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I don’t talk about but I’ve been spending a lot of time healing from the amount of harassment I dealt when I attempted to organize. Mostly by white sex workers grilling me on my ethnicity. I have moved on but I will never forget.
The person that led the smear campaign was a white sex worker with a degree from an Ivy League school that their parents paid for. While I am successful now that’s not where I come from. This person ended up apologizing to me in private after slandering me publicly everywhere
I kept quiet about it the entire time. It’s been over two years and this is the first time I’ve ever addressed this. But that destroyed me, I was emaciated, sick and tired. While I made mistakes trying to help my community I never deserved what happened.
I ended up dropping out of the org that I helped found. (I quit twice) I no longer felt safe in sex worker spaces. Nor did I feel seen or understood by my peers. These are folks whose house had never raided by the police because they thought their dad was a terrorist, etc
They did not have to change their last names in order to no longer be harassed, their clients did not expect them to put on hijabs at work etc. I understand that I hold a lot of privileges in this industry as well. Both can exist without negating each other
Anyways I have no idea really where I’m going with this except it feels really good to talk about it out loud. Especially since I just pretended none of this was happening at the time
Last thing is this went on for like 6 months and every time I would meet a sex worker from a different state or country they would bring it up to me. They discussed my gender which they knew nothing about because I don’t talk about it here, they discussed my body, etc WILD TIMES
