Dysphoria, it should be said, is not a precondition of being trans. According to some research, as many as 10 per cent of those who positively identi… - Shon Faye

Globally, trans sex workers make up 62 per cent of all trans murder victims, where the victim’s profession is known. [...] Trans sex workers around the world are often at most risk from the very same men to whom they sell their services. This is not some puzzling ‘hypocrisy’, but a horrifying and sometimes deadly reality. It should also be an urgent wake-up call for society and workers’ movements to better protect and support trans sex workers. Trans people’s increased likelihood of experiencing family rejection and homelessness, combined with substantial healthcare costs and a struggle to secure other forms of employment, means that many engage in the stigmatized work of selling sex. And, as we have already seen, trans sex workers experience unique and severe forms of vulnerability and violence. Therefore, the issue of sex-worker rights and safety must be at the heart of the trans liberation movement.

Above all, anti-prostitution feminism argues, men’s demand for the right to purchase sex should be condemned and criminalized. Given the extreme violence to which trans people, particularly trans women, who do sex work are subject worldwide, it seems tempting for trans politics to join with this condemnation of male violence and, consequently, with the condemnation of men who purchase sex. It is true that many sectors of the sex industry, from pornography to street sex work to managed brothels, rely on the exploitation of trans sex workers’ financial and social vulnerability by cisgender men for profit. Yet the converse argument – for pro-sex-worker trans politics – isn’t intended as a moral absolution of the client or unethical industry practices; it isn’t concerned with morality at all. Rather, it recognizes that trans sex workers exist in a society in which money is necessary for survival, and that sex work is one of a limited number of options available to the marginalized in this society – and so, regardless of any condemnation or criminalization of clients, trans sex workers will still need to sell sex. Accepting this reality turns the focus from ‘ending demand’ for sexual services, to harm-reduction for the worker. It is on this basis that full in all its forms must be a central tenet of the movement for trans rights.

One of feminism’s central ideas: that gender is a reductive trap which limits freedom and curbs individuality, forcing people to deform themselves and their desires in the service of an exploitative and violent system.