This Is How Sex Workers Win: Organizing Around Sex Workers' Rights

Sex worker activism and advocacy has made great strides in recent years, particularly around the idea that “sex work is work.” What comes next is translating those political messages into effective organizing and policy change.

“For decades, sex workers’ rights advocates have worked without major philanthropic support, without a national policy shop, and its leaders have worked under a double repression: as sex workers and as sex workers’ rights advocates. Most anti–sex work laws are on the state level, and that is where advocates’ efforts are focused now. That’s also where the myriad tensions that come with movements are: between community organizing and lobbying behind closed doors, between those who collect a paycheck for their advocacy and those who—as most sex workers in the U.S. long have—fund their activism with sex work.”