What’s it like to be an LGBTQIA
SEX WORKERS
ELLA GAUCI learns about the fight for equality, rights and justice in sex work activism
Standing outside the 56th UN Human Rights Council in Geneva in July 2024, sex workers from around the world are chanting, dancing and protesting. Many are holding fans with the slogan “sex work is work” spread across them. They are demonstrating against the presentation of a report made by the Special Rapporteur on Violence Against Women and Girls, which aims to criminalise the clients of sex workers, equating sex work with gender-based violence. The presentation claims this new move could protect sex workers, but the protest outside seems to say otherwise.
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168 countries globally have punitive laws that criminalise some aspect of sex work. However, organisations like the European Sex Workers’ Rights Alliance (ESWA) believe that criminalisation is only making sex workers more vulnerable and putting them in dangerous situations, rather than providing them with the rights they deserve. Sex work and the LGBTQIA community have always been linked, often because of a lack of opportunity within other sectors for employment. Trailblazers like Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera were sex workers, and early LGBTQIA rights movements like Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries (STAR), founded in 1970, were led by sex workers.