I turned most of my last few days over to fighting #HR3 & strategizing with a ragtag band of feminist activists on the #DearJohn campaign. Though most of the folks involved are multi-issue activists, their political home is much more squarely abortion politics than the movement that made me first feel like I had a home: sex worker rights. That’s okay. I am used to being the loud (ex-)whore at the table.

Theoretically, this should all have precedence. As the movement currently conceives of them, sex worker rights fall under the large umbrella of reproductive justice — which is theoretically the framework from which we fight for abortion access. But it doesn’t always look like we’re as in it together as we really are.

History filmstrip moment: where did reproductive justice come from? RJ is a political framework for moving towards a culture and politics of full reproductive & sexual freedom, one that addresses intersecting root causes of injustice and oppression, and one that explicitly centers people more impacted by reproductive/sexual control and violence. Asian Communities for Reproductive Justice have one of the best histories/breakdowns of how reproductive health, rights, and justice are different but mutually supportive frameworks. Go now. From a personal historical standpoint, what’s worth noting is that RJ is the most likely entrypoint for sex worker rights in feminist reproductive/sexual politics.

Okay, and we’re back.

So.

There’s two reasons I’m compelled by #DearJohn and they are going to sound possibly over-wonky right now but whatever:

1. In an effort to expand the base of support for sex worker rights, I’ve deliberately spent more time with folks engaged in other work around reproductive justice. The sex worker rights movement is really an intersectional movement, that crosses racial justice, gender justice, economic justice, and sexual rights/justice, but it’s rare that we get to do much cross-movement work together. Mainly, because we’re focusing on our own movement. And there is nothing wrong with that. But my faith in the power for the sex worker rights movement comes from seeing how in related struggles in queer liberation and feminism (fighting back against the police, fighting for access to health care that doesn’t shame us, and on and on) there has been tremendous success — and also, there have been times when queer & feminist analysis and tactics have failed. It happens. It heartens me that truly, we are all still working it out. And we all have a lot to learn from one another. As a result, I don’t want to isolate my politics to sex-worker-only spaces (though those are critical for other reasons). And I don’t want people engaged in allied social movements to feel like they have no common cause with sex workers because they never get to work alongside us. (PS: They always have, even if they don’t know it.)

2. The time I have spent with reproductive justice activists has made me appreciate the differences in the varied feminist framings around abortion. It was a turning point for me to understand how other feminists (women of color and trans & gender nonconforming people in particular) have also felt isolated from the mainstream of feminist politics — that can over-privilege media savvy and closed-door lobbying and minimize the critical work of community organizing. Learning from & working with activists who have the shared experience of having to convince our supposed allies that we matter, and who are unafraid to push back and challenge people who supposedly are working alongside us… all of that has made me feel more at home in an old home (which is, feminism).

What I want to contribute to #DearJohn is this: that advocating for fairer laws and rights is just one strategy in both abortion and sex worker rights’ movements, but it is a strategy that will most benefit those already with power and access. (This is why Medicaid coverage for abortion access is so broken. And why decriminalization will never fully address the policing and marginalization of sex work.) So we know this, as a post-Roe generation or two of abortion rights politics, and we know this, as a second generation of sex worker rights activists. So why are our goals still so consistently narrow? Narrow goals appeal only to a narrow base. And this is why we fail to inspire people.

Before it sounds like I’m accusing a movement of a lack of imagination before lunchtime and then disappearing into the rest of my work for the day, let me just leave it here: why are we willing to settle for so little as law reform when it is clear that the strategy of the anti-abortion, anti-sex right is not to outlaw abortion but to make it so impossible to access it doesn’t matter anymore if it is technically legal? (This, by the way, this shift in strategy we’re seeing in HR3, is also my nightmare-scenario for the decriminalization of prostitution. The who-cares-if-it’s-legal, we-can-just-intimidate-and-harass-sex-workers reality is all too likely if sex workers don’t have real political power to shape what decriminalization looks like.) We can learn from the last thirty years that a sustained fight with a lot of public support and passion is required to ensure rights, and that even then: rights alone don’t ensure justice.

Okay so!

I want the pro-porn people and the sex bloggers and the phone hos and the camgirls and the gay porn bloggers and the fuckyeahthisfuckinghotperson bloggers to thrown the fuck down on this. Don’t heart this. Pick up the phone. Thrown down and be known for it.

Really, as much as I want us to topple HR3? I want some real sex and power back in our politics.