know me, and I’ll be trying my best to determine if he’s really into me, or if I’m just the fetish.

At kink events I find myself turning inward, even when everyone is friendly and the space is entirely safe. Not because of you, but because of that nagging voice inside that still wonders if I’m an imposter.

If I do manage to hook up with a guy, I know I’m gonna have to have that conversation about how I won’t be there in the morning. I’d love to be, but so far I’ve never been able, because the fear of what can happen to a fetish fulfilled still lives in my mind.

And I hate that I have to navigate this. I hate that I miss out on good interactions because I’m pulling back from them. I hate that people who are genuinely interested in me have to work twice as hard to reach me. I hate that I miss out when they don’t because they didn’t know because how could they. I hate the asterisk behind my womanhood, and more than anything I hate that I’m the one who keeps putting it there."