By Esther 

Esther is a sex trade survivor. Both her mental and physical health were severely compromised by her involvement in the sex trade. She managed to exit after being compulsorily detained in a psychiatric ward by her family. Esther became an activist against the sex trade because of what was happening to women she knew who were still involved in prostitution.

If the sex trade had to comply with the UK’s Equality Act 2010 its business model would fail. It is the last, apparently untouchable reservoir of a hatred of women and girls to which the word “misogyny” does not do justice, overt racism practised by men with impeccable public credentials, “social justice warriors” who label everyone else a “bigot” and would cancel any equivalent epicentre of discrimination.

In both the public and the private sector great emphasis is placed on “services”, which exist to serve “customers”, “clients” or “service users”.

The Care Quality Commission (CQC) regulates care homes in England where the monthly average cost of residential care is £2816 and the monthly average cost of receiving nursing care is £3552. Specialist care, such as care for patients with dementia, is even more expensive.

 In the older resident care home population in England, women outnumber men by a ratio of almost 3:1 .

The premises regulated by the CQC describe themselves as “services” and use the language of “choice”, implicit in which is a customer focus. It recently celebrated LGBT history month with posts on social media about gender identity and the use of pronouns. Some women replied who were concerned about what the promotion of gender identity might mean for women who require same-sex carers. The CQC then threatened to report people who made what it described as “messages of hate and intolerance” to the police for “hate speech” and to their employers.

Late last year the Scottish Parliament backed Johann Lamont MSP’s amendment to the Forensic Medical Services Bill, which will allow victims of sexual assault to request a medical examiner of a particular sex, rather than a particular gender. She said:

“Sex is defined in law, and gender is not. A right is not a right, if it’s unenforceable. We owe it to survivors to listen and treat them with respect.”

It is incredible that this needed to be said. No one is obliged to report rape or sexual assault. Women are customers of a “service” when they access a rape crisis centre. They are supporting the public interest in reporting an offence and assisting an investigation when the odds of a successful prosecution are stacked against them.

I grew up in a city where it was relatively common for people to seek assistance from criminal networks with origins in groups coming together to fight powerful elites. A justice vacuum is a threat to social cohesion.

The public interest is also served by taking steps to reduce domestic violence, punish abusers and support women and children escaping abusive environments to access single-sex spaces if they want to, because a “service” is being provided and women who are at risk of losing everything, including their lives, are being denied it.  

Compare this with the heterosexual men who pay what the Office of National Statistics estimated in 2016 was a mean payment of £73 for sex with females, expect that their requirements as customers be regarded as sacrosanct. They select women on adult websites to enable the fulfilment of racist, classist fantasies of rape, humiliation, and degradation they have watched on similarly Equality Act non-compliant online porn sites. They choose women through “escort agencies” and brothels whose owners preserve their reputations amongst similarly exclusionary men by ensuring that females fitting their customers’ fantasies of domination are what they are provided with.

All this with no attempt to report “hate incidents” over the choices their “customers” make and no slurs on their character. One might use several different names to refer to organised criminal groups trafficking young females across international borders to satisfy men’s demands for sex and build market share at ever-diminishing rates of remuneration, but no one calls them “hateful and intolerant” or “TERFS” for selecting by sex because that is what their largest customer base wants.

Heterosexual men also exclaim “TERF” and “SWERF” in public while privately ensuring that a label referring specifically to the reproductive function of adult human females remains the top search term on online porn sites. The ghost of Sigmund Freud looks on with an eyebrow raised and Jonathan Swift updates for a modern audience his satirical essay “An Argument Against the Abolition of Christianity”, which, amongst other things argues that the maintenance of nominal religiosity enhances the pleasure of guilty secrets.

I have been mistaken for a trans woman many times in my life because I am above the 99th percentile for height for females and occupy public space confidently – the result of playing male characters in plays at the girls’ school I attended as a teenager. I was aware that I frightened men on the street when I walked home from nightclubs because they thought they might be messing with a theatrically dressed male. It did not put me in a place of overt danger until I became involved in prostitution.

Most of my clients were heterosexual and did not accept that transwomen are women, whatever they might have said in public or on social media. I stated my height clearly on my profile on the adult website I worked from. Rates of remuneration were higher there for females in the niches I was involved in than they were for trans women, so new clients would also flare up about the possibility that they might have been “cheated”.

 Men who pay for sex will kill over deception, as they will to demonstrate their hatred of women in the sex trade in general. I know this because I was threatened with serious violence and death directly several times until I was able to “prove” to a client’s satisfaction that I was female. I knew I had seconds in which to do so. What most often convinced them was the scar I have from a caesarean section. The irony of a reminder of childbirth being decisive was not lost on me.  

I worked several times with a trans woman who identified as female on her website profile. She had undergone full gender reassignment surgery, but our respective roles when meeting clients were always arranged to avoid the risk that a client who was unaware that she was trans would find out. Men frequently telephoned me asking intrusive questions about her because our profiles were connected.

I was never asked this about trans women I worked with who identified themselves as trans women, or indeed about anyone else with whom I worked. I was punched in the head on a central London street by a man shouting homophobic slurs who clearly thought I was a gay man. I could not tell whether it was a random attack, or whether my assailant was one of the men who had telephoned me.

If the men who murder trans women involved in prostitution, and the men who threatened me, cared about what females think they would not be cheating on their wives and girlfriends by paying for sex with others. They are the people who are a risk to the lives of trans women, as they would have been to mine. 

Those same men will gladly use every available slur against feminists fighting to preserve their sex-based rights because they hate women who speak up and defend themselves.

Feminists are at the forefront of fighting against male violence, which is what the danger to trans women is.  We are also at the forefront of the challenge to the sex trade.

Genuine concern for the lives of trans women of colour involved in prostitution in Brazil, who make up a high proportion of the annual statistics on homicides of trans people worldwide, would involve supporting every effort possible to reduce racial discrimination and inequality in Brazil and fund exit strategies to support trans women to leave prostitution, which also contributes to the extremely high rates of violence against females in Brazil and the femicide rate there. They deserve this as much as anyone else who risks their life in the sex trade. There is no such concern. Why is that?

I have male survivor friends whose vulnerability as migrants, as children and young people in need of safeguarding, was as ruthlessly exploited by people who brought them into prostitution as I and many of my female friends were, and who were greatly harmed by it. They were some of the people I was first able to speak to about my own experiences once I was no longer in the self-reinforcing, socially isolated, “empowerment” bubble prostitution creates for you.

Their trauma and self-stigma are compounded by demands male socialisation makes of them, particularly the view that they should view what happened to them as an inevitable aspect of masculinisation, something they should keep a “stiff upper lip” about in public to demonstrate “resilience” because referring to it is “weaponising your trauma”, something about which they will never receive any form of “justice”.

The sex trade both projects and then exploits low expectations of females and males, except where the children and family members of those who most profit from and promote it are concerned, as their social class protects them from the vicissitudes of it. It perpetuates inequality through the prejudices of its customer base. Serious injuries and deaths suffered by those involved with it are used as a means of extending, not diminishing its influence, through demands for ever-increasing protection for a trade which would fail any meaningful system of occupational health or health & safety regulation.

Who benefits?