Last summer, a sex worker from San Francisco called a client she found through Craigslist and they made plans to meet in the best hotel of a small Southern town. Shortly after they stepped into the hotel room, police stormed in to join the FBI agent who had posed as the client, and arrested the sex worker as part of a nation-wide sting which targeted venues such as “truck stops, motels and the Internet,” according to an FBI report on Operation Innocence Lost. Operation Innocence Lost focuses on rescuing children forced into sex work, but has arrested hundreds of consensual adult sex workers since its inception in 2003.

“They kept me in the hotel room and tried to interrogate me for more than three hours, but I refused to talk to them,” recalls the sex worker. A year later, after spending approximately $5000 on bail and legal fees, she continues to work as an escort, although she is traumatized from her arrest: 

“Now I feel paranoid and jumpy in ways that might be too extreme. I still have nightmares where FBI and police are chasing me. I just wanted to run and hide and be somewhere safe. I’m generally easygoing, but my emotions have been all over the place.”   

While the FBI’s Operation Innocence Lost is supposed to focus on the exploitation of minors, according to attorney Sienna Baskin from Urban Justice, “in the process [it] arrests hundreds of consensual adult sex workers.” Urban Justice’s Melissa Broudo has noted various trends in arrests over the last few years, including police conducting “sweeps” during which they arrest numerous women at a time at stroll districts; false arrests of gay men and transgender women; busts of dungeons; and individuals being arrested for selling sexual services over the Internet.

In terms of trends, police often go to sex workers’ stroll districts to arrest many [sex workers] at once in a van. There’s been many false arrests of transgender women, and I certainly have met some people who have been arrested for selling sexual services over the Internet.

The stories of consensual adult sex workers, like the aforementioned woman from San Francisco, who was 39 years old and planning on exiting sex work to start her own business at the time of her arrest, are missing from the mainstream media coverage and leads to a low level of public awareness about the consequences of police and FBI “anti-trafficking” and “child rescue” activities.

On September 4, 2010, when Craigslist shut down its “erotic services” category, sex workers suddenly lost access to the most popular online venue for sexual services advertising in the US. Craigslist had given in to the pressure, which had been intensifying since 2008, from seventeen attorneys general—including Richard Blumenthal of Connecticut and Beau Biden of Delaware—and several non-profit groups. The attorneys general and non-profit groups claimed that Craigslist was unable to adequately monitor for child exploitation and sex trafficking activities.

Although the shutdown of Craigslist’s “erotic services” is not in and of itself criminalization of sex workers, sex workers and their allies claim that it is another of a string of recent law enforcement actions that further marginalizes adult sex workers while failing to effectively fight child exploitation and trafficking.

Sex workers organizations such as the Sex Workers Outreach Project and the Desiree Alliance have been trying to raise awareness about how neither Operation Innocence Lost’s prosecution of sex workers nor the removal of mainstream advertising outlets like Craigslist will actually protect sex workers. In fact, they argue, it further compromises the ability of law enforcement to fight trafficking and child exploitation. 

According to Dr. Michael Goodyear, professor of medicine and feminist ethics at Dalhousie University, “Shutting down the Craigslist ads will only force sexual services advertising to move elsewhere…[to] places such as Backpage.com.” Craigslist was the only online sexual services advertising venue that worked with police to monitor its “erotic services” section. Now that the section no longer exists, “it is harder for law enforcement to monitor criminal activities,” says Goodyear.

Additionally, says sexologist Dr. Larry Falls:

“When the industry is forced to go underground, it is harder for sex workers to continue to work independently and avoid pimps and organized crime.”

Sex workers and their allies are also publicly criticizing the motives of the attorneys general and non-profit groups that pressured Craigslist to shut down “erotic services.”  When Norma Ramos, director of the Coalition against Trafficking in Women, declared that “prostitution is not the world’s oldest profession—it’s the world’s oldest oppression” on the Alyona Show, Stacey Swimme, sex worker and founder of the Sex Workers Outreach Project, responded:

“Prostitution today is a way that men and women and people of all genders are making a living. It is a real issue that we need to talk about.”

Swimme added that debates about the morality of prostitution and censorship distract from the more pressing questions: “What is happening right now to the people who are no longer able to advertise on Craigslist? Where are they now and what are they doing?”   

Other non-profit groups at the forefront of the movement to shut down Craigslist “erotic services” advertisements included the Polaris Project and the Rebecca Project. Malika Saada Saar, executive director of The Rebecca Project, an organization that works directly with child victims, claims that her organization is not anti-sex work. This suggests that there is a range of positions on prostitution within the non-profit groups who collectively called on Craigslist to shut down “erotic services.”

When asked if she would support consensual adult sex workers’ use of Craigslist, Saar said, “Sure.” But because Saar believes that Craigslist failed to effectively monitor its content, she was a strong supporter of the removal of sexual services advertisements on Craigslist.

After the initial criticisms and legal threats from attorneys general and non-profit groups in 2008, Craigslist staff began to manually monitor and require phone verification for each post on “erotic services,” charging users $10 for each post and $5 for each re-post and notifying police about suspicious activities. But Saar and others saw this as inadequate.

At a House Judiciary Committee hearing on the sex trafficking of minors on September 15, Elizabeth McDougall, a lawyer for Craigslist, said that “Craigslist fears that its utility to help combat child exploitation has been grossly diminished,” pointing out that traffic to Backpage.com (which does not monitor postings for abusers) has spiked sharply this month. McDougall, however, did not address the difficulties of effectively monitoring a website that facilitates billions of interactions each month in the US.

Even sex workers’ advocates who oppose the shutdown of “erotic services” do not argue that Craigslist’s monitoring was working effectively. But instead of removing sexual services advertisements on Craigslist, sex workers’ rights advocates favor decriminalization of sex work, arguing that decriminalization would empower sex workers to collaborate with police and report abuse.

“When prostitution is not a crime,” says the arrested sex worker from San Francisco:

then things that are crimes would be more apparent. It would make the whole industry safer, so when [trafficking or child abuse] does happen, people would not be afraid to speak out about it…with the way the laws are now, sex workers are afraid to report incidents to the police.

The current reality in the US, according to Urban Justice attorney Melissa Broudo, is that “when sex workers experience or witness rape or abuse, most sex workers do not feel empowered to report to the police. Even when they do, they are not given the same respect as other people who report the same crimes.”

“From a legal perspective,” Broudo continues:

“the reason we support decriminalization as attorneys and service providers is that it would allow sex workers to come forward when their rights are infringed upon…and become critical allies with law enforcement to fight trafficking and child exploitation.”  

Although it was imperfect, the decriminalization of prostitution in New Zealand by the 2003 Prostitution Reform Act made sex work safer by making it easier for the government to enforce the use of condoms, monitor workplaces and prosecute those who hired minors. The probability of the US acting as a pioneer along with New Zealand to give sex workers more rights and protections seems unlikely.

In a public statement on September 7, four non-profit groups, including The Rebecca Project, called on Craigslist to shut down its “erotic services” pages worldwide—even in countries such as Canada and France where prostitution is legal.

“While this is a good first step in the US, there are still more than 250 other Craigslist ‘erotic’ pages around the world where children and young women are still being sold for sex through Craigslist,” the statement said.

In Canada, the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) held a news conference on September 7, 2010, where Sergeant Marie-Claude Arsenault announced that the RCMP is working to bring US measures of controlling Craigslist postings to Canada. The RCMP’s rhetoric did not focus on the urgency of fighting trafficking and child exploitation, such as has been the case in the US. Instead, Sgt. Arsenault expressed an interest in making it harder for consensual adult sex workers to conduct their work: “Not having that service will definitely be an obvious disincentive and it will just make buying sex and finding those kind of activities just a little bit harder.” 

On September 28, the tide changed for Canadian sex workers when an Ontario judge struck down key provisions of Canada’s anti-prostitution laws, but back in the US, sex workers continue to lack many basic rights and protections, such as the right to a safe work environment. FBI agents and police officers are able to intimidate and arrest sex workers because decriminalization of sex work is an issue that lacks widespread support in the US.

American sex workers and their allies, however, believe they are making advances in fighting stigma and increasing public support for the decriminalization of sex work.  

“Perhaps there is more public support than we think,” says attorney Melissa Broudo, citing a recent moderated debate on Economist.com, which found that readers ‘voted overwhelmingly in favor…[that] prostitution should be legal.’ “It’s just an issue that isn’t often brought up in mainstream public discourse.“  

The sex worker from San Francisco is also optimistic about public support for sex workers’ rights:  

“Just as in the queer rights movement, as more sex workers come together to tell their stories, and the public becomes more exposed to sex work, then maybe we will end up being more accepted, and people will realize that something is wrong in their society when sex workers have to live in silence and fear.”

On Wednesday, I became illegal in my home state. I can’t go home to see my mother or my sister or my uncle or my friends from high school. I can’t go back to my favorite restaurant. Because the systematic eradication of transgender people from North Carolina is now the law of the land.

That’s not what the headlines said, but it’s the truth. A law that criminalizes trans people using the bathrooms of our actual genders criminalizes trans life.

That might seem like a big leap to you. So let’s break it down.

North Carolina’s HB 2, signed into law last week, overturns local anti-discrimination laws, bans cities or counties from setting a minimum wage for private employers, and dictates that access to restrooms in schools and publicly owned buildings be restricted to the gender on a person’s birth certificate. The law applies to schools and all state- and locally owned public buildings—public universities, rest areas, airports, courts, jails, social services, and the like. The law also defines public accommodations such that private property owners who wish to discriminate against trans people are protected; it just doesn’t force them to do so.

Using the wrong bathroom as the law demands isn’t a realistic solution for most trans people. Most trans people can’t walk into the bathroom the law says we should use without the risk of someone deciding we’re in the wrong place. A lot of trans people can’t walk into any bathroom without the risk of someone deciding we’re in the wrong place. Complying with the law wouldn’t work out very well, but that’s beside the point. Saying that it’s legal to be trans so long as you use the wrong bathroom is like saying it’s legal to be Christian so long as you don’t set foot inside a church. It makes it illegal to be trans in practice—illegal to live your gender.

If you could make us cis by making it illegal for us to live as who we are, don’t you think it would’ve worked by now? We were illegal when we rioted at Compton’s, we were illegal when we rioted at Stonewall, and we persisted despite being illegal for 100 years before that. A lot of us are still de-facto illegal, and we’re still here. Yes, sometimes trans people have to hide or compromise on who we are in order to survive in a world that wants us dead. Sometimes it means letting the system rob you of your dignity so that it doesn’t rob you of your freedom or your life, just as sometimes it means dying rather than let it rob you of your dignity. That’s the choice that trans people in North Carolina have right now: Dignity or freedom. Choose one—and probably get neither.

So it is absurd to say that what this law does is force trans people to use the restroom corresponding to the gender on our birth certificates. This law gives North Carolinian trans people three choices: risk legal penalties and police harassment for using a gendered bathroom, find a way to do without, or leave the state.

But bathrooms aren’t optional. Having them available is a requirement to access public space and public life. Could you hold down a job if you couldn’t pee at work? Could you go to school if a round trip to the only bathroom you could use took eight minutes, but you only had seven minutes between classes? Could you go on a date if you didn’t know whether you’d be able to pee at the restaurant, at the movie theater, at the bar—at all—until you got home? Could you keep yourself healthy by exercising at the gym without using the locker room or the bathroom? Could you fly home to visit your family if you had to get to the airport, check in, get through security, and board your flight before you had access to the plane’s gender-neutral restroom?

Bathrooms are an essential part of public infrastructure, and if you can’t access them safely and reliably, you can’t leave the house safely or reliably.

It is our duty to fight for our freedom. It is our duty to win.

The reality for transgender people in this situation isn’t that we have to use the wrong bathroom. The reality is that unless we leave and never come back, we either imprison ourselves metaphorically in our homes or risk being imprisoned literally. These are conditions calculated to bring about our destruction as a people. That’s genocide.

North Carolina isn’t alone in what it’s trying to accomplish. Security personnel already harass and arrest trans people for using the bathroom even without any laws to back them up. Because any time we interact with a representative of the state, there’s what the law says they can do, and then there’s what they actually do.

Laws like these justify and expand practices that already exist to eliminate and subjugate transgender people. Airport scanners are designed to deny trans people freedom of movement for the sake of security theater for cis people. A majority of states make trans people’s legal rights and access to accurate documentation dependent on genital surgery—which amounts to coerced sterilization.

Like many other trans people, I’ve been sexually harassed and assaulted in order to confirm a cis person’s suspicion that I’m trans—and I’ve never heard of anyone being punished for it unless the victim turned out to be cis. While this law doesn’t explicitly provide legal cover to expand the practice of transphobic sexual assault and harassment, it’s hard to imagine that that won’t be the effect. Those most vulnerable will be trans women and femmes—whose demonization has been the justification for the law—and people of color whose bodies are already criminalized and subject to additional scrutiny.

Police departments across the country use relentless profiling for sex work to criminalize condom use. In a climate where rampant discrimination can make sex work the best available survival strategy, that criminalization is an incredibly effective strategy for infecting Black and Latina trans women with HIV. Whether it was planned that way or not, the effect is absolutely genocidal. Years of activism culminated in laws banning the practice in New York and California less than two years ago, but it’s still commonplace elsewhere in the country. And then there’s the blunt instrument of murder, which seems to be gaining in popularity as we gain visibility.

We’re not going away. In the words of queer and trans activists of color protesting the bill Thursday night: This is not over. Cis people have been trying to eliminate us for more than 500 years, so for anyone hoping to get rid of us without getting blood on their hands, too bad. But the fact that this fits into a broader context and a longer history doesn’t make it less terrifying or less awful; it makes it worse. It’s another attack on an already threatened community. It’s a huge expansion of criminalization that makes trans people illegal as a matter of law, not just practice.

But personally? I just want to go home.

Researchers from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) in February published a study of HIV rates among female sex workers in the United States. The authors of the review—which was limited to female sex workers because research on genderqueer, transgender, and male sex workers in the United States is almost nonexistent—acknowledged that the prevalence of HIV in this group is high. They also noted, however, that they had little material to work with: The paper reviewed 14 studies, of which only two were done in the last decade. Thus, the authors note, “The burden of HIV among this population remains poorly understood.”

This shocking paucity of recent data is a result, in large part, of the withdrawal of federal funds for research on “prurient” topics imposed during the George W. Bush administration. That shift to the right had a chilling effect on the federal HIV response as a whole—an effect that has been most enduring with regard to sex workers. Overwhelmingly, even as federal agencies and public health organizations have taken steps to address HIV in other vulnerable populations, sex workers have been left out of the conversation. This omission is one that HIV-focused activists, at the urging of sex worker rights organizations, are starting to notice.

Most countries recognize men who have sex with men (MSM), people who inject drugs, and sex workers as their primary “key populations”—defined, in United Nations terms, as “groups of people who are more likely to be exposed to HIV… and whose engagement is critical to a successful HIV response.” The U.S. government, however, recognizes the first two, among others, as key populations, but not sex workers. Virtually no federally funded HIV prevention and care services are targeted specifically to sex workers in the United States, although, ironically, U.S. funding does support some good HIV prevention programming for sex workers overseas.

Here at home, they remain largely overlooked. The CDC’s HIV Behavioral Surveillance System (HBSS) only alludes to sex workers indirectly as a subgroup of “heterosexuals at risk of HIV infection” who “exchange sex for money or drugs”—a designation that, obviously, ignores their diversity on multiple levels.

Meanwhile, the National HIV/AIDS Strategy Update, a federal blueprint for our national response written by the Department of Health and Human Services’ Office of National AIDS Policy, mentions gay and bisexual men 35 times, youth 23 times, transgender people 19 times, people who inject drugs 18 times, and incarcerated people twice. It does not mention sex workers—as such or by any euphemism—even once.

This virtual invisibility was reflected at this year’s National HIV Prevention Conference in Atlanta, billed as the “preeminent conference for scientists, public health officials, community workers, clinicians, and persons living with HIV.” Of the hundreds of abstracts presented via panels, posters, and roundtable discussions, only four mentioned sex workers as a distinct and relevant population to consider at this conference.

At a “listening session” on the NHPC’s third day, I asked Conference Co-Chair Jonathan Mermin—the director of the CDC’s National Center for HIV/AIDS, Viral Hepatitis, STD, and TB Prevention—about the lack of data on sex workers and HIV. He acknowledged that the CDC has not collected the kind of data on HIV vulnerability among sex workers that it collects on other key groups.

This lack of inclusion is nothing new. In 2012, when the massive bi-annual International AIDS Conference took place in Washington, D.C., many foreign attendees with sex work or drug-using histories couldn’t get U.S. visas to attend.

Four blocks away from the two adjacent luxury hotels where NHPC was held, the HIV Prevention Justice Alliance (HIV-PJA) convened a free “People’s Mobilization on the National HIV/AIDS Strategy Counter Conference.” Nearly 100 participants signed in at its meeting space—some of them unable to afford NHPC registration and some dividing their time between the two conferences.

In the middle of the NHPC’s opening plenary, AIDS Foundation of Chicago organizer Maxx Boykin walked unannounced onto the stage, along with seven other Counter Conference participants, to protest the omission of sex workers from the National HIV/AIDS Strategy Update. “At this conference we talk about getting to zero new infections and ending the epidemic,” he said, “but we will never get there without tackling sex workers’ rights.” The group left the stage to substantial applause.

In contrast to the NHPC, the Counter Conference offered a striking example of HIV-focused advocacy groups joining sex worker rights organizations to address this exclusion. In the process, the collective also examined how structural factors such as housing, gentrification, and displacement affect people’s HIV risk and their HIV prevention and treatment choices.

Rather than choosing among hundreds of presentations, Counter Conference attendees met in plenary with experts leading discussions on topics that included the intersections of HIV criminalization, mass incarceration, and the war on drugs; the barriers to reproductive and sexual health care facing youth and women living with HIV; the escalating difficulty of getting HIV prevention and care in southern states without Medicaid expansion; the links between unemployment, economic injustice, and disparities in HIV-related outcomes; the health care and quality-of-life challenges faced by transgender people; and the need to develop solidarity between HIV and sex worker rights advocates.

At the latter panel, four leaders in sex worker rights organizations recommended that HIV activists learn more about their local and state laws on sex work. Magalie Lerman, representing the Sex Workers Outreach Project, observed that “the political and social environment in the [United States] contributes to negative outcomes for people in the sex trade” in all kinds of ways.

It is not unusual, for example, for police and prosecutors to use the possession of multiple condoms as evidence of someone’s intention to sell sex. This practice has been exposed and subsequently prohibited in a few cities, but is still a common practice elsewhere. It both discourages condom use—thus heightening HIV risk—and provides another tool for unjustly arresting marginalized people, including sex workers and those profiled as sex workers, which frequently includes transgender women of color.

Lack of funding for sex worker-specific HIV prevention and outreach work is another issue where joint advocacy is needed. Lerman urged HIV-focused organizations to “deal us in on HIV prevention funding streams” and collectively demand resources to support local, peer-led empowerment programs that have proven effective in reducing HIV rates. Such projects received less than 1 percent of all HIV prevention funding worldwide in 2009, the most recent year for which data is available. Domestic data on funding for this is, of course, nonexistent.

Another high priority was staff training and program adaptations to make HIV service agencies more accessible to sex workers. Panelist Deon Haywood represented Women With a Vision, a New-Orleans based organization providing harm reduction and HIV prevention services to Black women since the 1980s. She mentioned the need to “make the people running the organization look more like the people coming through the door.” She said this could be done by hiring peer counselors with lived experience in the sex trade and ensuring that their jobs were designed with room for advancement.

Panelist Cassie Warren from Chicago’s Howard Brown Health Center, meanwhile, talked about how agencies could expand their hours, locations (using mobile van services), and strategies to reach street-based youth engaged in survival sex. While the process of investigating and resolving existing barriers to care is labor-intensive, she said, HIV-focused service providers can’t expect to engage with high-risk youth without doing such work.

Building cross-sectoral communication and trust is another major challenge. Panelist Stella Zine, founder of the peer-driven support group Scarlet Umbrella Southern Art Alliance, pointed out that sex work can be a “heavy term” for some people. She urged participants to learn how to talk about HIV and sex work carefully, using language acceptable to people who need services but do not self-identify as sex workers.  

When working with organizational partners rather than clients, on the other hand, Haywood cited a willingness to name the issues on the table explicitly—and to point out incidents where issues are misnamed or avoided—as essential to solidarity building. For example, Haywood commended the Counter Conference for bringing an explicit racial analysis to its discussions, an aspect she found missing at the NHPC.

The central theme of the session was “nothing about us without us.” Having been ignored and forcibly silenced in so many other settings, the panelists emphasized that sex worker rights advocates will partner with allies willing to ensure that sex workers are at the table whenever funding, policy, and strategy decisions affecting sex workers are under discussion.

After the sex workers panel, some of us walked back to the NHPC to attend the “listening session” mentioned above, where I raised the issue of sex worker invisibility. Dr. Mermin responded by acknowledging the gap and advised us of the CDC review published in February. He warned us, however, that this new paper would not contain the kind of key population data on sex workers that is being collected in other countries.

Indeed, the CDC’s website currently states that “there are few population-based studies of sex workers in the United States or globally” (emphasis added) due to their illegal status. In international terms, that assertion is badly outdated. A plethora of studies on sex workers and HIV have been published in the last five years, showing clearly that punitive approaches to sex work exacerbate HIV spread. Public health and rights-based approaches, on the other hand, not only reduce HIV rates substantially, but are cost-saving to boot.

Silencing groups by excluding them from pivotal conferences and omitting them in national strategic planning are forms of overt discrimination, as is simply refusing to include them accurately in population surveys. If uncounted, they do not officially exist and do not have to be served. This political decision results in an absence of much-needed evidence.

Dr. Mermin added, however, that we don’t have to wait for solid numbers or data to increase national efforts to deliver services successfully targeted to sex workers. Was he signalling a federal shift, at last, toward the public inclusion of sex workers in our national HIV response? Hard to tell—but the odds of that occurring are undoubtedly better if pressure for such inclusion escalates.