COMMENT: Transgender sex workers need sympathy, not shaming
Kirsten Han is a Singaporean blogger, journalist and filmmaker. She is also involved in the We Believe in Second Chances campaign for the abolishment of the death penalty. A social media junkie, she tweets at @kixes. The views expressed are her own.
(Yahoo photo illustration)
Last year I had the opportunity to follow Project X – a group that advocates for the rights of sex workers – on their ongoing outreach work for a few months. I was working on a story about transgender sex workers, and felt that it was important not to simply parachute in and out of the red light district expecting people to give me immediate access to their personal experiences.
The sex workers, or ‘sisters’ knew I was a journalist, and had next to no incentive to help me. They had very little to gain with media publicity, and quite a lot to lose if they were victims of a hatchet job in the press. Yet they welcomed me and shared their insights anyway, and for two months I learnt more about the industry and the challenges faced by transgender sex workers than I had ever expected.
Sex work often evokes caricatures of shady alleys, red lights in doorways, a furtive wink of an eye. And yes, I stood in some alleys (although I didn’t find them very shady), saw the glow of reddish-pink lamps and witnessed some teasing of prospective customers. But there was also a strong sense of community and the need to look out for each other – some women had been rejected by their biological families, and could only turn to their sisters in the industry to watch their backs and provide emotional support.
Abuse and harassment
This support was particularly important because of the discrimination and prejudice that transgender sex workers face. In a society where LGBT people are marginalised, there is little understanding of what transgender people have to go through. Every transgender sex worker I spoke to had experienced verbal harassment and abuse, to the point where they could no longer be bothered to react. Sex workers are also vulnerable to other sorts of harassment. Project X has documented numerous cases where police officers have threatened workers with arrest for solicitation simply because condoms were found in their bags. A transgender sex workers also told me that she almost got in trouble with the police simply for walking through the Clarke Quay area – the assumption being that all trans women must be sex workers, and all sex workers must be working all the time.
It doesn’t help when voyeuristic articles appear in The Straits Times gleefully spilling the beans on where and how certain transgender sex workers operate, with no mention of the harassment and stigmatisation that they face. The article itself perpetuates ignorance, mistakenly referring to trans women as “transvestites”. Such exploitative coverage does little but peddle “scandal” and trigger moral panic, and are more likely to expose the women to more abuse and harassment than to educate the public on social justice issues.
Transgender sex workers are constantly misrepresented and marginalised, and it makes them more vulnerable to abuse and exploitation. Transphobic mindsets dehumanise transgender people, and pervasive slut-shaming in society means that sex workers might not be taken seriously if they are victims of assault.
What is needed is recognition that sex workers are, first and foremost, workers, and that they too deserve the rights and protections that we would expect for ourselves.
