#working guys

Title: Working Guys

Authors: Jack V Parker, Eddy, Rob Starkers, Liam, Arc D, Omar, Felix Mufti, Julian Yang, Faye, Mischa, Mx Dagger, A, Mister Saul/Jackson King, Ron Beastly, Dakota Nevaeh, Rush, Eric, Sunan, Trip Richards, and anonymous contributors

Editor: Jack Parker

Genre: Nonfiction

Audience: Adult

Format: Essay Anthology

Summary: Working Guys shares a collection of essays from authors across the spectrum of transmasculine gender identities and with diverse experiences with sex work, to build a nuanced picture of an underacknowledged demographic within sex work. It explores the unique ways a transmasculine identity may impact how someone navigates sex work and vice versa, in the ways selling sex may impact transition or other people’s perceptions of a person’s gender. The submissions are grouped around the topics of “female personas,” “popularity in porn,” “transphobic violence against transmasculine sex workers,” “the cost of medical transition,” “role models for transmasculine people,” and “outside views: radical feminists, progressives, and the right” to cover a broad scope with experiences ranging from traumatic to joyful to mundane and the ambiguous in-betweens. 

Affording surgery or HRT is a fantastic incentive for transmasculine people to sell sex. We are discriminated against in employment and earn less than cis people on average, so sex work sometimes becomes our only reasonable option for saving money for something like top surgery or metoidioplasty or phalloplasty. These surgeries can cost tens of thousands of pounds, making them prohibitively expensive for the average person.

The high cost of medical transition is also likely to steer trans people towards higher paid forms of sex work, despite the relative danger. In-person forms of sex work like full service sex work or stripping tend to pay more, compared to online-only options, with the except of performers who become well-known. For transmasculine people who want to seek masculinizing medical treatment, there is a short window where we can attain our maximum earning potential under the kind of female personas we discussed earlier. In the hopes of making this window as short as possible, transmasculine people may take more risks than we would otherwise like to with the clients we take and the ways we work.

Working while claiming to be a cis woman, presenting femininely with a female persona, allows trans sex workers to accumulate the money for HRT and surgery more quickly than if we were openly trans. As we transition, our income typically drops, potentially leaving us stuck at one stage of transition if we didn't earn enough money from sex work before we began. To maintain the desired pace to our medical transition, we are forced to make sacrifices and to plan them well in advance.

We might save enough money to afford testosterone and be desperate to take it, but have to hold off on doing so if we hope to afford top surgery in a timely manner. Some of us will make the decision to delay transition until we have enough saved for top surgery, only to be left with the same dilemma about lowering our income and the possibility that we will never afford bottom surgery. There are options in between, to start testosterone and hide it for as long as possible, or to film content in bulk and keep selling it when our bodies no longer look the way they did, all involving the same types of risk calculations and their own drawbacks. [...] At the point where we decide that medical transition is worth the cost, however we arrive at that point, we're forced to omit information when dealing with medical professionals or face additional barriers. Gender therapists will ask us about our sex lives and gender presentation, leaving us to weigh up the likelihood that we would be rejected for treatment if we tell them about our work against our desire to be honest. Any doctor may decide they don't believe we fit the criteria, or that we're lying about our gender identity, if they know we regularly sell sexual services to men who think we're women. We've come a long way since Lou Sullivan pushed for gay trans men to be recognized as men and to have access to medical transition, yet bigotry still persists when it comes to trans people selling sexual services.

Transgender sex workers who begin sex work after they've attained the transition milestones they want won't have to worry about lying to get initial diagnoses and referrals, but they'll still face stigma from their doctors. In the current political climate, with constant attacks on trans healthcare continuing, all transmasculine people are at risk of disruptions to their HRT prescriptions, so adding another marginalised identity only increases the danger. Lying continues to be an important safety measure and many of us benefit from keeping our status as sex workers out of our medical records.

Beyond the doctors and therapists we must interact with to gain access to medical transition in ways that are legal, there are yet more medical professionals with interact with as sex workers. Services which exist to provide us with STI tests or resources cater overwhelmingly to women, and our state of medical transition may impact how good the care we receive from these services is. These issues impact us no matter when we started sex work, be it pre-transition or after beginning HRT and getting surgery. Even the transmasculine people who are uninterested in medically transitioning are not spared, because coming out to a medical professional or being visibly trans will cause them to treat us differently.

Basic care from STI clinics can be impacted by our medical transition. Nurses who administer tests or ask us questions are often not familiar with how our bodies work or the kinds of sex we are capable of having, so they make assumptions and their biases lead to worse care. When we need access to PrEP, a HIV prevention, we may be given incorrect information about its effectiveness based on the assumption that we use certain parts of our anatomy and have vaginal sex (PrEP takes longer to be effective for vaginal sex than anal sex.) Our issues with vaginal atrophy can be overlooked as being the result of seeing so many clients or having so much sex, leading to assumptions that we aren't using enough lube or that the sheer amount of sex is the issue, rather than recognizing the effects of a lack of estrogen can have on our genitals.

It's no wonder, given all the issues that can arise for transmasculine sex workers when we seek out medical transition, that there are so many of us who do sex work only prior to our transition and quit afterwards. I wasn't surprised to hear from one transmasculine sex worker that his retirement was more of a logical consideration than a choice he made based on preference. "When I dropped to earning barely more than I was spending on ads, after I got top surgery, I realized I had to retire."

The transmasculine sex workers who do continue to do sex work after we transition frequently find that we change the type of sex work we do, moving from brothel work to independent full service sex work or from that to online porn creation, and lower the volume of clients and customers we interact with. Different stages in transition can require entire re-brands.

To lower the number of trans people who engage in sex work out of desperation, as opposed to making the decision under less pressure, the cost of medical transition needs to be covered by other means. ending employment discrimination gets us closer, but with the low rate of pay that the average working class person can expect, that will won't be enough to mitigate the need for an additional income source to afford medical transition quickly. Transition care, like all vital medical care, must be made free if we wish to remove it as a factor which drives people to sell sex."

The reality that many transmasculine people put on a complex feminine act, rather than simply claiming to be women and still acting like ourselves, raises the question of why we do so. Feminine women tend to be considered more desirable by clients and customers, but changing all of our mannerisms and lying about our hobbies isn't necessary to attract those men. Why build a character when we could settle for a feminine overlay, complete with only a name and a dress and maybe a wig? [...] It is possible that these female personas are an overcompensation resulting from a belief that many trans people have, that others can sense something is off about us. A cis female sex worker might feel comfortable presenting as a tomboy whilst a transmasculine sex worker becomes convinced that their transness will be discovered if they allow themselves a sliver of gender non-conformity. Meanwhile, clients are frequently oblivious and are likely to project whatever they desire onto the sex workers they see, in the absence of something extreme to jar them out of their fantasy. [...] Cis and trans workers alike have to contend with how clients anticipate they will behave and what they expect of someone they view as a woman. These differing expectations include, but are not limited to: having higher standards for how feminine women of colour should be, viewing certain expensive attire as essential to an elevated level of femininity, seeing youth and femininity as being bound together.

Whether a client has high standards for the femininity of some sex workers they see does not directly correlate with how feminine transmasculine sex workers of those demographics will act. Maintaining a feminine exterior can be time-consuming, expensive, and exhausting. In some cases, that standard that many clients have becomes so high that it stops being worth it for the sex worker to try at all, and the female persona collapses into a simple claim to be a woman regardless of presentation. How successful this is likely to be, in terms of attracting and keeping paying clients, will continue to be impacted by the client's bigoted views on how women of different demographics should behave. [...] I asked one black non-binary worker to share why they feel so much pressure to be hyper-feminine for work, and they responded, "That's because I'm the only black girl- not that I'm really a girl- at every [strip] club I work at. Loads of people want my place and I need to be perfect to keep it. I spend so much on nails and lashes that it makes a big dent in what I take home." [...] Ultimately, the believe that there are a relatively small number of trans men and transmasculine nonbinary people doing sex work can be attributed to the way so many of us hide behind acting as if we are women. Speaking to even a small number of transmasculine sex workers reveals this flaw. You cannot find the number of transmasculine people using an escorting website or working at a strip club or making porn when so many of us are actively lying about our gender to keep our earnings up. Researchers will get false information from us too, because we are unlikely to trust them not to report it in a way that will out us, and they should recognize this.

In the period of time when I was still working under a female person, I only came out to my closest friends and a limited number of other (predominantly also trans) sex workers. It is much easier for us to find each other, by word of mouth and spotting each other at events within the sex worker community, than for anyone else to find and study us. Any estimates of the total transmasculine population in sex work are hardly worth the time they take to read.

Presentation and gender identity are not one in the same thing, and this is doubly true when someone's presentation is being altered by an additional outside force. Sex workers' female personas are not built to be easy to see through; if we are armed with the knowledge that transmasculine people use them, we can be prepared to recognize them for who they actually are underneath, when they reveal themselves.

[2]The hidden trans men in sex work, 23 May 2023, Irresistible Damage, a magazine for gay and bi trans men/mascs"