A question relating to the trans*/feminism debate

not - sorry you had such awful experiences.

God I hope this name change works.
I'm in tears after reading AFG's post.
I grew up in a city with "liberal" prostitution. A path of drugs and low self esteem led me into "safe' prostitution. I can only confirm that those pimp lines were used on me too. I thought at the time it would fun and daring, wild and exciting. I was running with a pretty bad group at the time, we where playing at being gansters I guess. But it's not being a prostitute isn't wild and exciting, it's not empowering, it takes a little bit of you and if your super lucky you get to hold onto the rest of you. The emotional consequences of my actions still effect me daily. there is literally not a day I don;t wish I hadn't stepped inside that brothel, not a fucking day. My life choices are limited because of it. I can't for example work in a high profile area because I do not want it discovered and be outed.
And even in a "safe" legal brothel, I picked a fellow prostitute off the floor of a toilet where she was ODing. Not fucking safe.

I do think there is a gas-lighting/rabbit hole aspect.

I used to work in a shelter where the women kept a 'bad date' file to protect themselves and make sure the other women knew which cars/men to avoid. I am pretty hardened after years of working in addictions and homelessness but I had to stop reading the file (we read it to inform the Police if there were rapists/violent punters around - the women knew this). I couldn't read it because it was so violent, dreadful and repulsive. The men were raping, threatening, robbing, abusing, hurting these women and the descriptions were not of a few men, it was lots and lots of men. All the women I knew who were having sex for money had experiences that were terrifying. We also had a serial killer in the same province and the Police just ignored the women and their workers who were telling them.

I have never met anyone who conformed to the 'happy hooker' myth. And I have met a lot of people having sex for money. Including one that died of an overdose. Very soon after she started. She spoke to me the first night and was crying but went out anyway because she needed a fix. Anyone that has sex with someone in addictions for money is coercive, knows that person is out of choices and has sex anyway. I cannot understand why that isn't rape.

oh god AFG: A total lightbulb moment for me.

Thank you for your honesty

Thanks for this thread. Some very good stuff here. And also some tragic stuff. I am so sorry.

I like the term punterphobic. I am very punterphobic.

Depressing but necessary thread. AFG, I'm so sorry for what you went through, and thanks for coming on here and talking about it. It can't be easy.

NC for this.

LurcioAgain you have hit the nail on the head. I knew members of the ECP in the very early days, and it really distresses me to see how much traction they now have as "the voice of sex workers". They are an offshoot of the cult-like WfH, whose "up is down and down is up" gaslighting tactics are very familiar from the current debates, and at least in the early days, plenty of the women who were members of the ECP had never worked in prostitution at all. Even their most celebrated action of those early days, the occupation of the church in Kings Cross, was done to further their own political profile, and they didn't care that it shat all over local working women. The local women had an arrangement with the police, who would warn them when they were going to be nicked, then they could arrange for the kids to be collected, and that kind of thing, and from the police point of view, it meant they got no trouble from the women. When ECP occupied the church, the police thought the local women were taking the piss, and the arrangement ended, meaning local working women were immediately plunged into an even more hostile relationship with the police, which made their already difficult lives even more difficult.

Nowadays, they seem to be entirely with the school of thinking that says a fucking pimp is a sex worker, whose work we should respect and whose needs we should all bow before. Fuck that.

I knew ECP members personally, and I knew women whose already shitty lives in prostitution had been made more difficult, without their consent, by ECP posturing. They haven't changed a bit. The statements the ECP make sound really plausible as defences of sex workers, if you know nothing about the subject except what you read on tumblr, but I don't trust a single fucking word.

I'm bemused by the idea that there is no difference between a biological women and a trans women.

I remember years ago thinking Germaine Greer was being terribly intolerant in her stance of opposing trans students' entry to her college but I see where she was coming from now.

I don't agree with the statement that 50% of the world's population suffer all to some extent due to their biology but I'm quite clear that I am not the same as a trans women with a penis (or even without one)

It is not discrimination or phobic behaviour to suggest that penises should not be on display in a female gym changing room.

I've never cared whether I'm seen by a male or female doctor but many do, presumably that is "transphobic"?

The most awful thing is, the lines being trumpeted by pro "sex work" forces are the literal SAME lines pimps use to recruit girls.

"Sex work is very safe when it's done in the right conditions/with the right people, you'll see!"

"Prostitution is really just like another service, you're helping people."

"Other people sell their bodies to do construction work or garden labor, you sell your body for sex, what's the difference?"

"Other people are giving sex away, you're getting paid, how awesome!"

"It's empowering to see men throwing money at you."

These are the lies pimps tell girls to make them accept their lives as prostitutes ... and now they're accepted "feminist" thought.

Here's a feminist thought: under capitalism, by definition, being paid does not mean you are in power. Being the one payinghaving actual capital that returns dividends and using it to compensate labormeans you have power.

The idea of empowerment in getting paid is ridiculous as soon as you turn it to any other profession. Are janitors and housemaids empowered because people clean their own homes for free and they're getting paid to clean? It's laughable. Being the person whose payroll the janitor is on, now, that person has actual power.

AbortionFairyGodmother more from me too. We believe you, is all I can say. We believe you. xx

Hermione yes yes yes and yes - couldn't agree more

I remember that pearl of humanity, Lurcio.

Yes, Lurcio, I remember him. He really, really didn't get why we were utterly incredulous about it either, did he?

I would always describe myself as "feminist" - for female equality. Not well informed enough to adopt a more specific label.

But I am clear that 50% of the world's population suffer all to some extent, and a lot of women an inconceivable amount, due to their biology. I therefore will not accept that there is no different between born women and trans women, particularly those who still have male bodies. To me that makes me "sane" and "normal"

And again to deny the hideous abuse of women who are prostitutes boggles me. Just because some women might freely choose it, doesn't exclude the possibility that many, many women are effectively sex slaves. You don't have to be feminist to see and understand that, surely?

I don't understand how anyone who calls themselves "feminist" could insist that it's reasonable to have male bodied people in rape crisis centres, or that there is no problem with abuse of women in the sex industry.

I sometimes think I've fallen through the rabbit hole.

Funny, I was thinking about this earlier while reading the trans* and gender thread. It struck me that the entryist methodology extreme trans activists are using (taking over liberal feminist groups on campuses, monopolising access to the political decision making process) is exactly the same as that practised by the pimp lobby when they set up organisations like the English Collective of Prostitutes, most of whose members are in fact pimps, then get their voice taken seriously by parliamentary committees and skew the agenda away from serious consideration of the Swedish model.

"Pimp-phobic" and "punter-phobic" - great terms. (I still haven't got over the occasion on which a punter came on a thread to assure us he was a nice guy because he'd let the terrified student trying to escape from going through with her first experience as a prostitute pet his labrador to calm her down - then fucking her... instead of giving her 20 quid, paying a taxi home and googling the number of the student hardship office on her campus. He seemed convinced this made him a nice guy.)

AFG - more

AFG I'm sorry you have to go through that now after everything you've already been through.

AFG, you're not alone in that. I suspect that they also constantly try and prove you were never there and it never happened as well?

Yup, pimp phobic or punter phobic is a pretty good description, it doesn't have a lovely acronym though, so can't be used, I'm afraid. If we feminists could come up with a super acronym, that could go along with TERF to sound like a meal at a Berni Inn, I'm sure they'd all go for that.

Or not, because any discussion of the leeches who make money from prostituted women's pain, or the men who cause that pain ALWAYS gets turned around to statements like "Pentameter" "Women enjoy it, you just want them to be poor" "If they can't do this, then what can they do?" all said without any trace of irony about how these people actually view prostituted women, or how they are invisibilising the pain and the people who live off that pain.

Effing hell AFG.

AbortionFairy

That's horrendous. So much love and support to you.

I'm a former underage runaway prostitute who speaks out against the legalization of prostitution and against the term "sex work" fairly frequently (rape is not work, my friends). For this, I am called SWERF. Apparently, I am just a prude who longs to exclude women, rather than someone who experienced some of the worst of what humanity had to offer in my teen years.

A woman who had written about her own rape, accused of "thinking like a rapist". I will never not boggle at that.

The tactic is to accuse us of being like the oppressor, being what we are against.

So "TERFs" are hateful and violent (when we want safe spaces for women) "SWERFs" hate prostituted women (when we want to end the male violence and use of women)
Feminists are called "man haters" when we react to male hatred of women.
And so on.

If you are identifed as a "TERF" then at some point, someone will identify you as a "SWERF", a "white supremacist" (because all the nice white middle class armchair revolutionaries who use this as an insult are happy to erase WoC who are gender-critical) and almost anything else you can think of.

The surprise one came today, when a lovely academic, who had written very movingly in the New Statesman about her rape at Oxford, and how female-only spaces had helped her deal with it, was accused of "thinking like a rapist". A woman who had written about her own rape, accused of "thinking like a rapist". I will never not boggle at that.

It's all topsy-turvey bullshit. One of the weird results is that I am no longer as bothered by really extreme insults as I once was. When I can be called so many really vile things which I patently am not, it's difficult to take them as seriously.