#working guys

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Working Guys: a Transmasculine Sex Worker Anthology. edited by Jack Parker. page 39

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Working Guys - Review

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. 

Reflections: I found this very informative. It was structured to allow for many varied perspectives, including not just different types of sex work, gender identities and expressions, and transition journeys and goals, but also commentary on their intersections with race, disability, etc., while maintaining cohesion within each chapter's broad topic. These experiences were never flattened to fit a simplistic narrative of sex work as purely traumatic or empowering or even “just another job” nor was there any sanitization of the complicated experiences of being transgender or transitioning and the way those experiences might not fit the narrative often sold to cis people and the medical establishments. I took a lot away from the discussions about the practical considerations sex workers have to make if they are pursuing transition, whether social or physical, and how common perceptions of and discussions around sex work, even by “supportive” groups, can be marginalizing or contribute to the invisibility of transmasc sex workers. 

I was also intrigued by the section on female personas. It was no surprise to hear that they would often be necessary from a business perspective. But Working Guys also delved into the way these personas could play a different psychological role for transmasc individuals than seemingly similar constructed personas might for women selling sex. The differences in how transmasc people developed this persona and related to it, as well as the trade-off where the female personas could protect from dysphoria or perpetuate it, were very thought-provoking topics explored well.

Warnings: Depictions of transphobia, misgendering, gender dysphoria, medical discrimination, homophobia, whorephobia, verbal and physical abuse, consensual and non-consensual sexual content, racism, ableism, fatphobia.

[transbookoftheday]

Working Guys by Jack V Parker

Working Guys is a collection of essays, personal narratives and interviews about the lives of transmasculine sex workers, in our own words. Joyful, traumatic, or somewhere in between, this book preserves nuance and highlights a range of experiences. From selling sex under a female persona to taking advantage of the rise in popularity of trans men in porn, the pieces within provide a snapshot of moments in various transmasculine sex workers' lives.

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"Medical transition can have costs for trans sex workers that are not exclusive to the price of surgery or prescriptions or appointments with doctors. Our desirability to clients is impacted by our sex characteristics, therefore so is our income. The removal of breasts, changes to our genitals, or the masculinization that comes with taking testosterone will change whether certain clients are interested in booking transmasculine sex workers at all. Surgeries will put us out of work during the recovery period, leaving us in limbo wondering how much money we may still be capable of earning, depending on the reaction of the client pool to our new bodies.

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."

– from “Chapter 4: The Cost of Medical Transition,” Jack Parker, from Working Guys: A Transmasculine Sex Worker Anthology ed. Jack Parker (2024, self-published)

[laciere]

"As women [sex workers] are the most sought after by the predominantly straight male client pool, trans men and transmasculine non-binary people frequently pose as a gender that is not their own to attract them. We construct female personas. [...] I have heard from a flood of transmasculine people who are (or have been) "cis for pay". Dozens of transmasculine sex workers and former sex workers reached out to me, as a direct result of an article[2] I wrote about trans men being a hidden population within sex work, and I interviewed many of them. [...] Through meeting so many other sex workers like myself, I was reminded of my own early experiences selling sex whilst claiming to be a cis girl and woman. I lacked the awareness I have now, so I believed that my presumed lesbianism was the reason I felt the need to play a character for my clients. hearing that other people also used mental gymnastics to explain away their dysphoria when writing their escorting ads or taking nudes for their subscription sites brought me comfort. Meeting (mostly cis) sex workers who did not construct a separate work persona confounded me, at the beginning of my sex work career. I had universalized my own experience as if it applied to all cis women who sold sex or made porn, not yet realizing I was trans. Having a masculine gender identity had a huge impact on how I felt about acting as a woman to seduce straight men, but I presumed that the disconnect I felt between my true self and the roleplay I did for work was inherent to being a sex worker. Once corrected, I felt like I was doing something wrong. I felt alone. [...] After I came out, I began to find other transmasculine people in similar circumstances. They confided in me that they also constructed female personas. [...] Since so many sex workers use a stage name for work, as a way to protect our identities while dodging stigma and state surveillance, it becomes easier to think of our work self as a different person. In the case where this persona is a different gender to us, we are primed to develop an alter ego or to treat our work persona as a part we're playing instead of reducing it to a pseudonym. I think about my peer saying "she isn't really me" in reference to the performance he embodies when he sells sex and it resonates with me.

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"

-- from "Chapter 1: Female Personas," Jack Parker, from Working Guys: A Transmasculine Sex Worker Anthology ed. Jack Parker (2024, self-published)

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[HE SAYS YOU ALWAYS KEEP THE WORKING GUYS]