There’s this notion of treating sex workers like children who need watching over, but we don’t, and our model is evidence of that. – Catherine Healy
For years I have held the position that the cause of sex worker rights, as part of the whole fabric of recognition of the individual’s right to be unmolested by the state due to private sexual behavior, must inevitably succeed. As civilization has developed, respect for individual civil rights has steadily grown; certainly the growth has been neither smooth nor consistent, but as a rule the rights of individuals are greater at any randomly-selected point on the timeline of history than they were at any randomly-selected previous point. For the past century or so the development of individual rights has been impeded by the cancer known as Progressivism, the belief that “experts” have more right to determine what is “good” for any individual than that individual has to determine that for himself, and that said “experts” have the right to dispatch armed thugs to use violence to punish those who dare to violate the arbitrary pronouncements of those experts, in order to terrorize the greater population into meek obedience. But the bloody consequences of “progressive” thought are at last becoming obvious to all but the True Believers and the hopelessly collectivist, and it’s only a matter of time before drug prohibition follows eugenics, and prohibition of pragmatic sexual activity follows prohibition of non-procreative sexual activity, onto the ash-heap of history.
In recent years, the prohibitionists who saw this trend have been fighting a last, desperate, all-out campaign against the inevitable; it’s no accident that “sex trafficking” hysteria appeared on the scene immediately after three huge developments in sexual freedom (loosening of restrictions on sex work in Germany, decriminalization in New Zealand and the abolition of “sodomy” laws in the US) made it obvious that state control of individual sexual behavior was on its way out. But any campaign driven entirely by disinformation, conflation, negation of individual agency and pure moral panic cannot last forever, no matter how many billions are pumped into it; slowly but surely the truth will out. Since the summer of 2012 momentum for decriminalization has been building outside of the demimonde, and a broad coalition of UN agencies, health officials, human rights groups, think tanks, academics and journalists has joined sex workers in demanding that the state keep its filthy hands out of whores’ lingerie. For over two years now I’ve been waiting for signs that our society had reached the watershed moment, the point at which the momentum would begin to run away from prohibition and toward respect for individual rights again, and I think that finally came two weeks ago when Amnesty International declared its support for decriminalization. Since then, prohibitionists’ wailing and gnashing of teeth has largely been drowned out by the sounds of jubilation from the harlots’ camp, and a chorus of assent from many who had remained silent on the issue for a long time, such as drug anti-prohibitionist Richard Branson; even prohibitionist-leaning news organizations like The Guardian and Al Jazeera published op-eds cheering the Amnesty decision. But none of them were as welcome to me as the statement from venerable GLBT rights group Lambda Legal:
…we…applaud and support Amnesty International’s recent resolution to protect the human rights of sex workers by calling for decriminalization of sex work…For many LGBT people, participation in street economies is often critical to survival…Transgender people engage in sex work at a rate ten times that of cisgender women, and 13% of transgender people who experience family rejection have done sex work…LGBT people are regularly profiled, harassed, and criminalized based on the presumption that they are sex workers, contributing to the high rates of incarceration and police brutality experienced by these communities …Laws criminalizing sexual exchange—whether by the seller or the buyer—impede sex workers’ ability to negotiate condom use and other boundaries, and force many to work in hidden or remote places where they are more vulnerable to violence. Research and experience have shown that these laws serve only to drive the industry further underground…We look forward to working…with sex workers and…Amnesty International, to replace laws that criminalize sex work with public policies that address sex workers’ real…needs.
This is huge; Lambda was a major player in the advances in gay rights over the past forty years, and its support may give our movement the much-needed legal firepower that the ACLU’s abdication of its responsibilities has cheated us of for decades. To be sure, the conditions mentioned in this statement are nothing new, and had mainstream gay rights organizations not been obsessively dedicated to pursuing the agenda of white, middle-class, monogamous, vanilla gay folk for this entire century so far, they could have been addressing these issues long ago. But if they’re willing to stop ignoring us at last, and to put their might behind us in earnest, I for one am willing to forgive them. Gay rights groups, anti-prohibitionist groups, sex-positive groups…I don’t know where you’ve been hiding for the past eleven years, or what you’ve been waiting for to speak up. But if that’s finally changed, we can discuss it later; right now you’ve got a lot of catching up to do, and we are sorely in need of your help.
Maggie, I sure hope you’re right about this being the turning point.
In the following sentence “But any campaign driven entirely by disinformation, conflation, negation of individual agency and pure moral panic cannot last forever, no matter how many billions are pumped into it; slowly but surely the truth will out.”
Did you leave out the word “win” at the end of the sentence? i.e. “win out”
I don’t know if Maggie meant it that way or not, but “the truth will out” is an archaic but fairly well-known idiom.
You may be right. It didn’t sound right to me but considering how often Maggie has her head in historical texts that may be the case. I did a Google search of “truth will out” and found it dates back to Shakespeare:
LAUNCELOT: Nay, indeed, if you had your eyes, you might fail of
the knowing me: it is a wise father that knows his
own child. Well, old man, I will tell you news of
your son: give me your blessing: truth will come
to light; murder cannot be hid long; a man’s son
may, but at the length truth will out.
“Truth will out” was indeed what I intended to type. I’m sure nobody here will be surprised that I used a slightly old-fashioned phrase. 😉
“magna est veritas, et praevalebit”
“The truth will out” went by without a double take to this person on the other side of the Atlantic. Can’t say anyone else around here would look twice at it either.
Well I figured that Maggie was sitting in the hospital room with her laptop, keeping one eye on Jae and the other on the laptop while typing. I should have known better that she would have actually made a mistake!
“truth will out” is a phrase I use regularly but I also have bad habit of using archaic terms.
DITTO, ‘cept I narcissistically consider it a GOOD habit of mine!
So do you need a new initialism? Is there a -sexual word for sex work? Are you a workersexual? Maybe LGBTW? I think you need to get this straightened out as soon as possible!
I am well aware that, had things gone differently at one or two stages of my life, I could well have been one of those 13% (or whatever the UK figure is) so it is nice to see some this from an LGBT group. It is, I realise, a generalisation but they do seem to finally be acknowledging something other than the ‘G’ in the acronym which they all claim to act as an umbrella for.
As often in uncertain times (and with regard to what is “moral”, these qualify), a leader is needed to test the waters and if they are favorable others that were careful will follow. AI provided that leadership, because they saw it was needed and were in a position to do so. Note that I am not accusing the others that now follow on cowardice. If you are smaller/less tough/etc. than AI, you are right to be careful. Others may just have waited for the right time and may have estimated is a bit different than AI. The good thing here is that not only did the AI decision happen, but there are a lot of followers and support. This gives me hope that Maggie is actually right and also that other repressive tendencies will face real opposition in the wake of this.
Spot on, as always Ms. Maggie! Sharing the Amnesty decision as it happened with sex workers around the world (through the magic of Twitter) was the highlight of my year. It went a good way in dragging out of the funk I’ve been in since Bill C-36 became law last December. And glad to see that some in the LGBT community have finally set identity politics aside to remember the sexual outlaws they left in the dust … I hope to see more of it.
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